MAIZE 



MAIZE 



41' 



It is not a vital matter whether a silo is 

 filled hurriedly in a day or two, or more 

 gradually in a week or ten days. A silo which 

 has been filled very quickly will begin to 

 settle rapidly almost at once, and in the next 

 ten days or two weeks will go down perhaps 

 20 per cent of its total depth. Hence the 

 slow filling, giving an opportunity for the 

 silage to settle, results in getting much more 

 food in the same cubic space. 



Covering. — The best way to cover a silo 

 is to begin to feed out of it the day it is 

 filled. In this way, surface loss will be almost 

 wholly avoided. When this method is not 

 feasible, it will be necessary to cover the 

 silage with some material, otherwise the 

 upper foot or more will spoil. Any kind of 

 straw or chaff well wet down, swamp grass, 

 green buckwheat-straw or even sawdust, will 

 do nicely. Possibly it will be just as well to 

 snap off the ears of the last two or three loads of 

 corn and let the stover act as a cover. Sometimes 

 no covering is put on, but instead the top layer is 

 thoroughly wet down. This results in the rapid fer- 

 mentation of the surface few inches, making an 

 air-tight covering for the silage 

 below. The watering is done at 

 the rate of two to two and one- 

 half gallons per square foot of 

 surface. 



Harvesting machinery.— The 

 corn harvester or binder in its 

 present form has been in use 

 about ten years, and its use is 

 becoming well-nigh universal in j,\ 

 handling the crop for silage. It 

 is drawn by two or three horses. 

 It cuts the corn and binds it into convenient sized 

 bundles for feeding into the cutter. Under favor- 

 able conditions a machine should handle five to 

 eight acres per day. In a recent season the writer 

 used 118 pounds of twine, worth say $13, in bind- 

 ing an estimated crop of 300 tons of silage. The 



Use of conrexor in making silage. 



Ele, 641. Use of the conveyor in filling an outside silo. 

 B27 



Com busker and shredder at work. 



harvester, on the whole, is exceedingly satisfactory 

 in its operation. By a system of carrying chains 

 and devices for straightening up the stalks, it is 

 able to cut and bind corn even when it is badly 

 lodged and tangled. The advantage lies not only 

 in the labor saved over cutting 

 with corn-knives, but to an even 

 greater extent in the subsequent 

 loading on wagons and feeding 

 into the cutter. 



The machinery for cutting 

 silage and elevating it into the 

 silo is of two distinct types. In 

 one, the cut material is elevated 

 by means of a running elevator 

 of sprocket chains, bearing 

 wooden slats or sheet-iron buck- 

 ets, which carry tlie corn away from the knives. 

 The other type is known as the blower or pneu- 

 matic elevator, in which the cut forage is blown 

 into the silo through a sheet-iron pipe by a very 

 powerful blast of air, generated by a fan or by 

 blades fastened to the head to which the knives 

 are bolted. The first type is the earlier one. 

 Its disadvantage is that to set up and adjust 

 the slat carrier for a tall silo is rather diffi- 

 cult. Its advantage lies in the fact that it 

 can be operated with much less power and at 

 greatly varying speeds. A six or eight horse- 

 power engine will generally be ample. The 

 advantage of the blower type lies in the fact 

 that it is very much more quickly set up, and 

 that the corn can be taken care of in the silo 

 more easily, as it is a more uniform mixture 

 of the leaves and heavier parts of the plant. 

 Its disadvantage is that very much more 

 power is required and the speed must not fall 

 below a certain minimum or the machine will 

 clog. The blower type is steadily becoming 

 the more popular in silo districts. 



Place of silage in the ration. 



The question of feeding silage belongs more 

 especially to the domain of animal nutrition. 

 However, it may be said in passing that about 



