EIGHTEENTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK — PART VH 351 



President Sykes then introduced Professor J." M. Evvard, of 

 Iowa State College, who addressed the convention as follows: 



HOW ABOUT THOSE BROOD SOWS? 



Members of the Corn Belt Meat Producers' Association, and Friends: 

 It certainly is inspiring to come before men such as you, who have 

 won your spurs in the hard, practical fight of life thru the hard knocks 

 of experience. That is the real way and the right way to learn. In 

 this world-wide conflict, about the only way we can win the laurels 

 which belong to us is to fight for them, and that means to fight for them 

 on the fields iof our farms as well as on the field of battle. 



The subject assigned to me this morning is, "How About Those Brood 

 Sows?" The brood sow, as you know, is the foundation of the swine 

 pi^oduction business — the foundation of all swine business, as it were — 

 because in her originates the spark of life that later develops into that 

 250 or 300-pound hog which eventually produces the hams and bacon 

 and lard and ribs, and so on, for our tables. This means, then, that 

 if the brood sow is the foundatipn, she should be given the best kind 

 of treatment. It also means that she should first and primarily be 

 selected upon the right basis. We don't want to select fat hogs pri- 

 marily fit for market to go into our brood sow pen. Now, what shall 

 we pay attention to when we select our brood sow? First, I am going 

 to take up the question of treatment, because that is more important 

 than anything else. 



In the first place we want to have these sows healthy and free from 

 lice and mange. By healthy, we mean preferably that they should 

 be immunized against cholera, so that we will not carry the heavy risk 

 that we would naturally carry if these sows were susceptible to that 

 dreaded and terrible disease. When we realize that a new-born pig 

 costs us at present, just for feed alfone, at least a dollar, and that the 

 sow will bear on an avera7:e something like eight or nine, it makes a 

 total of eight or nine dollars wrapped up in this sow in addition to her 

 real value, which, if she weighs 300 pounds, and is worth $15 per cwt., 

 which is low, would be $45 plus $8, which is quite an investment pom- 

 pared to a number of years ago, when a brood sow was not worth more 

 than $20 to $35. Twenty dollars was a pretty high price five years 

 ago. 'We must take care of the lice, and the best remedy is simple 

 crude oil as it comes /out of the ground. It can be bought very cheaply; 

 it has not gone up in p^portion to other things and a liberal applica- 

 tion of tnat, winter or summer, is enough to drive the lice to their last 

 heaven. It is fine in winter because it does not contain water to evap- 

 orate and chill the sow. In summer, you can place it in your hog wal- 

 low in an old can, get your pigs up in a corner, and with an old broom 

 rid your sows of lice. Of qourse, you will get pretty well spattered up. 



Once in a while we are troubled with mange in hogs, and you can 

 notice it by the hard, scaly legs, and by the red patches which appear 

 on their under sides. What can we do for that? If you go to select 

 a bunch of sows, and find them scratching their bellies, you want to 



