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Vertical Mixers

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flyingS

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A friend asked me do some research so I have some questions for those of you who use a vertical mixer. First of what do you feel is the best and what size would you recomend to feed 500 hd of cows all winter? Secondly, can you grind a mainly dry forage ration in one or do you have to have a certain percentage of moisture in an ingridient to get them to grind effeciently? I used a Supreme last winter and as much as it pains me to admit it, I enjoyed running the machine. I was only grinding one bale of forage and mixing silage for the rest of the ration.
 
we have a haybuster that is 650 cu ft with a twin screw cutter, we thought it worked well for just hay and or green feed, would be nice to have one a little bigger for dry feed, at least a 1000 cu ft , just make sure it has a good boil ring, 4 min's to cut to 2 or 3 inches, thought that to be alright?
 
We didn't use any wet ingredients for quite a few years when we first got ours. I started adding water to the feed after it was done grinding to settle the dust. It would grind it fine and the tub would polish up like a mirror but when you would start to feed it there was an awful lot of dust that you know the cattle wouldn't get picked up. It was bad enough at times that I was a little concerned about it from a health standpoint. I don't remember exactly the amount of water I would put on, but I think it was at least four or five hundred pounds before the dust would stop fogging out of the wagon.
 
It is a Knight 5055, twin auger. Depending on your ingredients, 4-5 ton is the max you can get in if you are feeding a pretty high amount of silage and whole corn. It will comfortably grind up two big round bales, but any more than that and it won't grind them.
 
I got to thinking about what Rory used, and they were adding 3000 pounds of water to his. Anyway, that is what Tom told him, when we were shipping some cows out. I can't tell you what brand it was, but I should have bought it at the sale. It didn't hardly bring weigh up price, and was only a year old.
 

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