Much of human history is the story of catastrophic agricultural losses. The invention of the silo in the nineteenth century reduced grain losses from 50% to just 2%. Silos transformed farming from a seasonal survival struggle into a year-round productive enterprise.…
Before silos, life was measured in losses. After silos, farmers stored grain during harvest-time price lows to sell during peak periods. Silos enabled year-round milk production. Silos enabled strategic grain reserves for communities, creating buffers against seasonal shortages. Rural economies stabilized as community grain elevators enabled everyone to work together.
The agricultural silo is in fact one of history’s most transformative innovations, solving the storage challenges that had given farmers a headache for millennia.
Hollis Robbins, You say ‘silo’ as if it were a bad thing…
I had no idea.
Great reference. The silo played a great role here in New Mexico. Thank you. Taka a bike ride down the end of the south 2nd street to see the old silo in Sy Naniga’s property where I-25 takes a sharp turn due west to cross the Rio Grande. Those Journals of Agronomy are a real treasure trove of cogent information.
When I asked a farm-boy what happened in a silo, he replied, “It kindey ferments.” As well as I know, only corn, stalks and all, is stored in silos. Maybe sorghum, which farmers call milo. There are “silos” of concrete floor and walls with plastic tarps built into hills. It is easy to load the feed with a small front loader. Grain goes in graineries. Let’s say I was not particularly fond of the black ooze running out of the silo I passed by going to a field area in southern Indiana.
The steel version usually found on a farm are called “grain bins” by us yahoos
Thanks for the post, though!
Growing up in central Kansas I had many opportunities to harvest crops. The stone silo was always used to store corn harvested in the fall. This corn was a different variety than corn used for picking and shelling. The silo corn stalks were shot into the silo via and elevator and yes they fermented. Workers would perish, at times, by entering a silo full of noxious gas. In the winter one climbed an outdoor ladder constructed in a chute, open a round door, climbed in with a sileage fork, and shovel raw sileage into the chute where it fell into a wagon under the chute. Then off to the cattle. I was thrilled when we built an open pit silo and could load the winter sileage with a front end loader . Today the old stone silo in the plains and Midwest are empty and/or falling down. Great article.
You mean like this? (it’s a link to an image of an acorn storage granary in Yosemite Valley, since I can’t paste images here) https://www.library.ca.gov/california-history/gold-rush/native-americans/