The Early History of Ensilage a summary
By Paul Poornan
The word silo derives from the Greek ‘siros’ which means a hole or pit in the ground for storing grain. A silo is a cistern or vat, air and water tight on the bottom and sides, with an open top, constructed of masonry or concrete. It may be square, rectangular, round or oval in shape, with perpendicular sides, used to store in their green state forage-crops, such as corn, sorgho, rye, oats, millet, Hungarian grass, clover, and all the grasses. This forage is cut and taken directly from the field, run through a cutter which cuts it into pieces less than half an inch in length, and trampled down solidly in the silo, and subjected to heavy and continuous pressure. The structure is the silo, which may be above ground, or partly or entirely below the surface of the ground. The fodder preserved in silos is ensilage. John M Bailey, 1880.
Cereal grain has been stored in below ground-level pits since prehistoric times. By sealing the open pit, the stored grain undergoes respiration, exhausting the oxygen and replacing it with carbon dioxide which in turn shuts down further respiration killing any insects thus preserving the grain. Recent trials in Australia (2019) have shown that quantities up to 120 tonne of barley may be stored underground with minimal deterioration for a period of 11 years. In 1784 John Symonds, Professor at the University of Cambridge,
visited Perugia in Italy and observed that over-wintered cattle were fed solely on turnips and tree leaves. The farmers stripped the leaves from deciduous trees in September and October, sun-dried them for three or four hours, then pressed them into wooden barrels. The leaves were then covered in sand and the barrels sealed ‘lest the leaves should be exposed to the air’. In other parts of Italy the leaves were buried in a pit, covered with a layer of straw, and then covered in a layer of clay, sand or dung. In Verona the farmers used a deep pit method, filling it with alternate layers of leaves and bunches of unripe grapes and finally a layer of straw and sand. This latter method ‘not only prevents the leaves from heating, but impregnates them with a kind of spirit which … the horned cattle eat with a greediness which can hardly be conceived’. Symonds demonstrated with classical sources, that preserving leaves in this way to feed cattle during the winter had its origins in Roman times. In 1843 Professor JFW Johnston described a German method
of preserving grass, clover and vetches. Pits were dug in the earth, measuring 10-12 feet (3.0-3.5m) on all axes, and lined with wooden boards or brick. Some five hundredweight (approx. 250kg) of freshly cut green fodder was put into the pit, trodden down by five or six men to exclude the air and rammed into the corners, which then was covered by a thin layer of salt. This was repeated until the pit was full then finished with a thick layer of salt, then topped with wooden boards which were weighted with 0.5m of soil. The pit then contained about
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5 tons of fresh grass. ‘When covered up the grass speedily heats and ferments, and after the lapse of about six days, when the fermentation has ceased, the whole has sunk to about one-half of its original bulk’. The boards were then removed, fresh grass and salt added as before, and re-covered, so that the pit contained almost 10 tons of grass – equivalent to 2-3 tons of dry hay. ‘The grass when thus fermented, has the appearance of having been boiled, has a sharp acid taste, and is greedily eaten by cattle’. The evolution of the silage-making process was taken a stage
further when Adolf Reihlen of Stuttgart published his experimental results of ensiling sugar beet leaves and maize in the early 1860’s; his pits were 3m deep 4.5m wide and had a total length of just under 1 kilometre. In 1870 his letters were translated and published in the French press as part of a series about ensiling green fodder. In 1852 Auguste Goffart at Chateau Burtin near Orléans, France built four below ground silos which he had ‘filled and emptied several thousand times’ over 20 years before finding success in 1873. In 1874 he started large-scale trials (total 250 tons) of ensiling maize which attracted the attention of agriculturists. He preferred long and narrow brick-lined silage pits with semi-circular ends (no awkward corners) covered with wooden boards weighted with rocks to exclude the air. When the silage was ready to be extracted, the boards and rocks were removed from a small area, and men dug out the silage vertically (see Figure 1). Later he built new silos that were partly below ground, partly above and covered with a roof (see Figure 2). In 1877 he published a 200-page detailed manual on how to make maize silage. He was awarded the Legion d’Honour for his work. This book was discovered by an American, JB Brown who translated and published it in New York in 1880.
Figure 1: Goffart’s underground silo In 1881, John Bailey of Billerica became America’s silage pioneer
(green maize) and published his snappily-titled: ‘The Book of Ensilage: or, The new dispensation for farmers: experience with “ensilage” at “Winning farm”: how to produce milk for one cent per quart; butter for 10 cents per pound; beef for four cents per pound; mutton for nothing if wool is thirty cents per pound’. In the introduction to his book, published in Massachusetts, New York and London, he stated ‘I have but put
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