Silage will spoil on top unless at least two inches are fed off each day. It usually pays to have several small silos rather than one big one because during the summer months you may want to feed only a part of a ration. The figures given are for full rations. Have the silo air tight. Cut the corn fine and put lots of effort on tamping it. The “Flink’s Perfect Silo Seal” is a canvas that is treated with some kind of tar preparation. It spreads out over the top of the silo and is filled more than a foot deep with water. This weighs down the silage and makes a good air tight cover. Very little silage decays under it. With such a cover you can feed periodically and still lose hardly a day’s feeding of silage. =Grain Feed.= Grain should be fed mixed with other feeds. I have often been told how foolish was the old idea of the cow losing her cud. But a cow can hardly re-gurgitate and re-chew grain by itself, and all food eaten by a cow should be re-chewed. If food passes into the intestines without being chewed a second time, it is likely to sour and cause scouring and loss of appetite or even death, when a large amount of grain has been consumed. We usually feed grains with silage or fine-cut alfalfa. Alfalfa run through an ensilage cutter without any re-cutting attachment, is said to make cows’ mouths sore, but I would much prefer to feed it that way and risk sore mouths than to risk the grain by itself. Some farmers feed corn and cob-meal. The cob is of no value except to lighten the ration, but if there is nothing else to dilute the grain with, by all means use the cob. Oats, corn, hominy feed, which is a by-product in the manufacturing of corn meal, bran, which is not very valuable where plenty of alfalfa is fed, and oil meal form our principal feeds for dairy cows. Some get very good results by feeding ground speltz and barley, others by feeding ground rye. Corn, oats, wheat feeds and oil meal will generally form the main part of our ration. The average farmer is hardly warranted in looking farther for grains to feed. Oil meal helps as a conditioner and is fed in small amounts only. Cottonseed meal may be of value but has never proven so in the writer’s personal experience. Grain should be ground so that all of the nutriments may be absorbed. The amount of grain to be fed varies with the amount of milk that the cow is producing. One pound of grain to every five pounds of milk is a fairly good rule to follow. If more grain is fed there should be another reason for it, and that is that the cow readily responds to more feeding and makes sufficient profit to pay for the extra grain. The old rule, in the main, is true that it takes a certain amount to maintain bodily weight of the animal, and that the more feed above the maintenance ration that she can consume and turn into milk, the more the profit. But even that rule should not be taken too literally. If the extra feed is all grain, it may be too expensive.