108 DESCRIPTION OF FEEDING STUFFS 



corn belt and outside of it. These would furnish good feed for farm 

 animals, especially young stock, wintering cattle, and horses doing 

 light work, and would produce considerable revenue to the farmer 

 by proper handling and feeding with other materials. 



Method of Harvesting. The method of handling the corn 

 crop generally practised in the main corn-growing sections is to 

 harvest the grain in the field without cutting the stalks, and to 

 turn cattle into the field during late fall and early winter to eat off 

 the leaves and tender parts of the stalks, the rest being wasted. On 

 the better-managed stock farms, especially in dairy regions, corn 

 is cut by machinery and placed in shocks in the field, and the ear 

 corn is harvested late in the fall, the shocks of stalks remaining 

 in the field until needed for feeding to stock. Owing to the bulky 

 nature of the. stalks and the slowness with which they are cured, 

 they cannot be stored under roof in large quantities. The corn is, 

 however, now often husked and run through a shredder in the 

 same operation in the late fall, and the shredded corn fodder is 

 stacked for feeding during the winter. This makes a valuable feed 

 for farm animals and forms a good partial substitute for more or 

 less expensive hay. 3 



Field-curing of Indian Corn. Considerable losses of nutrients 

 occur in the corn fodder when this is left in shocks in the field 

 exposed to the severe weather of late fall and winter. These losses 

 have been studied at a number of experiment stations, among others 

 at the Wisconsin station by Professor Henry and the author. The 

 results which were obtained in studies of the relative economy of 

 field-curing and siloing Indian corn show that, as an average of four 

 years' experimental work, a loss of 24 per cent of the dry matter 

 and of crude protein was found in the case of shocks of corn left in 

 the field for an average period of about two months. Results ob- 

 tained elsewhere indicate that the figures given are rather low for 

 ordinary farm conditions. Exposure to rain and storms, abrasion 

 of dry leaves and thin stalks, and other factors, tend to diminish 

 the nutritive value of the fodder, aside from the losses from fer- 

 mentations, so that often only one-half of the feed materials 

 originally present in the fodder is left by the time this is fed out. 

 Furthermore, the remaining portion of the fodder has a lower 

 digestibility and a lower feeding value than the fodder corn had 

 when shocked, for the reason that the fermentations occurring 

 during the curing process attack the most valuable and easily 

 digestible components of the nitrogen-free extract, viz., the sugar 



3 Farmers' Bulletin 537, 773. 



