338 MISSOURI AGRICULTURAL REPORT. 



THE SILO AS A FACTOR IN ECONOMICAL FEEDING. 



(By Hon. John Patterson, Kirksville, Mo.) 



The economy in feeding cows is not saving feed, for the more you 

 can get her to eat and digest, the more she will make for her keeper. 

 When I think of that I remember what the Swedish dairyman said: "If 

 I feed a half gallon of barley a day, I get nothing for it ; she needs that 

 for her own support. But if I feed a whole gallon, she gives enough 

 more to pay double for it." That means if you feed little, you lose the 

 value of that, but if you feed generously she makes you a profit. That 

 is, she ought to have all she can eat and digest properly. Besides feed, 

 she must be kept in a comfortable place so as not to be exposed to storms, 

 rain and snow ; she must be handled by folks that know how to be good 

 to a cow. There are some men that it is not possible to learn that. They 

 will roar, swear and beat her for a\vkwardness and roughness of 

 their own, where a man that would be gentle and kind would have no 

 trouble. 



The first thing is the procuring of feed. I take it that the dairy- 

 man is a farmer and runs his farm to produce dairy products. Then he 

 wants to raise as nearly as possible all the feed on the farm. He has it 

 before him to consider what to raise that will make most, best and 

 cheapest feed. I think I have studied all parts of the known world for 

 all the diflferent plants to find something good and very productive. I 

 have tried nearly all the new things, such as Pencelaria, sunflower, 

 vetches, sugar cane, cow peas and clovers, and, of course, our greatest 

 of all feeds, the common corn. I say greatest because I think it is best 

 and yields more per acre. But the common way of letting it get dry 

 and hard, then gathering only the ears, grinding or feeding whole, is 

 not the best. When I first begun dairying I would cut and shuck it, 

 run it through a cutting machine that mixed the corn with the fodder 

 and two to four pounds of bran. I thought I did as well as I could to 

 get the most benefit of the corn, but that left a great deal of corn stalks 

 they would not eat with sufficient amount of clover hay that was fairly 

 good. 



Next I raised cow peas and built silos, cut the corn when it was 

 somewhat green and the corn a little too hard for roasting ears. I mixed 

 corn and cow peas, one load of peas to two of corn. That makes an 

 ensilage that cows will eat better than corn alone. But the ground I 

 had in peas did not produce more than one-third as much feed as good 

 corn. So I think corn pays best because you get the most, and with 

 good clover hay and plenty of ensilage, you get something near a good 



