THE RURAL NEW-YORKER. 
ISAY 6 
I use the two side pits of the main building 
for storing grain, and thrash just before the 
corn is fit to go into the silo, throwing the 
straw into the lean-to. When the thrashing 
is completed I haul the straw to the cow barns 
for winter use. When commencing to fill the 
silo I put in one day’s work, about 24 tons, 
into one side pit in the main building; the 
next day into another side pit; the third day 
into the center pit; going back the fourth day 
to the first pit, and so on alternately until 
completed. Then I fill the pit at the rear or 
Fig. 123. 
lean-to, carrying up the temporary partitions 
as the filling advances. Four days after a pit 
is filled I make it level on the top and put on 
tarboard paper. On the paper I put cut 
straw, marsh hay, grass, sawdust or earth, 
enough to keep out the air, about two feet 
of cut straw, or eight inches of sawdust— 
weight is as useless on silage as on a wood 
pile. While filling each day tramp well at 
the corners. The body of the pit takes care of 
itself. My silo is an independent building 
some 10 rods away from the cow barn. The 
silage is hauled in a one-horse dump cart and 
dumped between two rows of cows facing 
each other. It requires less hand work than 
where the silo is in an adjoining barn. 
The proportion of spoiled silage this year in 
250 tons, is less than on three acres left in the 
shock in the field till January; in fact, less 
than a cart-load on the whole amount put in¬ 
to the silo. I use the B & W or Southern 
ensilage com. Any kind of corn, or any kind 
of grain crop, makes good silage; but one 
acre of B & W corn is worth more and takes 
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Fig. 124. 
less labor than any other crop I have tried. 
I cut in the field by hand, lay in gavels to 
wilt one or two days, haul the fodder-corn 
with one team, and three trucks. While one 
truck is being loaded another is being un¬ 
loaded or handed directly to the man feeding 
the cutting machine, and the third truck is 
passing to and from the field. Six hours of 
such work usually put in 24 to 28 tons. If 
special men and teams were hired by the day 
to board themselves, it would cost about 75 
cents for a ton. To a common farmer with 
men hired by the month, earning their board 
by milking and other work, the cost is less 
than 25 cents per ton. 
The value for milking cows when the com 
is matured, is as 2% tons of silage to one ton 
of good hay. I find the best results, or, in 
other words, the" cheapest milk, when I feed 
five to eight pounds of wheat middlings to 
40 pounds of silage in two feeds, the middlings 
put on the silage. In addition to this feed, 
give two pounds of clover hay per day to a 
cow at five o’clock in the morning, so that 
the cows will get up ready for milking. 
As to any valid objection against silage 
milk, butter, or cream, there is positively 
none. If any objection is ever urged by the 
suspicious, it can always be traced to foul 
stables, want of salting the cows, or other 
causes not connected with silage. 
What is the probable future of ensilage? I 
venture the opinion that the thoughtful, the 
observing, the progressive farmer on high- 
priced land, will depend almost]entirely upon 
silage, made from large Southern Sweet Corm 
for both summer and winter feed, while the 
old-fogy summer dairyman will continue to 
keep his cows on pasture grass, meadow hay 
and ice water, and howl at monopolists, rail¬ 
roads, tariffs and taxes, and take his wife to 
town sitting on a board across the box of a 
lumber wagon, and if she timidly asks him for 
a dollar he will sneeringly ask her what she 
did with the 50 cents he gave her last week. 
“Can I honestly advise a farmer of small 
means to go the expense of building a silo and 
procuring a cutter?” As readily as I would 
advise a small-grain farmer to buy a seeder, 
a self-binder and thrashing machine. It is 
just as practical for four or five farmers to 
combine or to change work, hire a feed cutter 
and farmer to fill the silos, as it is to hire a 
self-binder and thrashing machine to do har¬ 
vesting. Men will not get up and get, so long 
as they sit whitling at the grocery. 
HIRAM SMITH. 
[A picture of Mr. Smith’s silo showing the 
interior arrangement is shown at Fig. 119, 
with a side view showing the manner of cut¬ 
ting out the silage with a hay knife.— Eds.] 
AN ENGLISH NOTE. 
I do not think it necessary to go to the 
great expense of building a silo, as we have 
been successful by making use of a cart and 
wagon shed, with the walls ten feet high, and 
my process of filling is as follows: Cut the 
grass (I use second-crop clover and rye grass) 
and put it in as cut, or if it is very wet, I let 
it remain a day or so before hauling. I then 
fill the shed, and keep a horse tramping on it 
while filling to settle it better, and when I 
have finished filling, which lasts over three or 
four days, I weight it down with old iron and 
posts or anything near at hand, first putting 
on some hurdles and planks to make it settle 
evenly. It will then heat to about 170° F. I 
let it remain until the winter, and cut it out 
in tiers, and cut it to chaff with some straw, 
about two-thirds of the latter to one of the 
former. The weight I put on is about 200 pounds 
to the square foot. I find it quite equal to 
roots, at about one-third their cost. I find that 
the animals fed on the mixture of silage and 
straw chaff do very well, and have all the ap¬ 
pearance of health and vigor. If given in 
larger quantities, it makes them scour, and is 
not good for them. The cattle are ravenous 
for it, and eat up every bit, and will lick the 
jacket of the man who attends them. 
