Sweet Clover silage

[charliep]

We make Sweet Clover silage here. One problem we have is with the blower on the chopper gumming up to a point where it reduces the blowing power and makes it impossible to completely fill the dump wagon. Any suggestions?

[jlamb]

This message is reprinted from an e-mail response from Darryl Slingerland - Alberta Farm Machinery Research Centre. Darryl writes: This problem is also encountered with alfalfa silage, and is related to the moisture content of the crop. Within a certain range of moistures, it tends to gum up. There are two possible solutions: 1) let the crop dry a bit more before silaging, to get past the gummy stage; 2) add water to the crop as the forage harvester picks up the swaths. This can be done by installing a water tank on the harvester, and installing a boom with a couple of sprayer nozzles on it on the header to wet the crop before it goes into the feed rollers. Apparently it does not take much water. Unfortunately, I do not have a recommendation of how much water per unit of crop, but it shouldn't be too hard to determine with trial and error. Start with very little water, and increase it in small increments until the gumminess goes away.

[tumbleweed]

This thread is getting pretty old, but in case anyone else is interested I will freshen it up.
We tried the water cure in July 99. I mounted a 200 gallon tank on the dump wagon behind the forage harvester. It seemed to me that the object should be to get the water onto the blower rim rather then on the material so I introduced it into the blower on the back side just above where the material enters. The tube entering the blower was 5/16 steel and the water was only under slighty more than gravity pressure.
The experiement was successful as far as keeping the blower and spout clean, but didn't completely solve the problem of not being able to fill the wagon as full as it can on cereal silage.
I am now considering speeding up the blower. The question is how much? This will increase the power requirements and at some point would become a safety problem. It is also possible that it may not help as much as one might think because it seems like the blower works best when the machine is working a full capacity, and that is limited by the cutterhead rather then the blower. Again, any suggestions?