In September 2025 Beverly and I visited members of her family in western New York. At the time we visited, they were busy harvesting corn for feed for the family dairy farm. When Beverly’s brother showed us the details of the harvesting, we first watched the chopper and trucks in corn fields. After photographing this activity, I was able to ride in the chopper for a while and later rode in one of the trucks to better understand and photograph the entire process. After seeing what happened in the fields, we watched them store the corn at the farm.
When Beverly was a child in 1954, the farm had fewer than 30 cows but at this time they are milking 1200 cows and are feeding more than 2000 animals including milk cows, calves, heifers, and dry cows. The cows are milked three times per day, taking about 7-½ hours each time and producing nearly 8,000 gallons of milk per day. This photo from Google Satellite shows the main farm area in 2020.
Chopped corn is used to make a high-energy feed for dairy cows. It is prepared as corn silage, where the corn is chopped and stored under airtight conditions. The whole plant (including stalk, leaves, and cob) is chopped to create feed that is fermented to prevent spoilage, so it can be can be safely stored for long periods of time. In fermentation, microorganisms break down the starches and sugars and provide digestible fiber and energy for milk production.
The corn fields they harvest total more than 1200 acres of owned and leased land, and the yield is typically 20 tons of corn per acre, which totals more than 25,000 tons of chopped corn from each fall harvest. When the weather cooperates they can chop 80 acres per day and the corn harvest typically takes 3 weeks of intense activity.
They use an eight-row rotary corn chopper and a fleet of six trucks to haul the chopped corn to concrete-walled trenches. The chopper has four rotating cutting wheels that both cut the corn stalks and direct it to the chopper intake area. With the rotary cutter the driver doesn’t have to follow the planted rows of corn to feed them into the cutter.
The chopped corn is blown into a truck using an operator-controlled chute that directs the corn into a truck’s forage body. The operator controls the elevation and direction of the chute with one hand on a joystick, using a small video screen to see where the chopped corn is going. The truck can either follow or drive parallel with the chopper and the corn is always directed into its body. As one truck is being loaded, the next truck is already positioned to receive the chopped corn when the first truck is full. This photo gallery shows the corn chopper and some of the field operations.
The chopped corn is stored in multiple forage trenches that are long areas enclosed by concrete walls on three sides. When a trench is filled with corn, it is covered with heavy plastic and weighted down with hundreds of automobile and truck tires and the chopped corn ferments naturally. The area being used when we visited is about 90 feet wide by about 200 feet long (please see the red-highlighted area in the photo below).
Some of the trucks that haul the chopped corn have dump bodies and the others have forage bodies that push the chopped corn out the rear of the truck. A truck unloads the chopped corn at the base of the pile and an 8-wheeled articulated tractor spreads the load on the pile. At the same time, two other 8-wheeled tractors are constantly driving up and down the pile to pack the chopped corn. In the photo gallery below I have photos of both types of trucks unloading plus the tractors on the pile.
Scenic View from Farm
While showing us the corn chopping operation and giving us a tour of the farm operation, Beverly’s brother took us up the hill overlooking the corn trenches to see the overall farm but that view was blocked by the standing corn in the field. However, there was a beautiful scenic view of the Pennsylvania hills and valleys to the south as shown in the photo gallery below.
References:
Fermentation (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermentation (very technical article)
Silage (Wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silage