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Storage Solution:
Early Silos Provided High Quality Feed
By Gary Van Hoozer
In the late 1800's, livestock farmers - especially dairymen - recognized the need to stockpile and preserve high quality winter feed.
While the ensilage process of chopping and packing most of the plant was already known, it had previously been pitched into and packed in pits or bunkers. There, the feed underwent a process of fermentation and sweetening.
Then, the idea sprouted to build small rectangular or round structures to contain silage (or ensilage) vertically near the site where it would be fed. The upright silos generally packed more uniformly, and minimized surface exposure that lead to spoilage. The square or rectangular models, though, soon fell out of favor, says Joe Becker, Hartland, Wis. Joe and his wife encountered accounts of three square-store silos in the process of doing research for another project.
"The first silos I know about in our area were built in the late 1880s," he says. "The smallest poured cement silo I've seen was eight feet in diameter, and was built in the early part of this century."
Joe, a retired dairy farmer, says that silo diameter was determined by herd size. Height was determined by how high farmers could blow or elevate silage with equipment available at that time.
"The first stone silos were huge," he says. "Sometimes the silage had to be forked twice to reach the chute."
By the early 1900s, round stave silos became popular, usually made from tamarack, Douglas fir, pine, spruce, hemlock and cedar, bound with iron rings. Glazed tile blocks were also occasionally used for silo walls.
Building the silo was one thing: filling it was quite another.
"Silo filling was very hard work," Joe recalls. "Bundles of green corn stalks with ears on were heavy. If corn was ensiled at the right stage, it was great feed.