Though Dennis' photo of the sileage fork may not yet be posted to this blog, Norb's reflection about how the cows liked the sileage is posted below. Norb's narrative reminded me of my jury duty on a civil trial in Milwaukee a long time ago.
It's amazing what a person learns serving on a jury. The lesson that came through to me had to do with the energy crisis in the 70's and what cows like to eat.
Before jury duty, I didn't know about dietary choices made by cows. The defendants' attorney explained it all during this trial. Most cows stuck in a barn in the winter, like sileage which is really pickled corn. The mileage at our farm was thrown on top of the dry hay to make the dry hay a bit more palatable for our diary cows.
You know when you are driving through farm country today, you often see long winnowed white plastic bags near a barn. These bags are filled with moist mash from breweries.
Before that energy crisis, breweries (Miller, Pabst, Point, Leininkugels, and others) dried the hops and grains they used to brew beer. These breweries siphoned off whatever the grains provided to make beer and then dried the grain leftovers which they sold to farmers. The energy crisis raised the cost of heat it took to dry these grains which led breweries to sell wet mash to farmers. Farmers were well award that cows will not eat moldy food.
What farmers and breweries learned from the sale of wet mash is that cows liked the wet stuff better than the dry stuff. The problem with selling this mash wet had to do with mold. Cows wouldn't eat moldy mash and only large farms with big herds of cattle could use the mash from these breweries until an inventor in LaCrosse came up with these plastic bags that attached onto a funnel like device on the back of big semis. The wet mash was spilled into these bags and the mash did not get moldy.
These semis delivered the wet mash that was dumped into the plastic bags that you see dotting the farm landscapes in Wisconsin.
As Norb's post explains, working in farm silos was quite dangerous. Once that frozen sileage began to thaw, it was possible that it would fall away from the sides of the silo and collapse into the floor and if you were in the silo, you could get covered by the sileage. In my lifetime, it happened to a neighbor, Johnny Kucaba who survived.
 Apr 14, 2020, 9:09 PM (15 hours ago) | | |||
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Norb's explanation attached for day 20
Silage fork. Think of it as a cow’s serving utensil. Every day one of us kids would climb into the silo and throw silage down the chute – enough to feed one helping to each cow. This was not the fork used inside the silo. That would have been a long handled fork with about 8 tines. For the task at hand that was the better tool for dealing with the compacted silage. In the dead of winter it was compacted and frozen solid around the walls of the silo. It had to be chipped away but chipping didn’t work very well. Over time a wall of this frozen silage formed and could be as much as 10 feet high. Another OSHA violation by today’s standards. With the onset of spring and warmer temperatures this wall would start to thaw and subject to cave in.
Dad would then take this fork and deliver one scoop of silage to each cow. Different cows had different appetites. Some were fussy eaters. Virtually all of them liked silage. But some of them would wait until a mixture of ground oats, corn and vitamin supplements were sprinkled on top of the silage before they would start eating. Think dollop of Kool Whip! Kind of spoiled you might say – much like dogs who will hold out for canned dog food to be added to the dry food. For cows facing the north side of the barn, the silage was scooped into a metal bushel basket and carried across. This activity was wedged in between switching milking machines from cow to cow. Multi-tasking!
When the corn crop was harvested, chopped and blown into the silo, we seasoned the corn by spreading bags of powdered molasses between layers of corn. I remember the sweet smell of the silage but not enough to make me want to eat any of it. Our cows were spoiled and they loved it – most of them anyway. The ones that didn’t the cow next to them reached over to help herself.
There was a health hazard of the corn chopping process. Sometimes, metal like barbed wire or nails would get chopped up in with the corn unbeknownst to us and certainly not the cows. If they ingested the metal and it became lodged in one of their stomachs they suffered loss of appetite. Usually it was a terminal illness. We referred to this illness as “hardware.” There was an effective remedy for this. We could have an essay question “Describe what was done to protect cows from dying if they swallowed hardware?
I’ll close with that except to conclude that when it came to spring and the silo was almost empty, the job of tossing silage down the chute switched to being a job of tossing it up. The floor of the silo was 5 or 6 feet below grade level. Not as much fun.
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