A vast number of studies have been conducted on using silage inoculants most of which have investigated their effects on silage quality without addressing performance of dairy cattle. The present experiment was designed with almost 900 tons of whole crop corn in 3 silage bags of 300 tons. Each bag was treated with one of the following: C (no additive), homo-fermentative bacteria (HF, including L. plantarum, E. faecium and L. brevis) and hetero-fermentative bacteria (HTF, including L. buchneri) that was sprayed to chopped corn forage during packing. One hundred ninety cows housed in 3 freestall pens and 18 cows housed in individual tie-stalls were randomly assigned to treatments and fed with a TMR containing one of the treated silages at 30% DM. Feeding lasted for 4 weeks. Results showed no significant effect of inoculants on DM, crude protein, NDF, ADF, pH, ammonia N%, water-soluble carbohydrates and particle size of corn silage (P > 0.05). Bacterial inoculants also resulted in no significant difference in aerobic stability of silages (P > 0.05). Cows in individual pens did not show different responses to silage inoculation compared with cows fed untreated silage in terms of DM intake, milk yield and composition, milk somatic cell counts and urea nitrogen (P > 0.05). However, in HF, milk lactose was lower than C (P = 0.008). Digestibility of DM, crude protein and NDF differed significantly with C being higher than HF and HTF (P < 0.05). Consistently, feeding the same TMRs to freestall-housed cows resulted in similar effects on milk production, and composition between treatments (P > 0.05). Results showed no effect of HF and HTF on silage quality and performance of cattle fed the treated silages.