A farm in the middle Rio Suarez region

A few weeks ago, on the same trip when we passed by our friend's farm in Arcabuco, our final destination was my brother-in-law's farm in Santander, in the Hoya del Rio Suarez region. The area is mainly known for growing panela (solid cane molasses), but my brother-in-law has an innovative product: grass silage.

Silage is a way of preserving animal fodder for the long-term. Especially in temperate environments with marked seasons, it's always a challenge to keep livestock fed over the winter, when there's little green food available (and sometimes in the summer, when pastures dry up and die). Silage is one method among many (hay, crop stubble grazing, grain feeding, haylage, etc.) for setting aside feed during times of abundance, in order to use it in times of scarcity.

Preparing silage consists in chopping up grass or other fodder and leaving it in a tightly-sealed place. The sugars in the grass ferment up to a certain point, until they consume all the oxygen in the container and create an environment too acidic for any microbes to survive.

I believe the preparation of silage has its origin in Ireland, where the constantly-wet weather prevented the drying of hay for winter feeding. So farmers used the moisture to their advantage and prepared silage in dugout pits. Today in the US many dairy farmers raise corn for silage. They let the corn grow until it's nice and green and juicy, then chop the whole plant, leaves and stalks and ears and all, into little bits. These little bits are then compressed into upright silos or long horizontal polyethylene bags. If you see a purple tower in the rural Midwest, it's likely a glass-lined silo, while if you see a big mound covered by a black tarp and lots of tires, it's a pile of silage. The glass or plastic are to keep air out.

Here in Colombia silage isn't too common. Many places don't have a long enough dry or wet season to impair grass availability. However, as ranchers raise the density of animals on their pastures, and climate change leads to more drought and flooding, there is an increasing need for storeable animal feed. My brother-in-law Alejo is meeting that need. Indeed, the worst weather years in the rest of the country are the best business years for him!

He mainly produces silage from king grass. This is a fast-growing species of tropical grass that's high in protein, energy, and other nutrients necessary for meat and dairy cattle. My brother-in-law hires a crew of guys to cut the grass with machetes when it's two months old (the farm is too steeply sloping to use tractors or mechanized cutters). They load the 10-foot stalks into a truck and bring them back to a central processing point, where it goes through two machines linked together.





The first machine chops the grass and blows it out of a chute leading to a second machine, which packs the chopped grass into a bag. When the bag is full (weighing about 40 kg), it is pushed out of the machine, and a worker grabs it and ties it. Then the bag goes into a pile to await shipping to a buyer.

The process has undergone various changes over the past years. Initially they blew the chopped grass into a pile, then had to shovel it into a bag that they subjected to a hydraulic press. This gave way to the linking of chopping and packing machines so as to avoid the intermediate shoveling process. They also now use a heavy-gauge plastic in the bags so that clients can return the bags for reuse. When the bags get worn out after a few uses, they sell them to a guy that recycles them to make irrigation hoses. Thus the major waste product of the process has been virtually eliminated.

In the first video below my brother-in-law Alejo loads a new bag onto the packing machine, while his assistant gets a bunch of king grass ready to chop. The stuff he pours onto the grass from the white bucket is a bit of cane syrup, which helps get the fermentation process going in the bag.



In the next video the bag is full after a number of batches of king grass have been chopped and shoved into it. So Alejo takes it from the machine and to a staging area, where he'll later tie off the bag and stack it in a pile with other bags.







Most of the silage is made from king grass, but Alejo also makes cane into silage. This cane mainly comes from other farms, whose owners tell Alejo to bring his team and his machinery to their farm and harvest their cane for silage. This usually occurs when the price of panela is too low to justify the farmer's processing it as such.

However, Alejo is slowly planting cane of his own for turning into silage. Cane silage has a slightly different nutritional profile from king grass silage, so some ranchers prefer one or the other. Alejo is also branching into corn silage. Here is a field planted to the locally-adapted peasant variety of corn.


It compares very favorably to a hybrid variety he also tried planting, which hardly germinated in the farm's humid tropical conditions.



A different hybrid did fare pretty well though, as seen in the background of the next photo.



The farm doesn't only grow silage. There are also a number of cattle, some of which I partly own. We've set up a deal much like the Peul people of western Africa set up with their neighbors. Alejo takes care of the herd, for which he gets to keep the female offspring. I will keep the males, and sell them off for meat at about 2 years of age. These cattle are a Holstein-Angus mix, so they are good for both milk and meat production. We brought them to the farm young, so they could adjust to the warm climate despite their cool-weather European ancestry.






This fellow with the white face is the only male of the bunch.


He will serve as an indicator of when the cows are in heat. My brother-in-law has scarred the young bull's penis so it will grow slightly crooked. This way he will try to mount receptive females without impregnating them, and Alejo will thus know they're ready for artificial insemination.

Alejo has also branched into subsistence crops, thanks in part to my wife's and my incessant nagging that he shouldn't put all his effort into commercial products that might suffer big fluctuations in demand. Here is his chicken area, fenced in by stalks of wild grass native to the area.




The farm also has fruit trees planted long ago. There's this mandarin lime tree. It gives a sweet lime that looks and breaks apart like a mandarin orange.



I harvested a bucket full of them to make a typical treat of lemonade with panela.


There are also some wild lulo bushes. This is what they look like.


Wear gloves to pick the fruits. They're spiny!






We always eat well when we visit the farm. When we arrived this time, Alejo and his wife were making envueltos.



These consist in corn dough with cottage cheese, wrapped and cooked in corn leaves. They steamed them in a big pot cooking over a barrel fire.







Here's the finished envuelto, ready to eat


accompanied by eggs scrambled with local chorizo.



The unused corn husks go to feed the cattle.




What is a barrel fire, you ask? Basically you take a metal oil drum and fill it with sawdust.



You leave PVC pipes in as you fill the barrel with the sawdust, so as to create a chimney from bottom to top. Then you take out the pipes, and it's ready to light.


We also cooked our trout (brought from Arcabuco) on plantain leaves over such a fire. They turned out good, with slices of lime from the farm.




I hope you enjoyed visiting my brother-in-law's farm!