256 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



to say he could feed a cow much cheaper from a silo in the sum- 

 mer than on a pasture. I wish, if he said that, he would em- 

 phasize it a little stronger and get these farmers to believe that 

 it is so and stop pasturing cows on land worth $ioo per acre. 



Answer : I said exactly what I am accused of. I said you 

 could feed a cow more economically on silage than you can on 

 pasture. If land is worth five or ten dollars an acre we can 

 afford to pasture it, l;)ut when it is v^orth sixty, eighty or one 

 hundred dollars an acre we can not afford to devote that land to 

 pasture entirely. Now, we kept our cows last year on ensilage 

 until after we had taken off' a heavy crop of hay; about the 15th 

 of July we got a second crop, otherwise we would not have cut 

 it; but two or three months* pasture that we get oft* that cost us 

 that second crop. Silage, good corn silage, will save the farmers 

 of Iowa hundreds of thousands of dollars by allowing them to 

 crop their acres and feed their cows with something just as good 

 as pasture grass. 



Mr. Taylor : How are you going to maintain the fertility of 

 the farm? 



Answer : You can not afford to haul fertilizer from your 

 barn any great distance; we simply had to do it to get it out of 

 the way. You can purchase your fertilizer much cheaper. 



Question : Why will a cow give the most milk and make the 

 most butter on pasture? 



Answer: You will all r-gree with me that there is not a single 

 food that is better than pasture grass, but a cow will do equally 

 as good work and will make you more net money in the twelve 

 months if you have her freshened in the fall and use corn silage, 

 than she will by freshening in the spring and putting her on pas- 

 ture. 



Mr. Goodrich: I think, before the Iowa farmer can be 

 brought to put in a silo, he has to be educated up to the point of 

 putting in a silo to store his corn cr(jp instead of letting the Avin- 

 ter winds blow it aAvay. I believe the corn crop to almost fifty 

 per cent of the farmers of northwestern Iowa is almost a total 

 loss. A man turns his cows into the corn field and they do well 

 on it for a few days, but that is all. 