There is another system I have seen which I 
think is good for large farmers and those who 
have no covered place. It is called the stack 
system, and a patent press is used in place of 
the weights, and with that the green material 
is put in a stack as with hay, and pressed 
down with wire ropes placed across the stack 
and drawn down with a ratchet cylinder and 
lever, and it is very simple and effective. 
(See Fig. 120-121.) r. h. pethelridge. 
Devon, England. 
SILAGE AT THE SOUTH. 
PROF. F. A. GULLEY. 
We have five silos, three in one barn and 
two in another. They are all above ground, 
built in the barns; wooden frame lined with 
two thicknesses of vertical 1x12 plank, break¬ 
ing joints, with a layer of tarred building 
paper between the planks. Fill over the top 
with the carrier, empty through doors made 
in sections extending from the top to the bot¬ 
tom on one side. I would adopt the same plan 
if building again. 
Use no regular weights, simply cover with 
plank and fill to the roof with hay above the 
silage. The present season one silo was found 
to have silage good up to the boards, except in 
a corner where rats had burrowed through 
the corn. 
Another, in which the top was filled with 
ripe, dry fodder, was black down for 15 
inches, but cattle ate most of it. Silage en¬ 
tirely spoiled has not averaged more than one 
per cent, for the past two years, and half of 
the loss is due to rats burrowing in the silage. 
Have used pea-vines, sorghum, clover and 
corn; have settled on corn as the best crop. 
Plant in drills four feet apart, stalks 10 inches 
apart; most stalks make ears; cut when the 
corn is getting hard. Let it be on the ground 
12 to 24 hours; haul to the cutter rigged with 
carrier; tramp no more than enough to keep 
the mass level and settle the sides and corners; 
fill about three feet per day. The mass gets 
quite warm, and the silage comes out with 
scarcely any acid taste or smell, except down 
near the bottom of the silos. 
On our best land silage costs for labor and 
manure from $1.50 to $1.75 per ton to grow 
the crop and put it into the silo, and weighs 
from 25 to 30 pounds to the cubic foot, and 
comes out dry. We have not made an accur¬ 
ate test, but find that two pounds of silage are 
about equivalent to one pound of good hay. 
We get better results, both for milk and for 
fattening cattle, when feeding silage in con¬ 
nection with cotton seed; the two seem to 
make a desirable combination. Ten pounds 
of hay, 50 pounds of silage, 10 pounds of cot¬ 
ton seed, to a 1,000-pound steer per day, about 
25 per cent, more to an average cow. 
In my opinion, silage will become a stand¬ 
ard cattle food in the Gulf States, taking first 
rank on well-managed farms. I would re¬ 
commend any farmer handling 20 cows to put 
up wooden silos and procure cutter and power 
for cutting of crop. I would state, however, 
that it is necessary to have land for the crop 
in a fertile condition, rich enough to make 
thick-planted corn ear. I have not found 
coarse, rank, immature corn silage of high 
value. Ensilage corn grown on poor land is 
an expensive crop. It is a crop that properly 
belongs to the “good farmer,” and not to the 
careless man. 
SILAGE FROM WHOLE STALKS. 
My first silo was built in August, 1886, and 
the second in June, 1887. The first is 24x10 feet, 
by 18 feet high, and will hold over 80 tons. It 
is built of stone and wood, and cost me for 
material and mechanical work, $50. I built 
it in one end of my carriage house, see Fig. 125, 
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Fig. 125. 
which stood beside my stable, that holds 25 
cows. I only had to dig down below the frost 
some four feet, and lay a smooth-faced wall 
and lime-sand up to the sills of the silo, then I 
boarded up the inside wood work with rough 
boards which I had on the farm, then I cov¬ 
ered them with good building paper, then I 
sealed up with good matched inch boards of 
which I bought about 1,000 feet in all. My 
second silo I built in a large basement, see Fig. 
126, some distance from my other barns, 14x14 
and 22 feet deep. I built it in a part of one of 
the bays, of stone and wood. The basement 
wall was there on two sides, so there were only 
two sides to build up to the sills, which I 
built of lime and cement with smallish stones. 
