The sun sets over a hay field between Lubenham and Market Harborough, in Leicestershire, England. In the foreground sits a black plastic wrapped silage bale.
Silage is fermented, high-moisture fodder that can be fed to cud-chewing animals like cattle and sheep. It is fermented and stored in a process called ensiling or silaging, and is usually made from grass crops, using the entire green plant (not just the grain).
For baled silage the grass is cut and partly dried until it contains 30–40% moisture (much drier than bulk silage, but too damp to be stored as dry hay). It is then made into large bales which are wrapped tightly in plastic to exclude air. The plastic may wrap the whole of each cylindrical or cuboid bale, or be wrapped around only the curved sides of a cylindrical bale, leaving the ends uncovered.
Description adapted from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silage
NEFs converted with -0.3 exposure compensation in CNX2
Images blended for exposure in PS CS5
LCE selectively applied in PS CS5