12 ADVANTAGES OF THE SILO* 



winter, another story would be told, and it would be 

 found that the shocks only weighed anywhere from a 

 third to a half- as much as when they were cured and 

 ready to be put in the barn late in the fall; if chemical 

 analysis of the corn in the shocks were made late in the 

 fall, and when taken down, it would be found that the de- 

 crease in weight was not caused by evaporation of water 

 from the fodder, but by waste of food materials contained 

 therein from fermentations, or actions of enzymes. (See 

 Glossary.) 



The correctness of the figures given above has been 

 abundantly proved by careful experiments conducted at a 

 number of different experiment stations, notably the Wis- 

 consin, New Jersey, Vermont, Pennsylvania, and Colorado 

 experiment stations. A summary of the main work in 

 this line is given in Prof. Woll's Book on Silage. In the 

 Wisconsin experiments there was an average loss of 23.8 

 per cent, in the dry matter (see Glossary), and 24.3 per 

 cent, of protein, during four different years, when over 

 86 tons of green fodder had been put up in shocks and 

 carefully weighed and sampled at the beginning and end 

 of the experiment. These shocks had been left out for 

 different lengths of time, under varying conditions of 

 weather, and made from different kinds of corn, so as to 

 present a variety of conditions. The Colorado experi- 

 ments are perhaps the most convincing as to the losses 

 vvhich unavoidably take place in the curing of Indian corn 

 in shocks. The following account is taken from Prof. 

 Cook's report of the experiments. As the conditions de- 

 scribed in the investigation will apply to most places on 

 our continent where Indian corn is cured for fodder, it 

 will be well for farmers to carefully look into the results 

 of the experiment. 



"It is believed by most farmers that, in the r^ry cli- 

 mate of Colorado, fodder corn, where cut and shocked 

 in good shape, cures without loss of feeding value, and 

 that the loss of weight that occurs is merely due to the 

 drying out of the water. A test of this question was made 



