Chopping Silage Corn and Tractor Question

When did farmers begin to chop corn for silage? Was it back in the Farmall M days or later? The earliest pull behind choppers - one row?

I know nothing about chopping corn for silage, but a couple of farms do it around here. Saw a YouTube video of a guy chopping silage with a 2 row chopper and a JD 4440 and thought - in the 70’s there were some fairly large acres of corn and if you’re chopping 2 rows per pass, you’re back to covering a field in the same time it might have took a Farmall M with a 2 or 3 bottom plow. I was also thinking that if it takes the hp of a 4440 to do 2 rows, chopping corn may have came about after the Farmall M and 2 cylinder tractor days - but don’t have a clue.

Chopping corn with a pull behind chopper, when did it begin, how many rows chopped in one pass and what tractors were used to do it?

Just curious.

Thanks!
Bill

I can’t say the year that pull type harvesters came on the seen, but one row for sure . I was at an auction about 10 years ago, and they had a Massey Harris one row pull behind chopper, and it had it’s own engine to drive the chopper.

Gehl had a pull type chopper that you could put a one row head on in about '42. Fox had one in '41. Papec was '44.

The Gehl brochure I have somewhere showed an Oliver 77, AC WC & a Farmall M on chopping duty. If I think to look for it in the next couple days, I'll post some pictures.

Mike

In our area of So Wisconsin pull type choppers really started in the late 40s. Allis Chalmers was among the early ones and I think was first to use a cylinder cut versus the flywheel cut everyone else used. The flywheel cut was adapted from the stationary silo filler used widely.
Gehl and Fox were two short line choppers very popular in our area. They had their own engines and could be pulled by a Farmall M or similar sized tractors. Were one row initially but developed into two row machines and later became self propelled.

The Allis really changed the industry as they worked better and took less power to run. Of the flywheel cut machines, Case was one of the better machines in our area, IH and Deere were behind the others and in our area there were probably more Gehl choppers than any other, partly because they were the biggest in stationery silo fillers for years in our area. The Gehl C-40 was widely used and liked.

I would guess the late 30s. Corn binders cut and made corn bundles. The corn bundles were then put through a stationary silage cutter set at a silo and powered by a flat belt and tractor belt pulley. Then came the single row cutters powered by tractor pto. Dad and a neighbor had a JI Case single row cutter powered by his DC Case. They filled silos and made silage piles for several neighbors.

We have six JI Case silage cutters....

Around here, SWI, chopping corn silage became popular about 1950,about the same time combines took over oat harvest and work horses wern't needed to pull flat wagons to pick up corn and grain bundles or pull hay loaders. The same flat belt drive of the silo filler ran the early forage blowers. The choppers also had hay heads and dairy farmers usually chopped a lot of haylage and built more silo's.Some tried chopping dry hay,but usually found it hard to get it dry enough as well as too dusty to handle.

We stopped using a corn binder and silo filler around 1950. We had a neighbor who did custom chopping for us. He had a DC Case and Case chopper like pictured above. He could fill our silo in about a day where if we did it the old way we would work on it for a couple of weeks. Picking up corn bundles, loading them on a wagon and unloading them into the silo filler was really hard work.

My uncle pulled a one row NH with his 1957 Ford 860. One of his sons would have done a lot of it while another hauled by truck. Hour after hour, day after day, week after week. In the early 70s my aunt and uncle were on vacation in FL and my cousin who by this time was running the farm in his absence, went to an auction and bought a Ford 5000. When my uncle got home he was very upset about such an extravagance. A few months later when they were chopping corn 50% faster he was pretty happy with it. I have a pic of him sitting on the 5000 with the chopper behind, looking kind of pleased.

I would say the practice of chopping corn for silage could easily date back to World War One. As others have said,it was done with corn binders and ensilage cutters, known as silo fillers in other parts of the country. Some Amish still do it that way. Most early forage harvesters had there own engines until live/independent PTO became common.

You could pull two row choppers with a lot less than a 4440, dad did it many years with a 70hp case 830 then 85hp 870 and his biggest was a 93hp 970. Chopped many hundreds of acres with them including a lot of custom work. All with two row choppers in my time.

