16 
BULLETIN" 1045, U. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 
Little trouble will be experienced in cutting sunflowers if the 
plants are fed into the silage cutter tops first. Sunflower silage 
packs more easily than corn silage. If harvesting has been de- 
layed for any reason until the sunflowers are older and somewhat 
dry it will be necessary to add water along with the silage. With 
such silage more care is required to tramp it down thoroughly. 
Sunflowers usually produce an inferior quality of silage if har- 
vested later than the blooming stage. 
A word of caution is necessary in regard to the strength of the 
silo used in storing sunflower silage. Those who have had experi- 
ence in ensiling sunflowers find that they pack much more closely 
Fig. 
-Filling with sunflowers the 200-ton concrete silo on the United States Sheep 
Experiment Station near Dubois, Idaho. 
in the silo than corn. This close packing, of course, means heavier 
silage and in large silos results in much greater pressure on the 
walls of the silo. George M. Rommel, formerly Chief of the Animal 
Husbandry Division, Bureau of Animal Industry, United States 
Department of Agriculture, is authority for the statement that a silo 
constructed to hold 200 tons of corn silage will hold nearly 300 tons of 
sunflower silage. 
Rommel says that a new monolithic concrete silo 14 feet in 
diameter and 50 feet high was built with 6-inch walls and the ordi- 
nary quantity of metal reinforcement on the United States Sheep 
Experiment Station near Dubois, Idaho, in 1920. (Fig. 6.) This 
silo, while it was being filled with sunflowers that fall, began to 
crack from the pressure when it was little more than half full. Fill- 
