. Cyclopedia of farm crops, a popular survey of crops and crop-making methods in the United States and Canada;. Farm produce; Agriculture. 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
. Cyclopedia of farm crops, a popular survey of crops and crop-making methods in the United States and Canada;. Farm produce; Agriculture. 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. Please note that these images are extracted from scanned page imag
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