122 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 
of the silo proposition that does not commend itself to me so favorably, 
because while you don't lose a pound of that manure, you must haul out 
more than you haul into the feed lot, and that must be done every day 
during the winter, and in all kinds of weather conditions. It is the most 
serious problerh that we have encountered in feeding this ensilage to 
cattle. There is an enormous quantity of it— thousands of loads, and you 
can't always put it on your fields in the winter time. That means that 
you must pile it up, and haul it out again on the fields, which means a 
pretty big bill of expense in the course of a year. But as I say, it would 
be a thing that would commend itself to the average farmer, especially 
in the older sections of the country, rather than to constitute an objec- 
tion to the use of the silo. That expense, however, when you come to 
figure it down to so much per head on the number of cattle that are in- 
volved, does not amount to so much, after all — a fraction of a dollar per 
head for bedding and taking care of the manure. 
This advantage I should have mentioned further in the feeding of this 
silage: it furnishes you storage right where you need it, if storage is 
desirable; and the handling of that corn crop after it is in the islo is a 
very insignificant matter. We usually allot one man to feed 300 or 400 
cattle. In feeding some other ways a man would do pretty well if he 
could feed 75 cattle properly, and the former w^ould do his work easier. 
This goes a long way toward overcoming this increased expense of bedding 
and taking care of the manure. 
Now as to the results. I can't go into much detail in regard to this 
matter, but we have found in the experience of feeding all kinds of cattle, 
from calves to three-year-olds, that we can get as good gains from feeding 
ensilage as in any other method of feeding that we were ever familiar 
with. We add to our silage, of course, clover hay or alfalfa. We grow- 
large quantities of that. During most of the time we have added to our 
corn soy beans cut in with it, because they are very rich in protein. In 
addition to that we have fed cottonseed meal with the silage, and it is an 
ideal way to feed it, because cottonseed meal is a thing by which cattle 
may be injured if it is not properly fed. When sprinkled over the ensi- 
lage it is mingled with all that mass of roughage, and you can feed from 
three to five pounds of cottonseed meal for six months to cattle without 
any serious effects at all. We advise starting with about two pounds of 
cottonseed meal, and increasing up toward the end of the period to about 
five pounds; and with that, without the addition of a grain of corn, we 
have been able to make gains as rapidly and put the cattle in better 
finish than we were ever able to do in any other way. 
Fifty bushels of corn to the acre will make about ten tons of ensilage 
as it comes from the field, and about eight tons as it comes out of the 
silo. There is a weight of about 3,000 pounds of corn in that, which you 
see is about twenty per cent of the total weight as fed to the cattle; and 
the steer will eat about fifty pounds a day, which contains ten pounds of 
corn; and he is getting it in a form that he digests and utilizes every 
pound. If you add to that two to five pounds of cottonseed meal, all our 
information upon that matter is that it has a feeding value of about two 
and one-half times shelled corn; so that if you give a steer five pounds 
of cottonseed meal, he is getting an equivalent of ten pounds or more of 
