ECONOMY OF SILAGE. 19 



in the season the silo will furthermore preserve the crop, so that 

 the farmer may derive full benefit from it in feeding it to his 

 stock. Frosted corn can also be preserved in the silo, and will 

 come out a very fair quality of silage if well watered as referred 

 to above. 



7. No danger of Late Summer Droughts. By using the silo 

 with clover or other green summer crops early in the season, a 

 valuable succulent feed will be at hand at a time when pasture 

 in most regions is apt to give out; then again, the silo may be 

 filled with corn when this is in the roasting-ear stage, and the 

 land thus entirely cleared earlier than when the corn is left to 

 mature and the corn fodder shocked on the land, making it possible 

 to finish fall plowing sooner and to seed the land down to grass 

 or winter grain. 



8. Food from Thistles. Crops unfit for haymaking may be 

 preserved in the silo and changed into a palatable food. This is 

 not of the importance in this land of plenty of ours that it is, or 

 occasionally has been, elsewhere. Under silage crops are included 

 a number of crops which could not be used as cattle food in any 

 other form than this, as ferns, thistles, all kinds of weeds, etc. In 



case of fodder famine the silo may thus help the farmer to carry 





 his cattle through the winter. 



9. Value in Intensive Farming. More stock can be kept on 

 a certain area of land when silage is fed, than is otherwise the 

 case. The silo in this respect furnishes a similar advantage over 

 field-curing fodders, as does the soiling system over that of pas- 

 turage; in both the siloing and soiling system there is no waste 

 of feed, all food grown on the land being utilized for the feeding 

 of farm animals, except a small unavoidable loss in case of the 

 siloing system incurred by the fermentation processes taking place 

 in the silo. 



Pasturing stock is an expensive method of feeding, as far as 

 the use of the land goes, and can only be practiced to advantage 

 where this is cheap. As the land increases in value, more stock 

 must be kept on the same area in order to correspondingly increase 

 the profits from the land. The silo here comes in as a material 

 aid, and by its adoption, either alone or in connection with the 

 soiling system, it will be possible to keep at least twice the number 

 of animals on the land that can be done under the more primitive 

 system of pasturing and feeding dry feeds during the winter. 