My dad bought a new one row Gehl with it own engine and pulled it with a WD Allis in 52. I always figured the cutter engine was about the same size as the WD engine. Lots of HP there.

Like stated below they used a binder and silo filler. If I remember correctly they started making corn silage back in the teens. I was told that when silage was first introduced that farmers were scared to try it as someone started telling them that it would cause the tails to fall off the cows.

Grandpa put up a concrete stave silo sometime in the 1930's - wasn't here, don't know the exact year. Have a photo of bundles of corn being fed into a chopper/blower powered by a belt drive from an old John Deere A - i think. The silo was the first of it's type in the neighborhood although the J C Marlowe Holstein farm just outside of Mankato had a silo built of some kind of glazed blocks probably built before 1920. In the big dairy areas, wood stave silos were built before that. Round barns sometimes had a silo in the middle that would have been easy to feed out of, but how they got the corn into it- don't know.
Dad switched to a John Deere chopper in the 1950's -1 row. The blower was powered by the JD -G on a belt. In the late 50's a blower was purchased that was PTO driven it had a shaft that turned a moveable front on the wagon to unload the chopped corn- had to stand at the back with a fork to make sure it fell out evenly and didn't plug-up the blower pipe. I use an old Papec modern style blower and a Gehl chopper that's probably 40+ years old for the few acres chopped today.

You also need to think how corn yeilds have changed. Today 200 bu corn or 30 tons of corn silage is common. In the 50's the average might have been 75 bu or 8-10 tons of silage. We were from western MD and tended to be dry often. More than once we only averaged 8 tons of silage per acre in the early 90's. Spent days on a 4020 with a two row Deere chopper in third or forth gear. Helped a neighbor one fall that had a 4040 and two row chop silage every day for over two weeks to chop for a 100 cow dairy,60 cow dairy and a 40 cow operation. The faster you can chop silage makes the best as it is all the same moisture and feed value. That is why many hire their work done but you can still harvest lots of silage with 1 or 2 row equipment. Pic below is 4020 chopping 25 ton corn silage with one row. Tom

I had a good friend and customer,now deceased, that chopped silage for many years with a 861 Ford and a New Holland 1 row chopper. He chopped into an old Dodge dump truck driven by his brother. One year the corn grew so tall that the old Ford didn't have enough power to pull the chopper, so they pulled the tractor and the chopper with a Farmall Super H and used the Ford as a power unit for the chopper.They went so slow that the one driving the dump truck went to sleep and ran the truck up on the rear wheel of the Ford and about trashed the whole operation. He woke up just as the truck fell off the wheel of the tractor and tore the fender off the truck. That was in the late 70"s or early 80's. We have a diary farmer in the area chopping now. 200 acres with a self propelled and a bunch of tandum dump trucks.

we chopped with a Massey 44 special and a Case one row then a IHC 20c then a FORD 612 two row . the last years we had a Massey 2805 and a three row Massey 260 chopper that set up was fun to chop with

Our first silo was a 12X30 poured concrete put up in 1911 by my grandfather. My dad was 10 years old. It had a 10 foot deep pit so the silo was only 20 feet high above the ground. Inside the barn the pit was only 3 feet deep as we had a barn built into a hill on the north side. My dad told me about digging that pit. Red clay all the way down. Silo fillers were used in that day powered by engines on wheeled carts pulled around by horses. Corn was cut by hand with a corn knife. Had a sharp curved cutting blade with a handle about 2 feet long. Bundles were made by tying corn stalks together with a single corn stalk. As the years went by, corn binders became common and tractors as well but for the most part, the tractor was used to power the silo filler and horses were used for binder and wagon pulling.

The first pull behind single row corn chopper I saw was a McCormick Deering that was very badly designed. PTO driven it took a Farmall M to power it. That was in 1949. Fox choppers were all powered by a mounted engine at that time. As they were made in nearby Appleton they were popular around here. One could hear those engines running for miles, especially in the evening. Many were owned by custom operators. Our first one was a John Deere PTO powered chopper that had the cutting knives installed on the fan blades which, in effect did two jobs in one. I chopped the incoming corn and blew it also. Quite easily powered by a John Deere A or similar sized tractor.

