During the 60’s it was the fashion trend in agriculture to put up Harvestore silos, otherwise know a blue idols to the corn gods. It was a time of great profits in agriculture and farmers were told how this would this feed sysstem would make them more profitable and life easier and maybe it did. But then a new fashion came, investors building big cattle lots in the sw where the weather was better.
It took 20 years before the last one was taken down.
There are still some AO Smith Harvestore silos around. Henry County IL used to have a LOT of them. 25 years ago we made a swimming pool with a ring of Harevestore panels. We had a concrete silage silo for our cattle feedlot.
Concentrated feedlots like in the Texas panhandle are not necessarily a good thing.
We called the Harvestores “blue tombstones” because they were so wildly expensive we figured they put the final nail in the highly leveraged farms. Pretty soon, people figured out cheaper ways to do the job and that was that. Many are still in use, though.
In any case, they were not a government boondoggle, so no skin off our collective back.