"EARS AND ALL." 175 



Siloing Corn, "Ears and All." 



The best practice in putting corn into the silo is to silo the 

 corn plant, "ears and all," without previously husking- it. If the 

 ear corn is not needed for hogs and horses or for seed purposes, 

 this practice is in the line of economy, as it saves the expense of 

 husking, cribbing, shelling and grinding the ear corn. The possi- 

 ble loss of food materials sustained in siloing the ear corn speaks 

 against the practice, but this is very small, and more than coun- 

 terbalanced by the advantages gained by this method of pro- 

 cedure. In proof of this statement we will refer to an extended 

 feeding trial with milch cows, conducted by Professor Woll at 

 the Wisconsin Station in 1891. 



Corresponding rows of a large corn field were siloed, "ears 

 and all," and without ears, the ears belonging to the latter lot 

 being carefully saved and air-dried. The total yield of silage 

 "with ears in it (whole-corn silage) was 59,495 pounds; of silage 

 without ears (stover silage) 34,496 pounds, and of ear corn, 10,511 

 pounds. The dry matter content of the lots obtained by the two 

 methods of treatment was, in whole-corn silage, 19,950 pounds; 

 in stover silage, 9,484 pounds, and in ear corn, 9,122 pounds, or 

 18,606 pounds of dry matter in the stover silage and ear corn 

 combined. This shows a loss of 1,344 pounds of dry matter, or 

 nearly 7 per cent, sustained by handling the fodder and ear corn 

 separately instead of siloing the corn "ears and all." 



In feeding the two kinds of silage against each other, adding 

 the dry earn corn to the stover silage, it was found that seven- 

 teen tons of whole-corn silage fed to sixteen cows produced some- 

 what better results than fourteen tons of stover silage, and more 

 than two tons of dry ear corn, both kinds of silage having been 

 supplemented by the same quantities of hay and grain feed. The 

 yield of milk from the cows was 4 per cent higher on the whole 

 corn silage ration than on the stover silage ration, and the yield 

 of fat was 6.9 per cent higher on the same ration. It would seem 

 then that the cheapest and best way of preserving the corn crop 

 for feeding purposes, at least in case of milch cows, is to fill it 

 directly into the silo; the greater portion of the corn may be cut 

 and siloed when the corn is in the roasting-ear stage, and the 

 corn plat which is to furnish ear corn may be left in the field 