I built up between two planks, and when suf¬ 
ficiently dry, raised them up and filled again, 
and so on until completed, as high as the barn 
sills. From the sills to the big beam and plate, 
I built of only one course of good matched 
inch boards, filling in between the siding of 
the barn and the sides with straw to pro¬ 
tect from frost. The bottom I cemented with 
water lime. It cost me for mechanical work 
and the matched boards and lime about $30. 
I filled it in July with grain and thrashed it 
the first of September, in time to fill it with 
silage, between September 5th and the 5th 
of October. This silo I fill from the barn floor. 
My stables are in the basement, there being 
a door in the lower part of the silo through 
which we take the silage to the stock from 
the lower part of the silo. There is not a 
farmer who can’t build a silo in some of his 
barns and sheds, making sure to have a few 
feet of stone work below the frost and as higb 
as the sills of the wood work of the silo. I 
will get as much fodder in one of my silos as 
can be put in an ordinary barn of hay, straw, 
etc. 
If the silage is properly put in, there will 
be no waste. On top I put a foot of [straw or 
four of hay. This is where the air is pressed 
up from below into the hay or straw. This 
will be mouldy but not rotten. The stock eat 
even that. 
I use only corn. I would not bother with 
any other crop. I use Southern White. I cut 
all my silage with a Champion reaper that 
has a strong steel cutter-bar. I cut two rows 
35 inches apart and rake them off from 7 to 11 
feet in hight. I never cut my silage and 
would not if I could have it cut for nothing. 
I regard it as a great damage for all the juice 
of the stalk to be exposed and dripping over 
the fodder, which ought to be left undisturbed 
in the stalk until the day it is fed. I lay it in 
the silo, beginning on one end with the butts 
and lay them as one would lay shingles. 
When I get across that course, I begin from 
that point back again, and so on until the si¬ 
lo is full, taking great care that the corners 
are plump and full. I put the fodder on the 
wagon, the butts all one way, and so take them 
off and put them into the silo in the same form. 
My silage has thus far come out good, 
sweet and in splendid condition, every par¬ 
ticle being consumed, as the stock are crazy 
for it. The stock are the best “silage cut¬ 
ters.” They have all the winter to do it in 
and enjoy it much. The first year I cut and 
put my silage in green, and filled slowly being 
over three weeks in filling, which gave a great 
heat, as high as 1258 or 135°. This completely 
killed the “bacteria” in the green fodder and 
the silage came out sweet instead of sour. This 
last year I feared the frost was coming and I 
cut it all down at once and let it cure from 
one-fourth to one-half in the gavels before I 
put it in, and then put it in slowly and when 
I first opened it it smelled very much like 
honey and I find it even better than the pre¬ 
vious year. 
I cut it down to feed with a lightning hay 
knife and put in crates that are two feet long, 
that hold one-half bushel. I give one-half 
crate to a cow once a day, feeding hay and 
grain the rest of the day. In my judgment it 
will cost from a dollar to a dollar and a half 
per ton. 
I consider it very much superior to any 
kind of hay for beef, butter or milk, if the sil¬ 
age is sweet as it ought and should be. We 
have now some nice, sweet beef, fattened 
mostly on silage and apple pomace which I 
put on top of one of my silos as weight for the 
silage. I have been largely repaid for all the 
expense and trouble of hauling the apples six 
miles. The stock do well on it and are as 
crazy for it as they are for the silage; besides 
it keeps nicely being better than when first 
put in. 
I have not discovered the least objection to 
feeding silage. I have never fed but once a 
day of silage, but should have no fears of it, 
having seen those who have maintained their 
herds of cows entirely on it. They come out 
in fine condition. For cattle and sheep silage 
will take the first place, ahead of hay of all 
grades. It will double the stock of New Eng¬ 
land in a few years. We of the East can 
summer only or quite double the number of 
animals that we can winter. This is also true 
of many States west and southwest of New 
England. 
“Can I, from my experience, honestly ad¬ 
vise a farmer of small means to go to the ex¬ 
pense of building a silo, procuring a cutter, 
and otherwise preparing for ensilage?” 
To the above question I answer, to the for¬ 
mer part, yes, to the latter part, no. What 
use is there in going to expense of money and 
time so needlessly? I know whereof I affirm. 
If I had to go to the expense of cutting, I 
should never build a silo. My experience with 
my two silos, and filling with uncut com, has 
been far more satisfactory than I at first ex¬ 
pected, and I have no hesitation in advising 
men who are prompt and thorough in what 
they do to engage in the enterprise. 
Hancock, Mass. a. f. morey. 
CENTRAL OHIO SILO. 
I was the first one in this part of our State 
to construct and fill a silo with green corn. 
I converted a portion of my cow stable— 1 
which is 100 feet long by 16 feet wide—into 
a silo, using one end 16x18 feet and 18 feet in 
hight. It is built entirely of wood with brick 
foundation under it, cemented outside and in 
with sand, and cemented one inch thick. I 
