FIFTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK — PART IV. 247 



half of it, but from the silo they eat it all and it is a juicy food, a food they 

 relish, and you might say it is grass in the winter. 



In our neighborhood we have twelve and there is not a man that has a 

 silo that is not very enthusiastic over it, and I can say to the buttermakers 

 that if you will encourage your patrons to build silos and build them right, 

 get two or three to build, that they may own the cutter together, I will 

 guarantee that after that you will have a good patron. You will have a 

 a man that will make money from his cows; he will be getting big checks, 

 and this is the secret of getting people into the dairy business. 



Some may think that a silo is too expensive. I want to make this state- 

 ment, that the silo is the cheapest container that we have for feed. A real 

 good silo costs only about $1.50 per ton capacity. You may think if you 

 have not had much experience, that it takes a good deal of time and labor 

 to fill these silos. Remember it is just like a man having a threshing 

 machine for the first time in this neighborhood. Wouldn't you have a whole 

 lot of trouble the first season? We had this difficulty when we first com- 

 menced filling the silo, but that is now a thing of the past. 



I would like to tell how much it took to fill my silo, which is eighteen 

 feet in diameter, thirty-two feet deep, on a foundation of one and one-half 

 feet; holds about one hundred and seventy tons. It took one man with four 

 horses and a binder to cut the corn in the field; then five or six men to haul 

 it to the machine, one man to feed and one in the silo, and the silo was filled 

 to the top in two days. Th^t was not all; we let it settle about two weeks 

 and refilled in about three-quarters of a day. That was the help required 

 to put up 170 tons of feed in less than three days. No shocking or husking 

 of corn, but the whole thing in the best possible shape for feeding, and the 

 cows ate it all up, and it came out of the silo better than it was put in. That 

 may be a strong statement, but at the same time it does come out better, 

 because it goes through that soaking process by cooking, and the shell of 

 the cornstalk, which is so hard and woody when it goes in, goes through 

 that soking process and softens, so that it is more palatable and the cows 

 like it better when it comes out. 



The silo is going to solve the problem of getting a living oflE of from forty 

 or sixty acres; solve the problem of expensive farming, and that is the ques- 

 tion that we are going to be up against in the future in this country. A 

 whole lot of old fellows have one hundred and sixty acres or three hundred 

 and twenty acres of land because they could not help it and got it for five or 

 ten dollars an acre, but the next generation, how are they going to farm? 

 Under the present system of feeding corn fodder, raising timothy hay and 

 keeping poor cows, can those younger fellows buy that land and pay fifty, 

 sixty or seventy dollars an acre for it, you may ask? Is it possible for a man 

 to get a good income from fifty or sixty acres of land by the use of the silo 

 and feeding to good cows? 



I want to tell you of a man I visited the other day, at West Concord, Wis- 

 consin. I had heard of this man Griswold, who was keeping a herd of cows 

 on fifty acres. I went out there, and I found a man on fifty acres of land 

 keeping twenty-eight cows, about twenty head of young stock, and the 

 necessary horses that he needed in working the land. I went through his 

 books, as he is a careful bookkeeper. I found that on that farm of fifty 

 acres, ten acres of which was in pasture, and four hundred and 



