THE IRRIGATION AGE. 



335 



SILO PROVES ITS WORTH ON IRRIGATED FARMS 



Farmers Tell of Success With "Feed Ice Boxes" 



Filling home-made stave silos in the Southwest. 



CTUAL 



farmers are 

 proving the 

 value of the 

 silo on the irri- 

 gated farms of 

 the West. 



E n s i 1 age 

 proved exceed- 

 ingly valuable 

 in many sec- 

 t i o n s of the 

 West this year, 

 when the warm 

 and dry weather 

 began to cut 

 down the pas- 

 turage. 



The West- 

 ern Washing- 

 ton experiment 

 station at Puy- 

 allup began 

 feeding from 

 one of its silos 



early in July. The oats, vetch and corn put into 

 the silo last fall, were all found in excellent condi- 

 tion and were relished by the stock. 



Years ago many silos were erected in Western 

 Oregon, but more than half of them were failures 

 because they were not air-tight. The result was 

 lost enthusiasm, a backset to this system of pre- 

 serving the feed. 



While a good silo may cost a little more at the 

 beginning than a poorly constructed one, it is the 

 cheaper of the two and the only practical one. Had 

 the farmers of Oregon built air-tight instead of 

 leaky silos in the first place their dairy and live 

 stock industry would have been far more profitable 

 to them than at the present time. 



Many irrigation farmers have started in this 

 year with home-made pit silos. Writing of his ex- 

 periences with such a silo, A. H. Weeks, of Valley- 

 ford, Wash., says: 



"My pit silo is 10 feet 6 inches in diameter from 

 wall to wall of earth. I hired the digging done and 

 furnished the powder to loosen the clay. Labor 

 and powder cost me $15, cement $14, gravel $2, 

 lumber cut to make forms $3, mixing concrete and 

 filling cost $7.50. making a total of $41.50 cash 

 outlay. The silo is 10 feet diameter and 14 feet 

 deep. The hauling of the gravel and work of mak- 

 ing and putting up forms we did ourselves. Figur- 

 ing wages for time and teams, I consider the cost 

 to be about $60. 



"My forms are made of segments sawed from 

 1x12 common boards and braced across from joint 

 to joint by 1x4. with small pieces of board nailed 

 over the ioint to hold together. I then set these 

 forms in the pit and set 2x4 pieces under each joint 



The above cut is from a photograph made by the Santa Fe Railroad. 



so as to hold 

 them the right 

 distance apart, 

 plumbed and 

 braced these 

 circles to hold 

 them in posi- 

 tion. I used 

 1x12 16 feet for 

 the backing, 

 and poured the 

 concrete be- 

 t w e e n them 

 and the dirt, 

 using a 2x4 to 

 tamp the con- 

 crete with, 

 making a wa.ll 

 3 inches in 

 thick ness. I 

 used one part 

 Port land ce- 

 ment and 9 

 parts of gravel, 

 which makes a 

 very good wall, but does not turn water. The last 

 two feet at top I used 1 to 6 parts cement and 

 gravel. I covered the bottom same as main part 

 of sides. 



"I put in what I considered was 12 tons of 

 green fodder for silage; this filled about 10 feet 

 when settled. I cut this fodder from about four 

 acres of ground. I also cut and shocked about 

 seventeen acres, which we cut with a hand cutter, 

 and fed before starting on the silage. We got rela- 

 tively the same amount of feed from the four acres 

 made into silage as we did from the seventeen acres 

 of dry fodder. The silage, however, held the cows 

 up in their milk flow to quite a degree, noticeable, 

 at least when they began to fail on the dry fodder 

 after threshing. 



"When the spring freshets came my silo took 

 in a considerable amount of water. I thought I had 

 lost my feed but instead it proved the saving of it. 

 I am digging it out of the water today and feeding 

 it along with alfalfa hay and green oats and peas 

 and the cows seem to like it as well as they did be- 

 fore the water entered. We dip the water out so- 

 as to keep the silage solid enough to stand on, and 

 feed as usual. In filling I tamped the fodder well 

 as it fell from the cutter and added four oil barrels 

 of water. Two or three days after filling I put two 

 barrels more on, and a week later two additional 

 barrels. Then I left the pit open until December, 

 after having filled up above the silage to about level 

 with oats, straw and chaff. I am well pleased with 

 my pit silo and contemplate later of puttiijg a stave 

 silo on top of the pit silo." 



Fred A. Hutton, who is farming near Dixon, 

 (Continued on page 347.) 



