"Collecting chaff makes direct seeding easier," says Ed Beauchesne, North East Director for SSCA. Ed has been collecting and feeding chaff for 5 years, and sees some great benefits for his farm operation.
Ed, Marguerite and their family farm at Albertville. They started toying around with direct seeding in 1989 and went into it full force 4 years ago. Knowing that chaff management was necessary to make direct seeding work they decided to go the route of chaff collection rather than spreading. They put a chaff blower and wagon on their combine the year before they started using their air drill. Ed is sure that getting the chaff off the field reduces his weed problems. "Over time it's a clean up operation," he says.
They see some real savings feeding chaff in their backgrounding operation. This year 85% of the roughage they feed will be ammoniated chaff. On top of this they feed rolled grain and supplements. This year with the price of feed up they hope to buy a cleaner and feed screenings as well. Buying 500 lb. calves in November, they have averaged 1.75-2 lb/day rate of gain over the winter. Ed says one of his neighbours who runs a cow-calf operation is actually selling good hay this year because he can replace most of the hay he would normally feed his cows with ammoniated chaff. As far as feed quality goes Ed has found that ammoniated flax chaff is the best chaff for feed, high in protein and very palatable. Oats chaff is the next best followed by wheat and barley. After ammoniation, feed testing has shown his chaff has 14-24% crude protein. A Sask. Ag and Food bulletin, Potential of Chaff, states that ammoniated chaff, "could contain from 8-12% CP and from 43-54% TDN...similar to a medium quality hay."
Ed picked up a used blower and wagon for a $1000 when he first started. Another $2000 and labor converted a Mckee Stack'n'Mover blower into a vacuum to pick up piles. The last $1000 and labor was spent on a top for his grain truck.
The process to ammoniate the chaff is not very complicated or expensive. It cost Ed about $10 per tonne of chaff for the ammonia last year. He gets the moisture content of the chaff up to 25% by spraying it with water as a payloader piles the chaff into 50ft. wide piles about 9ft. high. This moisture content and a high temperature are needed to get a good reaction during ammoniation. Representative loads of chaff are weighed so that an accurate approximation of the amount of chaff can be made. In 4-5 days the chaff has started to heat and 3.5% ammonia by weight is shanked in. This is accomplished with a 24 ft. 2in. steel pipe with 3/16 in. holes drilled every 2ft. along the length of the pipe. One end of the pipe is tapered to a point and the other end is fitted to a tractor so it can be pushed into the bottom of the stack parallel to the ground. Fittings for an anhydrous nurse truck are also tied into this end. This probe is pushed into the chaff to the center of the 50ft. wide stack every 4ft. along each side of the stack. The calculated amount of ammonia is applied at each probing. Ed says, "even if you can't get a nurse truck to meter the ammonia you can use a nurse wagon and time valve openings to apply the correct amount of ammonia. With this technique the ammonia probe is applied to within every 2 square feet of stack. The ammonia stops the spoilage and kills any viable weed seeds. Remember the dangers of working with ammonia and be sure you have taken adequate protection against any mishaps.
Ed feeds these piles free choice moving an electric wire into the stack as the chaff is eaten. He combines back and forth, and dumps the chaff wagon at either end of the field to make pick up easy. Canola is the only crop in which he might not make a 1/2 mile per wagon. He dumps the wagon on the go and is very pleased with the low maintenance of the blower and wagon.
If you are operating a mixed farm and some of your potential grain producing acres are being used to produce hay, there should be a good opportunity for feeding ammoniated chaff. As Ed says, using chaff will not guarantee you a profit feeding cattle, as he found out in the backgrounding industry last winter, but it could at least reduce some feeding costs. For more information on feeding ammoniated chaff see: Potential of Chaff by Saskatchewan Agriculture; Ammoniation of Straw and Chaff put out by the University of Saskatchewan or talk to Ed and Marguerite Beauchesne. Ed also says that he got a lot of good help from Leo Redekop of Redekop Chaff Systems.