"It's a low-cost way to add extra ear corn to silage," says an Ontario farmer who built his own "combo" harvester that lets him chop one row of corn and pick the ears off the two rows next to it.

"We were feeding high moisture ear corn out of a conventional silo to our cows, but we couldn't feed it fast enough to keep it from getting moldy," says Ike Enter, Parkhill, Ontario. "We couldn't justify the investment required for a sealed silo just for high moisture corn. We decided to find an inexpensive and simple way to incorporate ear corn into my operation with home-built equipment. The combo harvester allows both corn silage and high moisture corn to be put up in the same silo. It lets us feed more corn to cows using our existing forage wagons, blower, unloader, and silo."

The Enters already had a New Holland 890 2-row snapper corn head. They bought a used Deere corn silage head and had Maurice's Welding Service, Ayr, Ont., merge the two units together. They widened the New Holland snapper head to accommodate three 30-in. rows and mounted the Deere corn silage cutting row unit in the middle. The resulting feed is three fourths kernels and one fourth silage by weight. "It looks like corn silage with a lot of kernels. It makes a richer corn silage with a lot of extra fiber from the cobs," says Enter.

One disadvantage of the combo head is that harvesting can take up to one-third longer. "It isn't a big problem because we're doing two jobs in one pass. However, if I could do it over I'd make a 6-row combo head that could chop two rows," says Enter.