Impact of Vitreousness, Processing, and Chop Length on the Utilization of Corn Silage by Dairy Cows

Flint corn has a greater proportion of vitreous endosperm than dent corn (Philippeau et al, 1999). Philippeau and Michalet-Doureau (1997) observed that increased kernel vitreousness was associated with decreased ruminal starch degradation. Increased kernel vitreousness may explain the reduction in total-tract starch digestibility observed for mature whole-plant corn silage (WPCS; Bal et al., 1997; Johnson et al., 2002), the variation in the starch digestibility response to kernel processing of WPCS (Bal et al., 2000b; Dhiman et al., 2000; Johnson et al., 2002), and differences between corn hybrids grown for WPCS production in ruminal (Bal et al., 2000c) and total-tract starch digestibility (Bal et al., 2000a; Johnson et al., 2002).