616 IOWA DEPARTMENT OP AGRICULTURE 



to choose some feeding materials, but yet should hesitate to trust him 

 with grains, usually high priced, such as corn, oats, tankage, meat meal, 

 oil meal and others. 



Man himself is a self fed animal; this has been true since the average 

 man's earliest recollection. You have made the "dairy lunch" or the 

 "cafeteria" system of eating popular by your patronage simply because it 

 was efficient in administering to your needs. You have believed soup to 

 be an appetizer, and uniformly eat it at the beginning of a meal; science 

 has shown that you are largely right in this. Disregarding expense, you 

 prefer the a la carte method to table d'hote, because in the former you 

 choose, and in the latter you do not. You do not relish hash even as a 

 side dish ordinarily, hence why should you expect swine to relish it as 

 the one and only dish. 



You have watched your babies "lick" the butter off the bread; prefer 

 sugar to most other carbohydrates; devour milk and eggs rather than 

 pickles and olives; and eat crackers rather than "soggy bread." Why 

 all this? There is a reason; these foods are all easily and highly di- 

 gestible, and they furnish sustenance in an efficient form. Prom a physio- 

 logical standpoint, they are of great merit, but ofttimes the economy of 

 them may be a question, especially when war times cause excessive prices 

 on such foods as sugar, and other. 



Surely appetite is governed by the state of the bodily needs. Appetite 

 has been defined as the desire for food based upon the result of past 

 experiences. There is much truth in this. Of course, we must remember 

 that even though appetite is a reliable guide as regards bodily needs for 

 feed, that the hog which manifests it is using as a basis, physiology and 

 not economy. The hog is a physiologist, not an economist, therefore he 

 chooses his feeds regardless of their monetary value. 



How about the experimental research at the Iowa station, which has 

 to do with the problem of self feeding? You will be interested to note 

 some of our animal husbandry section results in the feeding of pigs from 

 weaning time to marketable age. 



Eight months and four days old pigs, fed in dry lot, weighed 316 

 pounds at Ames this fall. How were they fed? The following feeds were 

 placed before these pigs shortly after they were weaned, and when they 

 weighed about 45 pounds on the average: Shelled corn, meat meal (60 

 per cent protein), whole oats, linseed oil meal, maple wood charcoal, finely 

 ground limestone (such as is spread upon the land to correct acidity of 

 the soil), common rock salt, water. These pigs ran on an area which 

 measured, outside of the enclosed shed space, approximately 20x80 feet. 

 Surely this is a most excellent weight — 316 pounds for pigs 248 days of 

 age. This is especially true when we realize fully that they were fed 

 entirely in the dry lot, and not on pasture. 



Professor Dietrich worked for ten years at the University of Illinois, 

 in the attempt to determine the optimum amount of different feed con- 

 stituents which pigs should have every day after weaning until they went 

 to market, at about eight months of age. In all that time, so far as I 

 can learn from consulting his records at the University of Illinois, the 

 biggest pigs he produced for the age weighed, when 251 days old, 308 



