No. 6. DEPARTMENT OP AGRICULTURE. 765 



A Member: Do you cut the hay? Steam it? 



GOV. HOARD: I ouly cut it in the fall. 

 A Member: Do not chop it? 



GOV. HOARD: I steam it, throw it into those hogs; as the old 

 Irishman says, "Indade, man, but they ate it like a baste." 



Now, that is what led me to do that thing? I ran across a 

 bunch of hogs in Colorado that weighed 178 pounds per hog when 

 they were eleven months old. After they were born they staid 

 with the mother five weeks; when they were turned on to alfalfa 

 pasture, and the little things, as they were, went to grazing on 

 alfalfa. They were wintered on alfalfa and sold when eleven 

 months old weighing 178 pounds apiece, never saw a spoonful of 

 grain in their lives. They wintered at an alfalfa hay stack. I said 

 to myself, there is something in this thing. In the West we had 

 a great deal of trouble with our sows. In farrowing, the pigs 

 would come weak, lose a good many pigs, and we grow an abund- 

 ance of corn there, and do you know, corn is one of the most de- 

 luding and debauching things in the world. Well, now, then, I 

 reasoned that the difficulty with these pigs is that the mothers did 

 not get protein enough to make those little bodies during the period 

 of gestation, and the result of it was that when they came they 

 were deficient in strength and vigor. The first time I tried this 

 system of feed in the brood sows on alfalfa hay was five years ago. 

 My foreman, when I went to Texas — to El Paso to spend two or 

 three months — the foreman was just frantic about it and he says, 



"I hate to let you go off with such an order that I cannot feed 

 those hogs any grain." "Well, now," I says, "I am going to stick 

 right to it. I don't want you to feed them a spoonful. I don't 

 care if I lose the hogs, I want to know about it." "Well," he says, 

 "they will be perfect skeletons, I know." A month rolled by and 

 he wrote me, "The hogs are not losing in weight." The next month 

 came by and he says, "I think the hogs are gaining a little." I 

 was suspicious. I wrote back to him, "Are you feeding any grain?" 

 "Not a spoonful. I stuck to what you told me." The pigs came 

 and from that time on I have never had a single weakling pig 

 where the sows ate alfalfa and were kept on alfalfa during the 

 period of gestation. It is one of the most wonderful plants I 

 have had any experience with. We found that the old monks a 

 hundred years ago at Pueblo planted alfalfa and I have seen the 

 roots which the people say were from the same old roots that were 

 planted by the monks, and still it is just dawning on the intelligence 

 of you and me. This plant called alfalfa was known to the old 

 Germans under the name of Lucerne. They abandoned it when 

 ihey came to the country. In Jefferson county where I live, eighty 

 per cent, of the people are Germans. I got hold of an old German 

 one day and asked him if he knew anything about alfalfa in 

 the old country. He said they did not. I asked them if they did 

 not know about Lucerne? "Sure," we know about Lucerne." I 

 asked them if they ever grew it in the old country and some of the 

 old men said they had grown plenty of it. I asked them why they 

 didn't grow it here, and they said it would'nt do here. And they 

 simply expected it wouldn't and did not try it. Now, in Wisconsin 

 to-day there are 800 young men belonging to the short course as- 



