EXPERIMENTS IN SILAGE 205 



EXPERIMENTS IN SILAGE 



About the time the barn was built there was a 

 good deal of talk in the farm journals as to the 

 desirability of preserving in silos or pits, green 

 roughage for livestock. I think only one perma- 

 nent silo had then been built in America, though 

 many notions as to how they should be built were 

 paraded in the press. In order to try it out we 

 built in an angle of the barn a great cavernous silo 

 of concrete with a provision for two huge screws 

 by which silage could be pressed down solidly. 

 As the pressure was not a following one, the screw 

 had to be turned several times a day to serve its 

 purpose. This contrivance not being altogether 

 satisfactory, next year the material was weighted 

 with several tons of stone which worked better but 

 still did not meet my requirements. Then the 

 silage was weighted with a covering of two feet 

 of earth by which we hoped to form an air-tight 

 seal as well as attain a following pressure. But the 

 earth covering dried out rapidly, became porous, 

 and was scarcely better than the stones. Next 

 straw, kept thoroughly wet, was used as a cover- 

 ing; while it did not weight down the silage and 

 speedily became half-rotten, it proved to be the 



