Figure 2: Goffart’s new silo
into practice that which M Goffart had demonstrated was practical in France’. As a direct result, ensilage became widespread in America, and the USDA issued a report confirming that the condition of stock fed on ensilage was healthy, they gained weight and the system was profitable. Farmers were also happy that the fodder was in a safe place, protected from storms and wet rot. In January 1882 a correspondent for the Guardian (London)
newspaper commented that there had been a succession of wet seasons1 which resulted in a very poor hay crop, and that American farmers had been experimenting with a system called ‘Ensilage’ to preserve green fodder. He quoted Rothamstead who had not been impressed because 40% of the dry organic matter of maize was lost in fermentation process, and actively discouraged farmers from pursuing the process. The correspondent finished with ‘Ensilage with its alcoholic tendencies2, can hardly hope to be raised to the dignity of a remedy for scant or defective fodder; at least in this country’. A month later, the Guardian reported that an Ensilage Congress had been held in New York, at which all the butter, milk and cheese at the lunch was made from silage-fed cattle. Samples of ensiled maize, clover, rye and various grasses were displayed. In October the same year, a Times correspondent explained a little of the history of the process: ‘At first in America the fodder was simply ‘clamped’3 in heaps 6ft high and 15ft long’. This correspondent writing from a farm in France noted that ‘more milk was given by the cows that ate ensilage than those which did not’; he also envisaged that ‘cubes of ensilage … may be eventually made into marketable blocks for dairy and other cattle’.
Figure 3: Clamped silage,
The Times, Oct 1882. With permission of
Ancestry.com, copyright News UK.
In 1883 the Royal Agricultural Society of England decided to
investigate ensilage and the following year HM Jenkins published a substantial report into ‘Ensilage at Home and Abroad’. His report covered the history and detailed results of a survey comprising 23 questions to 40 UK farmers and six foreign correspondents (excluding America) concerning their experience with ensilage. There were silos below and above ground, square and round, roofed/unroofed, partly
Figure 5: Blunt’s Screw and Lever Ensilage Press
1. Particularly between 1878-1883 2. The Habitual Drunkards Act had been passed in 1879, and the Temperance movement was very active.
3. Is this the first reference to clamped silage? FEED COMPOUNDER SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2020 PAGE 35
chopped/chopped, detailed costings, feeding regimes, moisture readings, mechanical means of compression, examples of chaff and ensilage cutters. In 1885 the British Government appointed a Select Commission to investigate the potential of ensilage for British agriculture, the Ensilage Commission. They concluded that the system of storing undried green crops was a ‘valuable auxiliary to farm practice’. They also highlighted a difference in outlook between the scientific chemists who estimated the value of a foodstuff based on the analysis of the moisture, fat-forming, bone-forming and flesh-forming constituents compared to that of farmers who observed the effect of a foodstuff on the condition, rate of growth and development of livestock. They
Figure 4: FW Reynolds patent chain and screw compression silo
also noted that there was a general consensus from practical farmers that the results of feeding ensilage were of significant economic value compared to the ‘not very sanguine estimates formed … by scientific
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