No. 6. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 353 



lage for fattening' steers or cattle I( is an interesting qnestiou, for 

 we of the East mnst compete more or less with the cattle feeding of 

 the West, and my experience teaches me that there is nothing that 

 the farmers of the East can feed their fattening cattle upon much 

 better than upon good ensilage, now that we have learned how to 

 make it. The question was, how to make ensilage properlj' and have 

 it in its best possible condition. We have solved that now since 

 away back in 1880, down to the present time. I want to say that a 

 few years ago we started with 100 steers, all in one stable, and fed 

 them upon ensilage for over four months. Those steers were fat- 

 tened mostly upon ensilage, and the balance ration was the wheat 

 bran and corn meal fed with it. We have never had a stable of 

 cattle do better, and they were sold to Martin & Co., and shipped to 

 Liverpool. We never had animals gain as rapidly as they did upon 

 the ensilage fed them. The corn was nearly glazed as we put it in 

 the silo. It was grown not very thickly. It was a good, strong 

 feed. 



Now then, there are many farmers near Philadelphia, in my 

 county, that are attending the markets weekly, that feed and 

 butcher their own cattle, and these cattle now are mostly fed upon 

 their corn crop, grown as you grow your corn crop, and put in the 

 silo with the full ears on, and these steers are butchered and sold 

 in the markets of Philadelphia and fattened mostly upon ensilage 

 for the reason that it is the cheapest food by far we can secure. In 

 this way we think we can compete, in a small measure, with the 

 feeding of cattle in the West. 



MR. S. F. BARBER: I have been observing the benefits of feeding 

 ensilage for a good many years and never in this time have I been 

 able to find anything that will put on flesh so rapidly. I have not 

 been feeding beef cattle on a large scale, but I find it the strongest 

 feed I can get. I rememb<^r some gentlemen came to my place from 

 the city of Baltimore, who were large feeders, and the question in 

 their minds was whether to build a silo for feeding beef cattle. I 

 told them that my best experience convinced me that they could get 

 nothing that would prove more profitable. Out of the four, one 

 gentleman said: '*Mr. Barber, I have made up my mind that I will 

 build a silo." And then I asked him to give me a report of th(» 

 result when he sold the cattle. Sometime afterward, the gentle- 

 man wrote me that in selecting the same cattle out of the same 

 pen that his neighbors had he had been able to put on 150 pounds 

 per head more weight than by any other method. 



I notice by the Breeders^ Gazette lately that the gentlemen of 

 the West, Iowa and Nebraska, are coming to see the value of silos. 

 One man reported that his cattle had made a gain of three and a half 



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