Diamond J Custom Farming & Dairy
Merced, CA
Float Method
Below are the steps for the float method:
Sample from corn silo pit; typically what an evaluator will see is a lot of stock and a decent look at kernel processing.
Put your 32 ounce sample of corn silage in a 5 gallon bucket of water and swirl it around. This allows the heavy more dense particles to sink to the bottom, essentially separating stock and kernel.
As dense particles start to sink and lighter particles float, don't be in a rush to pour material off just yet.
Give the sample about 5 minutes swirl and settle time, slowly poor of the floating material and the remaining water. As you get near the end material that has sunk to the bottom it will start to pour out, be careful to contain the densest particles for observation.
As you can see the float method allows a clear cleaner picture of how well the processing is being done. Today we are no longer interested in nicking the kernels we would rather explode the kernels.