THE PORK MAKING INDUSTRY IN MAINE. 6l 



Stock will pay bigger dividends year in and year out than indif- 

 ferently bred stock can. Above all, breed your own supply. 

 Keep as many selected and tested sows as you can care for and 

 out of two litters each per year make a business at once profit- 

 able and satisfactory. Looking for profit, the growing of the 

 forage crops on which to pasture the hogs, also the corn and 

 pumpkins, alongside the hog pasture, becomes of the greatest 

 importance, as the labor item is thus minimized, a step the 

 importance of which cannot at first be realized. Then, too, the 

 liberty insured by this method induces larger herds, and the 

 man who keeps four or five sows this year realizes how he can, 

 by plowing a little more land alongside his hog pasture, carry 

 six or eight and the pig revenue becomes a factor of importance 

 in the year's account. Weekly there are received at one station 

 in Maine from six to eight hundred pigs from the West, hardly 

 one of which will dress over 225 pounds. These growers have 

 solved the problem of profitable production and they send their 

 forage-grown pigs by the thousands into our state, two crops 

 a year, and surely must smile as they read of the two-year-old 

 hogs slaughtered here by our farmers, grown almost entirely 

 on western corn, the growers of which could not afford to feed 

 it at home. From 175 to 200 pounds mark the limit of profit- 

 able pork production and this weight can readily be reached by 

 the time the pigs are five to six months old. This insures two 

 crops a year and may easily be made to add materially to the 

 net income of the farm. For the past two years prices have 

 ruled high, and the situation is such, throughout the West, that 

 nothing except a financial panic is likely to make any decided 

 change. 



With this period of prosperity, with wages good and every 

 mian employed, consumption of pork products has increased 

 much faster than production, and with the rapid increase of 

 population nothing but enforced idleness can stay this demand. 

 Thus from every standpoint the growing of more pigs for early 

 marketing is to be urged upon the attention of the farmers of 

 Maine. 



In breeding with any view to selling small pigs, always reserve 

 the largest, strongest, best-bodied ones for home growing. It 



