As I write this piece, the maize crop is barely out of the ground, so why would you be thinking about planning the harvest – surely that waits until the nights draw in and the crop is turning brown? Well it’s never too early to starting making a plan and as the famous six P’s statement goes “perfect preparation prevents piss poor performance”.

 So when should you start planning the maize harvest?

Almost certainly before you start planting any crop obviously. In deciding how much area to cultivate and what nutrients to throw at the crop, you have already set a target harvest volume or tonnage. Hopefully this meets your needs and requirements and has some relationship to the available storage space, so there are already the bones of a plan in place. The choice of seed variety and the planting dates will give you an idea of the harvest window. So with all this already completed, that must be you done until you need to book the contractor with the chopper isn’t it? You might think so, but there are a few things you can do now that will make things run so much more smoothly once the crop is ready to harvest.

 The planting date of the crop has a direct relationship with the potential harvest date. Or it would do in a year with perfect growing conditions. With the constant stream of “extreme weather condition” events we need to start to question this traditional approach. These extremes are fast becoming the normal, so a more flexible management style is going to be required. Planning the planting date has always been an aspiration and traditionally it was enough to record when the crop actually went into the ground. Given the flood then drought growing conditions we currently seem to receive, it’s much more important to record exactly when the crop emerges rather than when it went into the ground. This needs to be done for individual fields or each block of land. This will then give you an initial harvest route map, which fields are first and where the team will move on to once this block is cleared.

It’s all in the detail

As is common with this series, this attention to small details might seem “a bit much”, but it really can make a big difference. Hitting target harvest dates is really really important for maize and is sometimes overlooked. Getting the crop into the clamp in prime condition might have a slightly larger optimal window than grass silage with falling D-values but there is lots of research showing how crop will quickly deteriorate if harvest is delayed. Cutting too early is an even greater mistake as the lower Dry Matter leads to huge losses of feed value.

So you now have a harvest plan, time to give a thought to the guys doing the job. There is a strong chance they will be cutting the crop almost blind. Now I’m not suggesting you are employing “RNIB Contracting” or “Labrador chopper pilots” to make your silage, but the reality is that the driver can’t really see what’s in front of the machine. In a good maize crop the drivers view is little or nothing beyond the leading edge of the header. Faced with a wall of maize, Krone has introduced a cab lifting system and it does give the operator a better view, but anything hidden within the crop will still be hidden. In addition, there is a high chance the harvester will be running in dusk or fully dark conditions.

So get out and survey the fields whilst the crop is just emerging, when you can still see any obstacles that will eventually be (hopefully) hidden by the 8ft tall crop. Note them down, take a couple of photos of what is going to be invisible, from the likely approach angle of the chopper. Likewise, record those narrow gateways and bridges, footpaths, low cables and tree branches. Record all this on a map and give it to the contractors long before they turn up in the field.

 “It doesn’t matter what they hit, it’s not my kit” is an often quoted repost, and that’s one of the advantages of using a contractor. But it does matter for a couple of reasons.

Firstly the contactor spreads the costs of repairs and replacements over the area they cut. So if they need a replacement header because they have ingested one of your hidden gun emplacements, then you will be paying for it, or part of it, in higher contractor charges. The news of a blow-up also spreads like wildfire so other contractors soon get to hear if someone cops a big repair bill. It’s no surprise that “minefields” are always going to be more expensive to harvest than “easy land”.

Secondly – and more importantly – breakdown and delays in the harvest result in increased feed value losses, both in the fields and back at the clamp. These are really hard to quantify when measured in a few hours but as soon as you start losing whole days, then the respiration losses in the clamp alone will be huge. 

Thinking about the harvest long before you start cutting will also give you plenty of time to evaluate the clamp. As examined elsewhere in this series, this is another operation where you can never start too early.

If you want to discuss planning you maize harvest with an independent consultant or to discuss any of the other aspects of silage making covered in this series – contact Jeremy Nash @ jeremynash1@btinternet.com