44 SILOS AlTD ENSILAGE. 



silage will not contiaue to do well in condition and prod- 

 uct, and our plan now is to raise about fifteen acres of 

 corn next season, 1881, and this will be suflScient to fill 

 the silos full, giving us four hundred tons, and this will 

 keep forty cows three hundred and sixty-five days ; but 

 as we shall pasture all of the side-hill during the summer 

 season, about twenty acres, the pasture will also grow 

 better, because the cows Will drop more upon it than they 

 take from it. We think we can give the cows all they 

 will eat, morning and evening, of the ensilage, and keep 

 in this way fifty head the year round on fifteen acres of 

 corn and twenty acres of hill-side pasturage. " We, how- 

 ever, immediately after taking off the corn early in Sep- 

 tember, plowed up the stubble and put in winter rye. 

 This came up finely, and we will top-dress it this winter, 

 and early in the spring give it a good bushing in. We 

 expect to cut the rye by June 1st or 6th, and cut that up 

 the same as we do the corn and store it in one of the 

 silos, then immediately plow the same seven acres and 

 put in corn ; whether this will work remains to be seen. 

 But we have full confidence in the perpetual fertility of 

 this corn land, because it is to be replenished, not only 

 with what grew upon it, but from the grain fed with the 

 ensilage : for, by the plan we have adopted, the liquid 

 manure is as perfectly saved as the solid, and the most 

 accurate experiments show that the fertilizing matter of 

 the liquid is greater than in the solid manure. Prof. 

 Stewart reports that he has found the manure from one 

 cow, standing upon the self-cleaning platform, carried 

 fresh to the field, the liquid all absorbed by the soil, 

 equal to the manure from three cows saved in the old 

 way, by throwing into a pile and carrying it to the field 

 months afterward. In fact, there is no fertilizing matter 

 wasted or lost, except that carried off in the milk. 



The beauty of the system is, that, instead of spreading 

 the manure from forty or fifty cows over two hundred 



