zoe352
Member
Looking for some fair outside opinions to help settle a friendly disagreement.
We helped a local competition yard with their haylage this season — 3 cuts in total, around 300 bales. A few first-cut bales have shown holes and patches of mold (white and black). From what we’ve seen, it’s less than 5% of each bale affected, and the rest of the bale is perfectly sound.
They’re saying the bales are “completely unusable,” but from our side, the damage looks exactly like bird strikes. You can see clear peck marks and plucking, and it’s only affecting the first cut, which birds seem to go for more readily.
For context, we make over 4,000 bales a year for other customers and have no issues anywhere else – it’s just at this one yard.
Also worth noting: the day after baling and stacking, we always check the bale stacks for holes or damage that might have happened during wrapping, handling, or stacking. Everything was sound when checked, so any holes have appeared after delivery.
The yard themselves don’t have any experience making haylage – they mentioned they had to Google what a tedder is, and they’ve never used fertiliser or slurry on their fields. That can make a big difference: without those inputs, the crop yield and sugar content are both lower, which can affect fermentation and make the grass more attractive to birds (especially magpies).
We’re confident the wrap and process were right on our end. The holes are random and isolated, not in a line or pattern that would suggest a wrapper fault.
Has anyone else come across this sort of situation?
Would you consider small, bird-related patches like this enough to write off a whole bale?
And does anyone have good tips for reducing bird damage on first cut haylage?
(Photos to follow when i figure out how to upload them.)
We helped a local competition yard with their haylage this season — 3 cuts in total, around 300 bales. A few first-cut bales have shown holes and patches of mold (white and black). From what we’ve seen, it’s less than 5% of each bale affected, and the rest of the bale is perfectly sound.
They’re saying the bales are “completely unusable,” but from our side, the damage looks exactly like bird strikes. You can see clear peck marks and plucking, and it’s only affecting the first cut, which birds seem to go for more readily.
For context, we make over 4,000 bales a year for other customers and have no issues anywhere else – it’s just at this one yard.
Also worth noting: the day after baling and stacking, we always check the bale stacks for holes or damage that might have happened during wrapping, handling, or stacking. Everything was sound when checked, so any holes have appeared after delivery.
The yard themselves don’t have any experience making haylage – they mentioned they had to Google what a tedder is, and they’ve never used fertiliser or slurry on their fields. That can make a big difference: without those inputs, the crop yield and sugar content are both lower, which can affect fermentation and make the grass more attractive to birds (especially magpies).
We’re confident the wrap and process were right on our end. The holes are random and isolated, not in a line or pattern that would suggest a wrapper fault.
Has anyone else come across this sort of situation?
Would you consider small, bird-related patches like this enough to write off a whole bale?
And does anyone have good tips for reducing bird damage on first cut haylage?
(Photos to follow when i figure out how to upload them.)
