Method for studying how the crop's natural microflora affects heating when opening the silo.
Spontaneous heating in the silage during the feed-out of the silos is one of the most common problems in feed storage systems at Swedish dairy farms. Large volumes of feed are discarded causing economical loss and feeds in the process of deterioration are a risk to animal health. The invisible losses in bunker silos can be up to 20 % of the feed. When heating occur even more is discarded. Yeast is identified as the most probable factor to cause heating. The project will improve the scientific methods used in systematic silage studies connected to the influence of the epiphytic flora on aerobic stability in silage by developing a method to sterilize the forage crop. When incubating sterile standardized crops with the epiphytic flora from forages, the influence on the aerobic stability derived from the microbes and from the crop can be separated.