One thing to keep in mind was that all corn at that time was planted in wider rows of about 42 inches and we were only dealing with about 12000 plants per acre. That John Deere chopper was advertised to be able to chop 10 to 15 tons of corn silage per hour. A 12X30 silo holds around 70-75 tons. It took about 6 +/- acres to fill that silo but then we put up a temporary snow fence silo that held more than the concrete silo did.

Remember as a youngster in the mid 1940's that dad had a JD one row and pulled it with a JD 2-cyl, probably an A. The chopper was galvanized. Filled wagons and dumped in a pit silo.

The first silos built in WI were built in the early 1880's... one, claimed to be the first, was built inn the township north of me. Another was built about the same time about 10 miles south. One of the silo's owners documented his successes in Hoard's Dairyman at that time.

There are several old square silos within a few mile radius of us- probably people following the example of the neighbors. Perhaps I can get a picture of one of them this afternoon.

Intially, these silos were not very tall, and were typically filled with some sort of silage cutter and an elevator. As the silo filler evolved with a blower, most of these square silos were made taller, as they could be filled with the silo filler, and greater height meant better packing and less spoilage.

At least two in my neighborhood were filled into the 1970's.

Around here a tractor drawn forage harvester (versus a binder) came into prominence after WWII. The Papec plant was around 20 miles west of me in Shortsville, NY and grandpa had one that was in real nice condition when I was a young boy. I don't know that any one brand dominated around here as I have seen NH, JD, Gehl, AC, and IH flywheel type choppers. Self unloading wagons did not really become popular until the late 1960's. The IH 40 blower which was meant to be used with the false end gate wagons remained here after dad bought two IH 61 forage wagons. Cylinder type forage harvesters also got to be wide spread here during the late 1960's. Most dairies around here were hard scrabble so the move to cut and blow machines did not get to be wide spread until the 1980's after the cut and throw unit was wore out..

Here in south central MT, Billings area, they tell of a guy who chopped his corn(many years ago)
with a one row Deere chopper(I think) that he pulled with a Deere 50 plus pulled a wagon.
The story was he had to have big headlands, so he could get the chopper started and get everything
moving to take a run at the corn!!!
I just finished helping the neighbor chop a bit over 300 acres of corn with a big 6 row Deere
self propelled chopper. Loaded a 20 foot long tandem KW truck in 4-5 minutes. At one time, we had
4 KW's plus a Ford 3 ton hauling. Rarely did anyone have to wait. The longest haul was a 3-4 mile haul,
depending on which end of the field you ended up on. It took us about 8 days, from 7:30 AM to 6:00 PM.
It was a good season!! No seroius break-downs, and great weather.
And we ate GOOD at noon!!! Turkey one day, smoked brisket another, Ham another, fired chicken, hamberger steaks and gravey
and roast beef, just name a few!! She fed 10 to 12 of us each day!!
I actually gaine 5 lbs.!!!!
In this area, there are very few tall silos. Most are pits or stacked on the ground.

We used an IH pto corn binder with a bundle elevator to load flat wagons to haul to IH silo filler until 1950.Without the bundle loader. we made corn shocks to run thru a Rosenthal (Reedsburg WI Co) 4 roller shredder that chopped the stalks and blew them into barn overhead as well as cleaning the ears to crib. A flat belt ran the shreder as it did the early forage blowers with tip down hoppers for the rear unload wagons. The blower pipes that were pulled up to each silo by hand with rope and pulleys went from 6" for silo fillers to 9" for forage blowers. The reel type cut and throw forage choppers pulled easier but had trouble blowing sticky haylage. About 20 years ago a UW ag engineering grad student was testing an upside down cut and throw claiming it took less power and threw better. Have you noticed how the big self propelled choppers throw up into the corn processor rolls and then up to the accelerator (blower)?