Hit and miss engines were a hit with farmers —Part 3
Hit and miss gasoline engines were perfected in 1876. Unlike the cumbersome and expensive steam engines of the time, these new inventions were affordable to most every small farmer and in a very few years they revolutionized agriculture on our local farms. As described in the columns of the last two weeks, the small, one cylinder hit and miss engines were soon doing everything around the farmstead from turning ice cream freezers to filling silos.
In addition to the revolution in wheat harvesting described last week, the engines revolutionized dairy farming. Now it became possible to erect silos where many tons of shredded, green, corn stalks could be stored for winter feeding. About the same time a rail system that included special early morning milk trolleys was rapidly developing, and so the modern dairy farm producing and delivering fresh milk on a daily basis became possible.
The quantity and quality of milk a cow gives depends on what she has been fed within the last few days. Butter was the small farmers’ cash crop from the earliest times, and the better the diet, the more butterfat a cow produced. However, early farms seldom had more than two or three cows since it took considerable resources to gather winter season fodder for cattle. In the 18th century it was meadow hay mowed by hand with a scythe and some “corn tops” and cow pumpkins that barely sustained cows in the barn from October to May when they could again be put out to pasture. The 19th century saw some mechanization, such as mowing machines for hay fields, but winter feeding was still the limiting factor as more stock could be supported on the farm in the summer than could be carried through the winter.
By the late 19th century the universal practice of shocking corn in the fall provided dried stalks for winter fodder. Carried to the barn, the dried stalks and leaves were chopped to bits by a variety of hand cranked mechanical contraptions that reduced them to pieces a few inches long. Cows have no upper incisors, just a bony plate, so corn stalks must be cut up for them to eat.
In the 1870s, reports came to this country of experiments in France in which green forage, principally corn stalks, were put in a pit in the earth, covered with boards and earth to exclude air, and when unearthed in the dead of winter the corn was still green and succulent. Furthermore, the corn had undergone some action by enzymes giving it a faintly fermented smell and taste that the cows relished; and, more importantly, milk production rose dramatically.
Despite some mockery from neighbors who laughed at giving the cows “sauerkraut,” the practice of cutting and storing some green corn stalks in airtight structures for winter feeding took hold almost at once. At first “ensilage,” as it was called, was stored in square or circular stone additions to the barns. Soon, however, wooden silos (those tall cylinders beside barns) began to appear. Silos were similar to giant barrels in that fitted planks called staves were bound with external steel hoops. Redwood was then the lumber of choice for silos as it resisted the corrosive effects acidic corn juice. Shipped in by rail and often erected by the farmers themselves, by 1910 wooden silos were on most up-to-date dairy farms.
A corn “juice” liquid sometimes literally runs from the bottom of just filled silos; consequently various cement formulas were problematic in silo construction as that liquid slowly dissolved the cement. For a time, brown glazed ceramic blocks were sometimes used as they were impervious to the acid. Later coatings and sealants solved the problem while the “blue giant” silos that one sees today are actually glass lined.
While more than ten times the tonnage of ensilage fodder could be harvested from an acre of corn compared to hay, dried hay was still a valuable milk maker and all dairy farms continued to fill the hay mow in the summer.
Silos changed the farmer’s year. Corn was planted later and silo filling became an autumn event much as hay making was in the summer. Horse drawn corn binders appeared which cut and bundled the corn into “corn sheaves” which could be loaded onto wagons and taken to the barn. There they were fed into a powered fodder cutter which operated much like a modern wood-chipper. A revolving drum with knives shredded the corn stalks into small pieces and fed this chop into an elevator that carried it to the top of the silo and dropped it inside.
Of course, it was the six to ten horsepower hit and miss engine that powered this whole operation.
At first it was thought that after filling, the ensilage in the silo had to be covered with boards and weighted with stones to keep out the air; but it was soon discovered that the weight of the ensilage itself (eventually in the hundreds of tons) was enough to compress and seal the whole.
Today, silos have grown much taller, and farmers use a tractor powered blower and pipe to lift the ensilage.