I recommend a system of feeding silage, corn and all, to producing cows only. If you do not have cows enough to prepare to feed them separately, it will pay better to use no silos that have grain in them at all. Feed the grain to those cows only that are giving milk and will pay for it, or the cattle that you are fattening. Hold the rest of the grain for high prices. It will pay better.
Silage. The important thing about a silo is to make it tall enough and small enough around. The following dimensions are approximately correct:
For 12 to 15 cows, silo should be 10 feet in diameter
For 20 to 30 cows, silo should be 12 feet in diameter
For 30 to 40 cows, silo should be 14 feet in diameter
For 40 to 60 cows, silo should be 16 feet in diameter
Silage will spoil on top unless at least two inches are fed off each day. It usually pays to have several small silos rather than one big one because during the summer months you may want to feed only a part of a ration. The figures given are for full rations. Have the silo air tight. Cut the corn fine and put lots of effort on tamping it. The “Flink’s Perfect Silo Seal” is a canvas that is treated with some kind of tar preparation. It spreads out over the top of the silo and is filled more than a foot deep with water. This weighs down the silage and makes a good air tight cover. Very little silage decays under it. With such a cover you can feed periodically and still lose hardly a day’s feeding of silage.
Grain Feed. Grain should be fed mixed with other feeds. I have often been told how foolish was the old idea of the cow losing her cud. But a cow can hardly re-gurgitate and re-chew grain by itself, and all food eaten by a cow should be re-chewed. If food passes into the intestines without being chewed a second time, it is likely to sour and cause scouring and loss of appetite or even death, when a large amount of grain has been consumed. We usually feed grains with silage or fine-cut alfalfa. Alfalfa run through an ensilage cutter without any re-cutting attachment, is said to make cows’ mouths sore, but I would much prefer to feed it that way and risk sore mouths than to risk the grain by itself. Some farmers feed corn and cob-meal. The cob is of no value except to lighten the ration, but if there is nothing else to dilute the grain with, by all means use the cob. Oats, corn, hominy feed, which is a by-product in the manufacturing of corn meal, bran, which is not very valuable where plenty of alfalfa is fed, and oil meal form our principal feeds for dairy cows. Some get very good results by feeding ground speltz and barley, others by feeding ground rye. Corn, oats, wheat feeds and oil meal will generally form the main part of our ration. The average farmer is hardly warranted in looking farther for grains to feed. Oil meal helps as a conditioner and is fed in small amounts only. Cottonseed meal may be of value but has never proven so in the writer’s personal experience.
Grain should be ground so that all of the nutriments may be absorbed. The amount of grain to be fed varies with the amount of milk that the cow is producing. One pound of grain to every five pounds of milk is a fairly good rule to follow. If more grain is fed there should be another reason for it, and that is that the cow readily responds to more feeding and makes sufficient profit to pay for the extra grain. The old rule, in the main, is true that it takes a certain amount to maintain bodily weight of the animal, and that the more feed above the maintenance ration that she can consume and turn into milk, the more the profit. But even that rule should not be taken too literally. If the extra feed is all grain, it may be too expensive.
Prepared Feeds. There are many kinds of prepared feeds on the market and I have no right either to knock or to boost them, because I know practically nothing about them. Where there are combination feeds, intended to make a balanced ration, I think the farmer would very likely be paying a good deal for the combining. Where a mill man buys grain from farmers and from those grains prepares feeds that are not by-products of other milling operations, I think the price would be high. I have known farmers to sell alfalfa hay and buy alfalfa meal, but I do not think it pays to do those things. All I would say concerning prepared feeds would be to experiment carefully and to buy them, not on their guaranteed chemical analysis, but on what results they actually show in the milk pail. Some prepared feeds contain oat hulls which are about like wheat straw to digest. Dried sugar beet pulp is a by-product feed containing mostly carbohydrates, and seems to have some benefit as an appetizer. Cattle like it for a change. Where it is not too high and carbohydrate rough feeds are to be purchased, it might be profitable to try it.
CHAPTER V.
HOW TO FEED
Balanced Ration. Cattle like variety in their feed. Not all cattle have the same tastes and desires. When one cow refuses to eat her grain, it is well to try her on some other mixture. A good feeder usually has several grain feeds on hand at a time and is continually changing and trying out rations. By checking his results at the pail, he acquires knowledge that is more practical than any chemist can impart. We know that a cow’s food must contain the necessary elements needed for her bodily maintenance and the production of milk. We must supply the substances needed. Rules for figuring values of feeds and examples of balanced rations are given below, but we also let the cow in on the discussion. We should not follow rules so closely that we ignore her likes and dislikes or overlook the results that she puts in the milk pail and the pocket book. There is probably no living creature that has for its natural diet a balanced ration, unless it be a carnivorous animal that eats its prey whole—feathers and all.
A poorly balanced diet may be fed for several months before any results begin to show. Cattle do fairly well on the corn plant (mainly carbohydrates), and they also do well on pure alfalfa (a protein feed). They do better on a combination of the two, but the combination does not have to be in just the right proportion. In deciding what to feed a cow the good feeder uses his eyes more than his pencil. If the muscle and body of the animal needs building up, he uses protein feeds in large proportions. Cattle inclined to be too sleek and fat often milk better if fed more carbohydrates in proportion. But we should never pass up one or the other completely. Notice that I speak of only two substances in food—protein and carbohydrates. There are others, but we need not be concerned about them. All we want to know from the chemist is approximately the amount of these two elements the feed contains. Fat is considered the same as a carbohydrate but has more than two times the value of carbohydrates.