. Cyclopedia of farm crops. Farm produce; Agriculture. MAIZE MAIZE 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 fur 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, su
. Cyclopedia of farm crops. Farm produce; Agriculture. MAIZE MAIZE 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 fur 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 the top layer is thoroughly wet down. This results in tlie 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 3'ears, and its use is becoming well-nigh universal in jj 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 118 pounds of twine, worth say $13, in bind- ing an estimated crop of 300 tons of silage. The. Fig. 639. Corn husker and shredder at Please note that these images are extracted from scanned page images that may have been digitally enhanced
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1920, booksubjectagriculture, bookyear
