What is a silo for anyway? I see them while commuting and never knew the purpose for the structure.
The individual tall cylinders that you see on the farm are built to hold corn silage. or other types of grass silage. It is a bulky feed and needs a lot of space to store it. Corn is chopped green ,the stalks, leaves,grain, cob and all, and blown into the silos. The corn starts to ferment and spoil until all of the available air is used up. The anaerobic bacteria create acids until all of the bacteria are killed and the feed is preserved.Very much like cabbage is preserved as sour-crout . It is important that the structures are round to eliminate any air pockets as that would cause spoilage. They must be tall so the chopped corn is packed tightly for the same reason.
silo farm shaped tall cylinder
All silos are not tall cylinders. Some are piles above the ground and some are trench's in the ground. Upright silos, such as you are talking about are losing favor because they hold relatively little feed and with today's larger operations it takes a lot of them to store feed. Recently silage has been forced into large plastic bags laying on the ground. These provide good storage also.
Cylinder Shaped Buildings
They are built in that shape for two reasons. 1. Crops are generally very heavy and a cylinder maximizes the strength of the material the walls are made of. 2. Cylinders hold a greater volume per square foot of wall than most other shapes (squares built using the same amount of material hold less because of corners)
