3 ways to make silage in Farming simulator 19

Hello it’s the RedcoatViking here back with some Farming Simulator 19 content and in this video I’m going to be explaining the three different ways you can make silage in the game aswell as why you would want to and what you can use it for.

If you enjoy the video please subscribe, leave a like and share your thoughts in the comments, and with all that said and done, let’s get started.

So silage is basically the result of storing grass or chaff in air tight conditions, such as in wrapped bales or under a tarp inside a silage bunker, without drying it first, which allows the fermentation process to do its thing and, over time, turn the grass or chaff into a mushy, brown straw like substance called silage which can be used as food for livestock or to generate power as a bio fuel.

In Farming Sim 19, silage is worth a lot of money and it’s fairly easy to start creating it making it a great way to start out on a new farm, but it’s also a vital part of the livestock process because it’s one of the ingredients needed to created the special mixed feed that cows need to achieve maximum efficiency.

So let’s start by demonstrating how to create silage from grass, starting out with the cheaper but more labor intensive method using a silage bunker.

Firstly you need a mower to cut grass, and preferably an entire field of grass to cut. You can plant grass like any other crop using a seeder.

After cutting the grass you’ll have grass trails all over the field, and I recommend using a windrower to condense the rows which will reduce the amount of work needed to collect it all.

Now, using a loading wagon, you can begin collecting the grass and dumping it into a silage bunker which are usually already present on most maps, but if not you can buy and place your own in the shop under the buildings menu.

Once you’ve collected all the grass and dumped it in the silage bunker, you need to start flattening the silage inside the bunker to compress it and make it as compact as possible, and you do that by driving over it again and again with a tractor. You can see the current percentage of compression on the menu in the top left corner.

There are some tools available in the shop to help with the compacting process, but I started playing Farming Sim back in FS13 where driving over it with a tractor was the only option, and I still find it to be the easiest and most effective method today.

Finally, once you’ve compressed it down to 100%, just jump out of your tractor and hit the key to cover it. You’ll see a white sheet appear over the mound of silage and a new meter will appear on the menu in the top left showing the fermentation process. Once that hits 100% you just take off the cover and you have silage ready to be sold or moved, or you can just leave it sitting in the bunker for as long as you need!

If you want to sell the silage there’s a few ways to pick it up. For cost vs how much work is involved I recommend using a conveyor belt placed in the silage bunker and have it feeding a trailer which you can then just transport to the bio plant to sell.

The alternative is using a front loader to scoop up the silage and manually dump it into a trailer ready for transport, but however you do it is entirely up to you.

Now let’s move on to the second way of making silage, and this method also uses grass but in a much more efficient way using bales, with the downside of needing more equipment to be able to do it.

So just like before, start out by cutting the grass and condensing the rows using a windrower to make collection faster and easier. Then this time, collect the grass using a bale maker, either round or square bales work fine, and wrap them using a bale wrapper that fits the type of bales you created.

Some balers have built in bale wrappers to make the process even faster, but whether you use a multi-baler or individual baler and wrapper combo’s doesn’t really matter since the end result is the same.

You should end up with a field full of wrapped bales which you can lift onto a bale trailer using a front loader and a special bale fork, either the spikes or the smoother bale arms work fine since the spikes don’t damage the wrapping anyway.

You can then either sell the wrapped bales directly at the same value as regular silage, or you can store them around your farm ready to be used as cow food later.

This is the best way to make silage for cow food overall, since it involves less work and the bales are a lot easier to store without taking up otherwise productive space, like inside a silage bunker.

The third and final way of creating silage involves the use of corn. For this you need a rather expensive piece of machinery called a forage harvester, a forage header for cutting corn, and a decent sized trailer so it’s not the most new game friendly way, but it does produce the highest yield of all three options.

Start by planting and growing corn in a field, making sure you fertilize and weed the crops to ensure you get the maximum possible yield.

Then once the corn is ready to harvest, attach the trailer to the back of the forage harvester and begin collecting the crop. The corn gets cut up into tiny pieces called chaff, which get blown out through the pipe directly into the trailer.

Once the trailer’s full you just drive back to the nearest silage bunker and dump it. Repeat the process until you’ve collected all the corn.

After that the process becomes the same as with grass. You just need to compact the chaff until it reaches 100% compression, then cover it and wait for the fermentation process to complete.

As I said you generally get a much higher amount of silage using corn chaff which makes it a really great, reliable income.

And that’s all there is to say about silage! I hope you enjoyed the video and found it useful, if you did please subscribe, leave a like and share your thoughts in the comments, and as always until the next time, have fun, take care and stay safe!