Project title: Silage Pits VS Silage Bales to reduce emissions.

Team: Haymakers

St.MUredachs College   Ballina   Ireland   4 Student’s age: 14-15 years old, 16-17 years old

How reduce emissions in farming practices by using a silage pit instead of silage bales.

After coming up with this idea we planned out how we would be able to run results in charts and if it could work.Also we planned where information would needed to be gathered from and what websites would be help towards us. We drew out a rough idea of the stages we needed to go through to make this project a success.

The next stage then was to gather information on websites about silage pits and silage bales and why they are used. Then we gathered information on the covering of pits and bales such as prices and places of manufacture.

We then had to figure out the amounts of silage we were going to base this on, so we took a trip to the local co-op to be advised on sizes we should use and prices to go along with them. He also advised us on which wrap we should use to base on our bale covering.

With the information we gathered with put it to use and started to create diagrams for the plastic used for silage amounts for pits and the same with bales. We also researched on where the plastic goes when it is put to recycling as there is a local recycling plant about a 15 min drive from us.

We put all this information onto a google doc and checked that all information received was reliable.Then after that we started putting points onto our final doc. Also we created two charts on google sheets, one for bales plastic usage and one for pit plastic usage.

Then when all that was finalized we sent it off and looked forward to preparing for the presentations in Athlone in April.

From the data and the results we found, we have found that clearly bales in vast amounts use a vast amount more than any pit cover would ever use.If a farmer was only making anything under 50 bales [40,000kg] worth of silage it would use less plastic than the pit cover used in the tests and would be cheaper two.But anything over that pit is the viable option being cheaper and using less plastic to cover the amount of silage.To cover the amount of 400 bales (320,000kg) worth of silage ,bales use 3,000,000 meters squared worth of plastic versus pit only using 1100 meters squared worth of plastic. Also the pit cover used for the amount of silage weighed in at 50kg for bales and 200kg worth of plastic for the pit. We found this intriguing as even though the plastic used for bales is a lot more than the pit it is still four times lighter than the pit cover.

We all think that this project was a success as we found out the results from the data we collected.
We learned many interesting facts about plastic usage and recycling, we also found out many interesting facts about the history of silage making. Our information and results gathered can now be given to farmers to lead the in the right direction in making a change in their carbon footprint.We found it interesting the difference in plastic amount between the pit and bales.We now know from this information that the farmer with smaller amounts of silage for storage will be better going for bales instead of pit as it is cheaper at the moment.The price of plastic lately has gone up in price and may force farmers to change anyway to change from bales to pit.

Download project poster PDF

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