This subject has been largely expounded and discussed lately in the
_Times_ and other newspapers. As most of my readers are doubtless
aware, it is simply a substitute for haymaking, by digging pits, paving
and building them round with stone or concrete, then placing the green
fodder therein and covering it over with sufficient earth to exclude
the air.
We are told that very inferior material (such as coarse maize grass
mixed with chaff) when thus preserved gives better feeding and milking
results than good English hay.
I may mention a very humble experience of my own that bears upon
this. When a boy, I was devoted to silkworms, and my very small supply
of pocket-money was over-taxed in the purchase of exorbitantly small
pennyworths of mulberry leaves at Covent Garden. But a friend in the
country had a mulberry tree, and at rather long intervals I obtained
large supplies, which, in spite of all my careful wrapping in damp
cloths, became rotted in about ten days. I finally tried digging a hole
and burying them. They remained fresh and green until all my silkworms
commenced the working and fasting stage of their existence. This was
ensilage on a small scale.
The correspondence in the newspapers has suggested a number of reasons
why English farmers do not follow the example of their continental
neighbors in this respect; climate, difference of grasses, etc., etc.,
are named, but the real reason why this is commercially impossible, and
farming, properly so called, is becoming a lost art in England (mere
meadow or prairie grazing gradually superseding it) is not named in any
part of the discussion that I have read.
I refer to the cause which is abolishing the English dairy, which
drives us to the commercial absurdity of importing fragile eggs from
France, Italy, Spain, etc., apples from the other side of the Atlantic,
tame house-fed rabbits from Belgium, and so on, with all other
agricultural products which are precisely those we are _naturally_ best
able to produce at home; I mean _those demanding a small area of land
and a proportionately large amount of capital and labor_. A poultry
or rabbit farm, acre for acre, demands fully ten times the capital,
ten times the labor, and yields ten times the produce obtained by our
big-field beef and mutton graziers.
The scientific and economic merits of ensilage are probably all that
is claimed for it, and it is especially adapted for our uncertain
haymaking climate, but what farmer who is merely a lodger on the land,
holding it as an annual tenant-at-will or under a stinted beggarly
lease of 21 years, would expend his capital in building a costly
_silo_, which becomes by our feudal laws and usages the absolute
property of the landlord?
Our tenant farmers employ the latest and best achievements of
engineering science in the form of implements, but take care that
they shall be _upon wheels_, or otherwise non-fixtures, and use rich
chemically prepared manures, provided they are not permanent, while
they abstain from improvements which involve any serious outlay in the
form of fixtures on the land. Those who lecture them about their want
of enterprise should always remember that their condition is merely
a form of feudal serfdom, tempered by the possession of capital, and
that all their agricultural operations are influenced by a continual
struggle to prevent their capital from falling into the hands of the
feudal lord. Anybody who has ever read an ordinary form of English
farm-lease, with its prohibitions concerning the sale of hay and straw,
and restrictions to “four-course,” or other mode of cultivation,
must see the hopelessness of any development of British agriculture
comparable to that of British commerce and manufactures.
Imagine the condition of a London shopkeeper or Midland manufacturer
holding his business premises as a yearly tenant, liable at six months’
notice to quit, with confiscation of all his business fixtures.