A:   Good question and one that I will relate our experiences with you in regard to storing wet distillers grains in a bunker silo or an ag bag. The information that we have can be found on our website Beef Cattle Production and you can go to Reports on the left-hand side of the home page and there is an article in the 2008 Beef Report, Evaluation of Storage Methods for Wet Distillers Grains Plus Solubles with Added Forages or also on the home page on the left-hand side is a navigator bar titled By-Products and if you click on that it will take you to information about storage methods of wet distillers grains. We have used ground forages to add some integrity to the wet material so it can be bagged of packed into a bunker. You will need to add less dry forage to the wet material to store it in a bag. Our feeling is that when bagging, you need to put some pressure to exclude air. When bunkering wet material, the amount of forage added makes it the consistancy of corn silage when it is packed into a bunker. The dry matter of the fnal mixed material will be between 35% and 40%; therefore, it is 60% to 65% water. Producers that have used this procedure to store wet distillers grains may add or take-out some forage depending on how it is packing.

The material that you have that is 92% water will require a lot of ground forage to get it to bag or pack into a bunker. When you remove 20% of the water of the original material, it gets much closer to the moisture content of the material that we are working with. The methods that we have developed for storing wet distillers grains will work in your situation. Seems to me that you will still need to remove some of the water of the original material or you will need to add a lot of ground forage to get the wet material to a consistancy that can be bagged or bunkered.

We have not used hulls on our trials. Dry forage seems to work well for us because it absorbs a lot of water. In addition, we have used and would recommend using low quality forages.