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Whole crop rice silage(WCRS) is fed to dairy cows and beef cattle in Japan. The silage contains grains of rice, which are not easily digested because the chaff is indigestible. This paper describes a new type crusher to make chaff digestible. In order to develop a WCRS processing device to decrease indigestible unhulled grain, a chaff removal and grain crushing test using the new device was conducted. Forces required to remove chaff from unhulled rice were measured in three different directions; this test showed that shearing forces were the most effective to remove chaff. Tearing off rice chaff partially by mechanically scratching the unhulled rice surface is adopted to make rice in the chaff digestible. A processing device for WCRS equipped with a new shape rotor was designed, and it could remove chaff from unhulled rice grain continuously without any problem. This machine will be useful for processing better WCRS.

The target of our research is to develop a technology for objectively measuring the density in a silo. In the present paper, we attempted to detect ultrasonic waveforms through shredded raw forage crops in order to obtain foundational data on measuring forage crops’ densities by nondestructive means. A function generator, oscilloscope, transmitting ultrasonic transducer, and receiving ultrasonic transducer were used in these experiments. Forage samples that had been formed to cylindrical cells, were made from shredded alfalfa and whole-crop rice. A well-spread ultrasonic wave could be emitted by ultrasonic transducer when rectangle or pulse waves were generated from the function generator. A 16V amplitude rectangle ultrasonic wave could pass through 75mm thick cylindrical forage samples of 650kg/m3 or greater density.