During the past two weeks, the warm and dry weather patterns have provided an excellent opportunity for hay making.

Hopefully, most hay producers were able to take advantage of the good hay weather as it becomes quite challenging after Labor Day to harvest dry hay with the days becoming shorter.

Corn silage harvest also is under way; corn is drying out, although not very fast, which will make for some excellent feed.

One key indicator of when the optimum time to begin harvest is plant moisture content. The ideal moisture will be determined by what kind of storage structure you will use. For sealed airtight silos, the ideal range is 60 percent to 65 percent moisture; for upright silos, 63 percent to 68 percent; for silage bags, 60 percent to 70 percent; and for trench silos, 65 percent to 72 percent.

Chopping at higher moistures often causes too much acid production, which reduces palatability, DM loss and seepage. Valuable nutrients will be lost from the crop through seepage, which also can harm the environment.

Ideally, one should test moisture during harvest to stay within the optimum moisture range. If this is not practical, you can monitor moisture by the stage of crop development. A simple method can be used to determine the optimum stage for harvesting your corn silage. When the kernels reach early dent state, a separation can be seen between kernel starch and milk.

Take an ear and snap it in half. You can see the firm starch deposited in the outer part of the kernel while the milk will occupy the base of the kernel. This gives the appearance of a whitish line separating the two areas. The milk line moves down the kernels as the kernels continue to mature. When this line reaches the midpoint, 90 percent of the kernel dry weight has been achieved.

When the milk line reaches the base of the kernel, a black layer forms, separating the kernel starch from the cob, meaning the crop is mature.

When the crop reaches full dent and the milk line first appears, the crop is usually about 70 percent moisture. When the milk line reaches the midpoint, silage yields should be at their maximum and the moisture is at 65 percent. When the milk line reaches the base of the kernel, the crop moisture is usually about 60 percent.

By observing the development of the milk line, one can determine optimum harvest time. The one limitation of this method is the weather variation. If you have experienced extremely wet or dry conditions for a few weeks before harvest, the moisture can vary by as much as 5 percent from the predictions given above. There also are wide variations in hybrids, so testing is still important.

How to estimate corn yields

As the summer winds down, an estimate of what is in the field is very important to help in planning marketing of the crop or purchase of additional feed.

A fairly simple estimating technique involves the following steps. First, measure one-one thousandth of an acre, with 30-inch row spacing that would be 17.4 feet in one row of corn. Next, count the number of ears in that section of row. For every fifth ear in the sample row, record the number of complete kernel rows per ear and average for all the ears in the sample. Then count and average the number of kernels per row.

Next, use the following formula to estimate yield. Multiply the number of ears in the one-one thousandth of an acre by the number of kernel rows per ear. Then take that figure and multiply by the number of kernels per row. Divide that number by 90, and the result is an estimate of bushels per acre.

Repeat this several times across the field to increase the accuracy of your estimate.

Luke Fritz is executive director of the Butler County Farm Service Agency.