NINTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART III 121 
We can put the corn in the silo at an expense of between $4.00 and $5.00 
an acre when we do it on a considerable scale. If a man were putting 
forty or fifty acres of corn in a silo, ne could do it at much less than that. 
But where you do it on a large scale it involves a great deal of expense 
outside your regular farm labor and increases the expense of it. After 
you husk your corn off the stalk, the expense of putting this corn 
in the silo would all be added. It is simply a question of whether 
or not the expenditure of $4.00 or $5.00 an acre necessary to put that 
corn in the silo, by which you would save $12.00 or $13.00 of feed, is a 
paying business proposition. The statement of that is enough to carry 
conviction. 
If that was all there was to it, everybody would say at once, "We will 
build silos, for we want to save the whole of this corn crop." It won't 
be practicable for you in Iowa to all build silos, and you don't want to 
put the whole of your crop in them. You want first to feed every acre 
of this corn possible down in the field. You have to have some of this 
corn to carry your stock through the winter, and you will need to have 
the roughage also. But you can profitably handle a certain percentage 
of your corn crop in the silo. On one farm of over 2,000 acres, where we 
raise an average of 700 or 800 acres of corn per year, we put about two- 
thirds of it in the silo; that is about all we can profitably handle in that 
way. The amount each man could put in the silo profitably would de- 
pend upon his particular circumstances. 
Here are some of the objectionable features with regard to that 
method of handling the corn crop. It costs money to build silos. If you 
build them of cement and have gravel reasonably accessible, silos hold- 
ing 500 or 600 tons can be built reasonably; but the average farmer is 
not looking for storage. You must have barns ar sheds to feed these 
cattle in if you are going to feed silage, and it costs money to build them. 
But I think good sheds will pay, even with the ordinary methods of feeding 
that we in Ohio and you in Iowa have generally used. When cattle are 
fed all the corn they can eat, they don't need much shelter; a barbed 
wire fence is about as good proptection as any shed you could build for 
them. They want cool air instead of warm air. But if we come, as we 
must in time, to the methods of feeding that are adopted in the older 
countries of the world — in England, for instance, where they practically 
never feed a steer more than eight or ten or twelve pounds of grain, we 
will have to have these sheds for protection, because the cattle won't get 
enough heat to keep him warm, after he takes what he will need to make 
the addition of two or three pounds daily to his fiesh. In addition to 
having the sheds, our experience has taught us that we must have solid 
bottoms in them, and then there is practically no waste at all with the 
silage; they will eat every pound of it. You may haul in straw and that 
will help some, but often conditions arise that the more straw you put 
in the worse they will get. So we have found that the only practical 
way is to have solid bottoms in the sheds, and in the lots, too. That 
means that you must clean out, and that there isn't going to be a pound 
of waste of manure; and to the man who puts a high value on manure, 
that is a thing that will recommend itself very strongly. While I think 
I have a proper appreciation of the value of manure, that is a feature 
