ILLNOIS STATE DAIRYMEN'S ASSOCIATION. II3 



"Anyone who can dig a trench 5 or 6 feet deep; fill it with cut 

 feed; weight it with a foot of earth, and cover it with a few 

 loads of straw or swamp hay, will get just as good ensilage as 

 though his silo cost him $1,000, 



The cost of the silo is an important matter, and the more we 

 have to do with ensilage, the less money we put in silos. They 

 are being made more cheaply every year. The idea that a few 

 pinholes in the wall would ruin your ensilage, is fast fading 

 away. In fact, some are simply stacking their feed, and weight- 

 ing heavily and find only a few inches of the outside spoiled. 

 Our own silo of concrete cost us about $1.50 per ton capacity 

 for the material and we did the work ourselves. Mr. O. C. 

 Davis, Richland county, Wis., has a silo built of wood, 112 tons 

 capacity, costing $125; R. P. Gilbert, Oswego county, N. Y., 

 has one of stone, costing $700, of 600 tons capacity; L. C. 

 Morse, Sparta, Wis., has one inside his barn that cost $85, and 

 holds 80 tons. Now, look at the cost of our hay barns: W. D. 

 Hoard, of Ft. Atkinson, Wis., puts the cost of a hay barn at 

 $7 per ton capacity; take the case of Mr. Gilbert, whose silo 

 holds 600 tons; he must have a barn that holds 200 tons of hay 

 to have the same amount of feed. This will cost just $1^400 

 instead of $700 for the silo. Take the same case and see the 

 amount of land it will take to produce 200 tons of hay. At 1 % 

 tons per acre, it will take 133^3 acres ; the same land will pro- 

 duce 15 tons of corn per acre, or it will take forty acres to fill a 

 silo. We could enumerate such cases all day, but will not take 

 your time. 



Second — Too Expensive a way to Handle Water. I admit 

 that a load of green corn is heavier than the same bulk of dry 

 stalks, but you take the juice from the green corn and it is lost 

 forever; its equivalent can never be replaced by steaming or 

 any other process, and the stalk that was filled with juice is 

 filled with pith, of no more nutriment than a dry corn cob. 

 Francis Sutton, Chemist to the Norfolk Chamber of Agricul- 

 ture, England, says: "By far the most valuable feature of en- 

 silage is the preservation of the juices of the plant in a soluble 



