King Country Chronicle Wednesday, July 5, 1911. SILAGE AND SILOS.

King Country Chronicle, Volume V, Issue 375, 5 July 1911, Page 5

King Country Chronicle Wednesday, July 5, 1911. SILAGE AND SILOS.

"A good dairy community can be judged by the number of silos on the horizon, just as an oil district may be known by the number of derricks in use," says the "Saturday Evening Post," in an interesting article on silage. The King Country, like Waikato and Taranaki, is destined to ba a great dairying country, and in improved methods of getting the best results lies success for the dairyman and those concerned with the industry. Silage has been strongly advocated as a drought-season food by the Ruakura experimental farm, an 3 apparently in America it :s proving just as valuable as it does in other countries. The article points cut that while silage is an acquired taste, yet, once known, cows love it, and as milk consists of mostly water (householders complain sometimes it is nearly all water), green silage, consisting of nearly all water, is the most valuable drought food they can get. Silage is what the farmer makes it. He may vary its constituents, adding this, reducing the other, as experience shows him what is best, and proves to be the best of bovine tonics. On the single item of space for storage, silo is a great economy. A cubic foot of hay contains four pounds of dry matter. That of silage contains ten pounds. A cylindrical, concrete silo is strongly advocated, and a round silo measuring fourteen feet in diameter and thirtysix feet high, accommodates one hundred tons of silage. The size, naturally, will be that of the number of animals to feed. Two inches of the surface silage is taken off daily, to avoid loss from decay. Five square feet daily per cow is sufficient feed and a fifteen feet silo will serve for a herd of twenty cows that receive forty pounds a day. We had only ten days on which rain fell in the Te Kuiti district in the months of January, Feb ruary and March, and the total fall was under three inches. If such an association as the newly formed l)airy Company could lead the way by constructing a concrete silo in a suitable locality, capable of holding one or two hundred tons of silage, and that was available during our drought periods to members of the association, it would, first of all, relieve their difficulties at a most critical time of the year, and secondly, set an example to dairy farmers in the King Country such as would stimulate the U9e of silos and benefit the industry generally.