Manchester Democrat. [volume] (Manchester, Iowa) 1875-1930, 1909-10-13
ENslLAeE AS A SOLE RATION.

ENsiLAGE AS A SOLE RATION.
This is the season of the year
when farmers are making diligent in
quiry about the silo and its advan-
tages over other methods of storing
feed for live stock. While in our of
flee recently, Mr.. l.. II. Paul of Ana
mosa made the following remarks:
IN reading some articles on ensilage
feed in various papers find that
nearly every one contains this sen.
tence or one of like meaning. OF
course you have to feed some hay
or dry feed with it as it will not do
to feed ensilage feed alone Now
would it not be a good plan for the
editors who are supposed to know
what should be placed before the
public In the way of reading matter
to sharpen up their shears and cut
such things as that out before they
go into print Because, the fact is,
that there is no more need of feeding
dry hay with ensilage feed than there
is of feeding it with blue grass or
clover. am speaking now of ensil-
age made of matured corn, as that is
the only kind of ensilage worth con-
sidering aand the men who write that
OF course You need to feed some hay
with it. have never tried feeding that
kind of ensilage alone.
81 have never heard of or have new.
er read of any experiment station
where they had sand enough to take
even one calf or one steer and feed
it for time on ensilage alone to
see whether it would live or die. So
suppose it is not strange when all
the experiment stations are sending
out bulletins to the effect that you
must only feed limited amount of
ensilage and must feed some timothy
hay or a small amount of straw or
corn stover. That is all of them eX-
cept Ames. At Ames they seem to
have been devoting most of their time
to the question of silo construction.
The question was asked of an Ames
man at Farmers Institute last
winter, What do you know about en-
silage as az food for producing beef?
He replied, THAT is something we
do not know anything at all about
| as we have never tried it,
Another thing that looks strange
to the average farmer that after all
the educational work that has been
done by Secretary Wilson, and all
the dairy and farm papers, that there
are no silos at any of the state in
stitutions of Iowa except Ames, with
probably one exception. think there
is one at the orphans home at Dav-
export. This average farmer natural
| ly thinks that If silo is such good
thing on his farm that the three wise
men who constitute the Board of Con-
troll would certainly put them on the
state farms, when this board was
/ VI SalSu topCNiolly lOi lu6 pul pCSS vi
saving the peoples money. But when
we remember that ever since civil
lized man commenced making SER
wants of the dumb brutes and had to
care for them and provide feed for
them in winter they have been feed
ing them on dry feed, because that
is the only way we know how to pre-
serve it. We older men remember
when our mothers dried pumpkins an
beans and fruits for the families in
winter because they did not know
any other way to preserve these
things for winter use. Nearly all
fruits and vegetables are now either
canned or kept in cold storage. The
silo we use for canning food for live
stock and there is just as much sense
in advocating that 1t is necessary to
eat some dried beans with canned
peaches as to feed timothy hay or
straw with corn ensilage. True, corn
silage is an all corn ration, and can
be balanced very nicely with clover
or alfalfa hay. But clover or alfalfa
silage would be much better. True,
all the experiment stations advocate
feeding dry hay with ensilage but |
suppose never having tried feeding 1t
alone they really don't know any bet
ter But the editors of our farm pa
pers ought to be up-to-date enough to
cut such things out before they get
into print. Feeding dry feed to our
live stock has been bred into us for
something like thousand years and
it is going to be long hard pull to
get out of the old rut. understand
that they have quit burning witches
on the Boston common. So we are
encouraged to think that some time,