Brown midrib (BMR) corn silage has long been a go‑to forage option for dairy farmers looking to improve fiber digestibility and maintain strong milk production. But as seed companies begin to phase out their BMR offerings, producers and nutritionists are evaluating other silage strategies.
One option gaining attention is short-stature corn.
How Short Corn Works
Short-stature corn hybrids are designed to change the structure of the plant without sacrificing its productivity. Instead of growing tall stalks, these hybrids shorten the space between leaves, known as internodes. The plant still produces a similar number of leaves and ears, but the overall plant height is reduced.
Luiz Ferraretto, assistant professor and Extension specialist in dairy nutrition at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, shares his thoughts on short-stature corn, explaining the altered plant structure may also affect how fiber is distributed within the stalk.
“Basically, [short-stature corn] has shorter internodes, and there are some claims that there are changes in lignin distribution within the stalk,” Ferraretto says.
As researchers take a closer look at how these shorter plants are built, the early results are looking pretty promising. Trials in both Italy and the U.S. show the shorter stalk structure seems to boost forage quality. Across several plots, short‑stature corn has consistently come in with higher starch and better‑digesting fiber compared with regular hybrids.
This plot data matches what university researchers are seeing, too. At Michigan State University, Mike VandeHaar, a professor of animal science, has seen similar trends in fiber digestibility and yield with short corn. During a recent “Dairy Nutrition Blackbelt” podcast, he explained how his team ran studies comparing short hybrids with conventional tall corn and BMR varieties to see how they performed side by side.
“We compared three short corn varieties with a conventional tall hybrid and a BMR variety. We treated the conventional corn as the low-fiber-digestibility baseline and the BMR as the high-fiber-digestibility benchmark to see where the short corn fit in between,” VandeHaar says.
In the trial, the team measured fiber digestibility using 30-hour in vitro NDF.
“What we found was the shorts really did have better fiber digestibility than the tall. The BMR had higher in vitro NDF digestibility at 30 hours, like 65% versus 55%, and the shorts were all around 60%,” he says.
These differences suggest short corn could offer a real nutritional advantage over conventional hybrids.
Yield Performance
Those nutritional gains didn’t seem to come at the expense of tonnage. In the Italian trials, short corn yielded right with conventional hybrids and even topped the BMR in that dataset. Ferraretto notes the bump in starch and better NDF digestibility didn’t show any clear yield penalty.
John Goeser, dairy nutrition and management consultant at Progressive Dairy Solutions Inc., added his thoughts on how short corn performs at higher plant populations.
“Generally speaking with greater plant populations, say 40,000 to 45,000, we see a decrease in fiber digestibility,” Goeser says. “Yield will actually increase, but there’s usually a trade-off between quality and yield. The fact that short corn is being planted at higher populations and still maintaining — or improving — fiber digestibility is intriguing.”
Milk Production Response
For dairy farmers, forage quality only matters if it translates into milk production. Feeding trials with short corn silage suggest these hybrids can boost milk in a way that differs from BMR. Ferraretto described a trial in Italy where cows started on a common diet before switching to rations containing either conventional or short corn silage.
“What we saw change was milk production,” Ferraretto says. “Feed intake didn’t really differ between groups. That’s important because with BMR, almost every trial increases intake to drive more milk. Short corn seems to work differently — milk went up without cows eating more. I don’t know if that’s better, but it’s promising and interesting to see this kind of response.”
At Michigan State University, VandeHaar structured diets to limit cows by gut fill, ensuring improvements in fiber digestibility would show up as a milk response.
“I fed diets that had more forage NDF than I would normally even feed to cows in about 200 days in milk, and when I put them on my diet, milk production dropped about five pounds or so, showing that they were, in fact, limited by fill. So therefore, if I had a forage with better NDF digestibility, I would have expected a response, and we did, in fact, see that,” VandeHaar says.
That improvement appeared as increased energy-corrected milk. In a follow-up trial, the same short hybrid was compared with conventional tall corn at two starch levels, 32% and 24%. The advantage for short corn persisted.
“We went on and did another study with that variety,” VandeHaar adds. “In both cases, the cows fed the short produced about two kilos, so about four or five pounds more energy corrected milk than the conventional.”
What it Means for Silage Decisions
As BMR availability changes, dairy farms may need to consider multiple strategies to maintain silage quality. Hybrid selection, harvest timing, kernel processing and ration formulation all affect fiber digestibility and milk production. But adding short-stature corn to your silage lineup may be another tool to add to your toolbox.
Short corn is unlikely to fully replace BMR, but early results suggest it could provide another option for high-quality silage. As more trials are conducted and management practices become clearer, producers will better understand how short corn fits into their forage programs.
