No. 6. DEPARTMENT OP AGRICULTURE. 341 



or experiments. This data, taken a,s it is from so many trials made 

 in different parts of the country, should give us a safe means of es- 

 timating what we may expect from approved modern treatment and 

 good average conditions. While the old or animals do not mako 

 nearly so great a percentage increase as do the very young ones, 

 yet their gain is so much greater than that of animals approaching 

 maturity that the economical pig feeder cannot afford to ignore the 

 question of age when he is selecting stock for his feeding pens. When 

 we compare the amount of food required to produce a pound of gain 

 in live weight at the different ages, we find the comparison almost as 

 striking. With pigs weighing thirty-eight pounds a piece, about 

 three pounds of feed were required to produce one pound of in- 

 crease in live weight. At seventy-eight pounds of weight, four 

 pounds of feed were required to produce one pound of live weight. 

 At three hundred and twenty pounds of weight, a little over five 

 and one-third pounds of feed were required to produce a pound of 

 increase. Here again it is shown that older animals do not turn 

 the food which they consume to so good an account as do the younger 

 ones. While it is true that as the pigs grew older they consumed 

 much less food per hundred pounds of live weight, yet they did not 

 make so good use of it, from the farmer's standpoint, as did the 

 younger animals. The young animals, not only consumed a much 

 larger proportion of food than did the older ones, but they seemed 

 to be able to digest and assimilate it or to turn to good account a 

 larger percentage of that which they consumed. But one says that 

 young animals digest their food closer than do older ones. We do 

 not know this to be true. While we recognize that very young 

 animals are given food that is more easily digested, yet it is not 

 known that they have greater powers of digestion than is possessed 

 by older animals of the same breed. 



I may say that the weights of the food during the earlier stages 

 of the pig's existence are not given because they are not readily de- 

 termined accurately, as the food normally consists largely of the 

 mother's milk which, as to quantity, is difficult to estimate. As no 

 method having as yet been discovered for drawing the milk from the 

 dam equal to a litter of young pigs, experimenters have preferred 

 to confine their work to later periods of life when the food could be 

 accurately determined, both as to quantity and to quality. 



While young animals produce a much greater gain in live weight 

 for the food consumed than do older ones, and consequently produce 

 a relatively cheaper market product, yet it is perhaps well for us to 

 remember that as a food product the meat of the young animal and 

 that of the older one should not be compared wholly by weighi. 

 While the deliciousness of the young meat may be the greater an*], 

 in many instances, this may be a most important factor, yet we 



