The Cylindrical Silo

Nonfiction Collection audiobooks, librivox, nonfiction collection, silo

Above: An old silo, July 24, 2017

If you live, as I do, in farm country, old silos are a familiar sight. Almost all of them are abandoned now, because the farms do not raise livestock anymore. Dairying is out; corn and soybean fields predominate.

My curiosity about these old silos led me to read a selection on their form and function for the 51st volume of the Nonfiction Collection. I found out that you could estimate from the diameter of a silo, how big a herd it had once served: “There should be a feeding surface in the silo of about five square feet per cow in the herd; a herd of thirty cows will then require 150 square feet of feeding surface, or the inside diameter of the silo should be 14 feet; for a herd of forty cows a silo with a diameter of 16 feet will be required; for fifty cows, a diameter of 18 feet; for one hundred cows, a diameter of 25 1/4 feet, etc.”

Everything you might want to know about silos, including how to build your own was provided in the book Modern Silage Methods, published in 1911, from which I read.

In the fall of 2017 our local Farm Bureau sponsored a “Ride on a Combine” fundraiser. Everyone who took part got to ride with a farmer while he harvested a few rows of his corn field. This is a picture of me, standing on the steps of the combine. What I learned from talking to the farmer was that his corn crop, far from ending up in a silo, is sold to the local ethanol plant.