SilageSnap App
Excellently cracked corn can boost milk production by up to two pounds (about a quart) per cow per day.
If 70 percent of the cracked corn fits through a hole the width of a standard drinking straw, then the corn receives an excellent score—fit for a dairy cow’s feast. Unfortunately for many farmers, the lab results yield merely adequate, or even poor, scores, meaning they must feed their cows much more grain every day to meet nutritional requirements.
The UW Madison Extension developed app "SilageSnap" is a convenient and accurate in-the-field alternative to after-the-fact processing scores. To use the app, farmers merely spread out a small sample of corn, set down a coin to calibrate for pixel size and snap a photo with their phones. Image-processing algorithms then calculate kernel-processing scores right there in the field, instead of weeks after the harvest at an external lab.
Based on kernel processing scores and summary statistics from the app farmers can fine-tune their machinery on the spot — rather than develop contingency plans after the harvest is well over. Initial results suggest that the scores returned from the app align very closely with official results from commercial corn silage processing score evaluations. Google Play Store Apple App Store
