Silos have a bad rap. For most of the world, a silo is a metaphor for cramped and uninquisitive thinking: we are forever being told to ‘get out of our silos,’ and chided for our ‘siloed thinking.’ Farmers, however, don’t think of silos that way. Most of them have no more use for literal silos than the rest of the world does for the metaphorical ones, and the agricultural countryside is littered with the remains of abandoned silos – monuments to a good idea that didn’t turn out so well.
The word ‘silo’ Wikipedia so helpfully tells me, comes from the Greek word ‘siros’ which meant a pit in which grain was stored. So the Greeks dugs holes and kept grain in them. The modern silo that we all recognize -- the tube (frequently blue) shooting up into the air – only goes back to 1894, so it is scarcely an artifact of traditional farming. They are were used to produce silage, which is fermented green crops, in America, mostly corn. The entire corn plant is harvested, chopped up, mixed with some water and frequently something else like molasses, and blown into the silo where its weight packs it down and starts a process of anaerobic fermentation. This preserves the farmer’s crop for feeding to his animals during the winter. So far, so good. Another ingenious way to carry summer’s bounty over into winter. This basically is a parallel idea to haying, which takes grass off the fields and into the barn for feeding animals when there is no more grass to be had out where it was.
But silos had their downside too. It may well be that more farmers have died in silo accidents than any other non-mechanical part of modern farming. They were filled with tons and tons of silage which had been packed in, but also had to be gotten out. You could do this for a while with a silage fork, reaching through a hatch, but at a certain point the silage just got stuck and the fork would not loosen it any more. Farmers then resorted to long sticks, trying to poke it till it came down. When that didn’t work, they would sometimes climb into the silo itself to get a better position. You can imagine the result of successfully dislodging 20 or 50 or 100 tons of silage: the farmer’s wife would go looking for her husband when he didn’t come in for supper and find his feet sticking out of the silo hatch. Or, since silage produces nitrogen dioxide, a toxic gas, the farmer would just be dead next to the silo. That is a high price to pay for fat cows.
So industrial ingenuity moved on past the silo and created first the silage bunker, which is a big horizontal concrete box where silage is kept covered with sheet plastic. The plastic is usually held down with old tires, so if you have ever seen a mound of black or white plastic, studded with firestones, on your drive through the country, you have seen a silage bunker. More recently farmers make silage right in the field. If you have ever seen what looks like a field full of giant white marshmallows, you are looking at modern silage.
But our farm makes hay, not silage. Silage is actually not all that great for ruminants (cows, sheep, goats) since it is acidic and wears away the lining of the rumen. It is particularly bad for goats, which have a bacteria population in their stomachs that is easily thrown out of whack. Goats love silage like kids love candy, but in neither case is the object good for the subject.
We inherited two abandoned silos, which is what this post is about. One is concrete, with a round cap. The other is steel, but long ago lost its lid and when we arrived was a rusting hulk. It was also completely in the way of the conversion of the small barn into the goat house. When silos got popular in the early 20th century it seemed like such a good idea that the farmer here tore off half of the front of his barn to make it more convenient to feed his cows. Silos are bad enough, but to wreck a perfectly good building to install one is pretty close to idiotic.
So what do you do with a useless silo? I have seen one near here, painted red, white and blue and fitted out with a deck on top so now it is an observation tower. That is an arresting sight, however our silo was beyond that. Taking it down was what needed to be done, but how to do it? It was a daunting job. The silo was not huge: 12 feet in diameter and 35 feet high, but that is plenty big enough. It was firmly anchored to the ground in a doughnut of concrete, around and inside the steel of the silo. The guys who put this up were building for the long term.
Finally we could not put it off any longer; we had to do something. Off we went to the hardware store to buy 100 feet of thick rope. Zach got into his climbing harness and scaled the silo. It was not quite like throwing a shrimp net, and I ended up climbing the other side, but we got the rope secured around the top of the silo eventually. I dug out the angle grinder, large size (7” disc), got a couple of metal cutting discs and went to work. It was such an unpleasant task that I actually put on safety glasses and gloves and ear protection. Zach used the smaller grinder and we worked away from each other, cutting more or less evenly. More or less was good enough, since the only crucial thing was that our cuts met up on the other side.
After various adventures – mostly involving wearing out cutter discs, we made our way around the circumference of the silo, which was about 37 or 38 feet. On the way, the small grinder bit the dust, which means that if you ever want to take a steel silo down, go with the big grinders! For those of you keeping score, the cutting took a couple of hours, not more.
Now we had a 35-foot tall steel silo, weighing who knows how many thousands of pounds, sitting essentially on nothing. We had left a couple of inches of uncut steel on the side we wanted it to fall, but otherwise it was free-standing. Exciting. But here I take you back to the paragraph above where Zach had attached a big rope to the top of the silo. The other end of that rope was tied to the hitch of the monster Toyota Tundra 4WD that was bought back in the spring and that gets absolutely lousy gas mileage, but has paid for itself in the things that it does. The silo came down just like we wanted it to. It is, of course, in the way of what we want to do next; we are getting used to that now. We can finish the loafing barn now, but how this steel whale will disappear is fodder for another post.