246 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



unless they can make money. I know, from experience, a farmer is not sat- 

 isfied unless he can make money. In order to produce milk and make 

 money we have to have a cheap feed 



I believe that as land gets higher we will have to give more considera- 

 tion to that question of cheap food product. I will make this statement, 

 and I think the farmers in this audience will bear me out, and that is, that 

 the cheapest coarse feed in this country, for Iowa and Minnesota, I say the 

 cheapest coarse feeds will be clover and corn fodder. Clover on one side to 

 get the protein element, and the carbo-hydrates we get in corn fodder. 

 Tnere is no crop you can grow that will produce as much to the acre as corn 

 fodder. The fact is, there is hardly a crop grown today that will produce 

 more than one-half as much to the acre as corn. 



But the great question confronting every farmer is * 'how are we going 

 to handle this corn fodder ? " We have a system for handling most every- 

 thing else on our farms, but the handling of corn fodder is a tremendous 

 matter. I might call on farmers in this audience to take it up and express 

 their views as to the best method of handling corn fodder; one man would 

 have one method, another another, and I will venture we would hear of a 

 dozen different ways of caring for it, and the man giving his system today 

 would change his mind within a year. That was my experience. I realized 

 there was as much food in the stalk as in the ear, and of course your chem- 

 ists have that worked out. You know when you take the ear and analyze 

 it, and then take the leaves and analyze them, there is just as much feed in 

 the stalk as in the ear, and that is why we have to save the whole thing. 



How are we going to save it ? There is the old-fashioned way of shock- 

 ing in the field; I have tried that. You know when you take those shocks 

 out in the field that nice smell comes out of it that the cattle likes, then it 

 works well; but that does not work always. Once in two or three years a 

 big blizzard comes up and you have to go out with a pick-ax, a log chain 

 and a shovel and perhaps have to hitch a team to the log chain to get the 

 shock out. I have done that. If put up in stacks it often heats, and the 

 last few years it heated badly. Then the shredder came. I don't want to 

 say a word against the shredder. I don't want to say a word against a class 

 of people introducing labor-saving machinery, but at the same time I have 

 tried the shredder and it was not satisfactory. I used it two or three years 

 and found it was too expensive. When I came to feed the fodder to the 

 cows it was not much better than when fed in the bundle. 



Another thing about the corn shredder, if you will allow me to diverge 

 from the question just a moment. I have been attending institutes in 

 Minnesota for a number of years. Yesterday I found a man with his arm 

 taken off in using a shredder. The same thing happened a week ago, except 

 that the man lost his fingers. At least one hundred arms have been taken 

 off by shredders in Minnesota. Those fingers and those arms are worth 

 more than all the corn fodder they will ever grow in Minnesota. 



How are we going to handle it then? Seven years ago I built a silo. 

 The only thing I have to regret is that I did not build it twenty years ago 

 when I first started in. What is it about the silo that makes it better? We 

 get this feed up in the best possible form for the cows. They consume every 

 portion of it. When you are feeding dry corn fodder, they do not eat over 



