 DV Management News
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Director, Global Research and MarketingDiamond V
We're always looking for ways to better share with you our expertise in dairy nutrition and health. Our year-end survey is one way to do this.
I invite you to take a minute and complete the survey. The answers you provide let us know about technical and production topics you are interested in, the preferred format and distribution of DairyAdvisor, and how well we're hitting the mark with the instruction, stories and tips we provide each month.
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As always, we are grateful for your continued readership and look forward to serving you even better in the year to come. And, Happy Thanksgiving!
Kind regards,
Mike
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| Producer Spotlight
Silage facing made easier
Who: Riverview, LLP is a multi-site dairy operation based out of Morris, MN that raises heifers and milks about 43,000 cows in Minnesota and South Dakota.
Background: Riverview built its first dairy near Morris, MN in 1995. Since then they have built four green-site dairies, three-heifer ranches and have purchased two dairies in SD. Each site has its own feeding center that includes corn silage and haylage piles.
The daily routine of feeding cows begins with facing corn silage and haylage and then piling the material into a well-blended pile to be loaded into mixer boxes mounted on pull-type trailers or trucks. In the beginning they used rotary facers that required the feeder to get out of the payloader cab and connect or disconnect the hydraulic hoses.
Sometimes they would forget to unhook the hoses. There were constant maintenance issues with replacing bearings, sprockets, tighteners and motors on the rotary facers which caused delays in feeding the cows. They had one full-time person just fixing rotary silage facers from all of the dairy sites.
Riverview identified the bottleneck in the feeding operation and found it necessary to make a change. A quote from Plato, "necessity is the mother of invention," spurred the Riverview group to develop Easy Rake™. Easy Rake is a one-piece device that can be built to fit your payloader, skid-steer or tele-handler. It has no moving parts and it does not break down the silage particle length (Figures 1 and 2). The patented Easy Rake™ has been acquired by Hanson Silo of Lake Lillian, MN. Below are the advantages of Easy Rake listed on the Hanson Silo company website:
- No hoses to hook up
- Safe and maintenance free
- Greatly reduces facing time
- Works great on any pile or bunker
- Designed by dairymen
- No moving parts
- 1-year limited warranty
The face value: One of the things we look for during Diamond V's TMR Audit™ is how well the silage pile or bunker is faced. We want the face vertical and smooth, the face blended into a pile and a minimal amount of loose silage remaining when feeding is complete.
We blend the faced silage into a pile to reduce variation in moisture, speed up loading of the TMR and reduce shrink of silage.
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Easy Rake™
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Easy Rake facing corn silage
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See us at these industry events
Midwest Dairy Expo
Dec. 2-4
St. Cloud, MN
Winter Academy of Veterinary Consultants
Dec. 5-7
Denver, CO
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 Diamond V
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