NINTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART III 123 
corn, in additiou to the ten pounds of actual corn fed in the ensilage. If 
he digests and utilizes every pound of twenty pounds of corn, either in 
the form of cottonseed meal or shelled corn, he will do well, if he has all 
the good roughage he wants. In addition to that, this ensilage puts him 
in the shape that he is when he is on grass. It is a succulent, cooling 
food that keeps his hair in the same condition as when he is on grass, 
and it finishes him up evenly. Our experience has been that they finish 
up more uniformly on the ensilage than on the dry feed. These gains, as 
you can see, if they are made as rapidly on the ensilage, hay and cotton- 
seed meal as they can be made in any other way, must be made much 
more economically, because you are utilizing there the stalk and the 
leaves and the husks of the corn plant, which, as I have said, counting 
the corn worth 40 cents a bushel and 50 bushels to the acre, is worth two- 
fifths as much as the ears; so you are feeding about $12 or $13 worth that 
you are wasting in the ordinary way of feeding. 
Briefly, therefore, it is our experience that the feeding of ensilage 
to cattle is valuable. It has long been recognized as an indispensable 
in the dairy, and I could never understand why, if it was good to put fat 
in the milk-pail, it would not be good to put fat on the back. There is 
essentially no difference in the process that takes place in the digestive 
tract. 
It would not be advisable for the man feeding 50 or 100 cattle to 
build such large silos as we build. We build them with a view to ac- 
commodating several hundred head of cattle, and we build our sheds 
in the same w^ay; but I think what can be done with profit upon that 
scale will be equally profitable upon a lesser scale. We have lands, also, 
that we don't have any silos on, and we are feeding some cattle by the 
old methods, so that we have an opportunity for comparison of the different 
methods. We have not built silos for the reason that it has not been 
practicable for us to do so, for various reasons that it is not necessary 
to state here. How^ever, we expect to extend the use of the silo, even if we 
don't have occasion to extend the cattle-feeding oprations any. But I 
don't want any gentleman to get the idea that we think every man 
should build a silo. We would not recommend that every man should 
build one. There are a good many farmers who already have more 
feed than they are utilizing. They haven't as much live stock as they 
ought to keep, and they don't need any silo. If a considerable per cent 
of the corn crop of Iowa should be put in silos, you could hardly get 
live stock enough here to eat it. But the time will come when we will 
have a better system of farming that will have in view the crowding 
upon these lands of all the stock that can be got upon them, and that will 
mean, as the gentleman who preceded me said, the application of more 
system to the business of farming, such as is applied in other business to 
make them a success. He says ninety per cent of these fellows in the 
towns fail, and that the men in business in the towns have system. He 
distinguishes between the business men, and then calls the rest of us 
farmers! I always did object to that sort of distinction as invidious. A 
man with a little corner grocery is a business man, but a man with a farm 
worth $20,000 or $30,000 and having much more invested in live stock, em- 
ploying men and growing crops and putting them into beef, is not en- 
