Preservation of moist hay with NaC1

In Switzerland, chemical additives are authorized for the preservation of moist hay. However, they are not allowed to be used on all farms (e.g. not on organic farms and milk producers for certain AOC cheeses). Therefore, the efficacy of NaCl was investigated with hay on 73,4 and 78,2 % dry matter content in laboratory scale in cylinders of 2,5 l. Besides a negative control, also a variant with a chemical additive, which served as positive control, was tested as well as the two variants with 1% and 5 % NaCl. During a period of 30 days hay temperature was controlled. Before and after this period the dry matter contents and different parameters were analysed. At both dry matter levels, the hay of the two variants without additive and 1 % NaCl heated much stronger in comparison to the two other variants. Furthermore, there were differences between the variants in dry matter losses, sugar content and in the concentration of acid detergent insoluble N of total N. The efficacy of the variant with 1 % NaCl was practically as bad as the variant without additive. The variants with 5 % NaCl and with the chemical additive showed clearly an improvement. However, the application of 5 % NaCl is much higher than the recommended supply, and such high dosages can not be recommended in animal feeding.