THIRTEENTH ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART VIII 



469 



ter the dry lot with meat meal or tankage or some feed that will build 

 up will give cheaper gains and heavier gains, but from weaning time up 

 to a hundred and fifty or a hundred and seventy-five pounds you can pro- 

 duce gains more rapidly and more economically through the use of any 

 one of several forage crops than from dry lot feeding. Our experience 

 is that the heavier hogs do not do as well on forage crops You can get 

 faster daily gains on the larger animals in dry lot feeding. There are 

 two factors which I think are more important than anything else from 

 the standpoint of getting hogs ready for market. One is rapidity of 

 gains and the other is economy. Economy only is not enough because in 

 all hog feeding operations you all know that the hog is a hard animal 

 to do anything with when he is sick and the sooner you get the animal 

 ready for market, the better. Rapidity is an all important factor. 



"I have some results of experiments which have not yet been published 

 but will be published this fall in a bulletin on forage crops. These exper- 

 iments embrace the use of alfalfa, clover, rape, sweet clover, oats, peas 

 and rape; oats, clover and rape; blue grass and timothy; and winter rye. 

 Blue grass is permanent, alfalfa is somewhat permanent, clover usually 

 lasts two years, and the others are annual crops. We have tried to get 

 something that would answer the needs of every man. For a grain ra- 

 tion to feed with the alfalfa or whatever it might be we fed ear corn. 

 Several years ago we started in to find out the best method of preparing 

 corn for swine. We fed ear corn, soaked shelled corn, dry corn meal, 

 soaked corn meal, but in all of our experience we have found that pigs 

 up to two hundred pounds made heavier daily gains and more economical 

 gains on ear corn alone than any other manner. If that is true, there is 

 no need of going to the work of shelling corn or soaking and grinding it. 



"The experiments were on about four hundred head. It is not guess 

 work. It was on large numbers for three different years and in checked 

 lots. For pigs over two hundred pounds we found that soaked corn or 

 soaked corn meal gave cheaper gains. The shelling and soaking or grind- 

 ing seemed to appeal more to them. The ear corn was fed to the pigs 

 under two hundred pounds in the dry lots and every two or three weeks 

 the cobs were raked up and burned and the ashes were there for them to 

 eat. 



The details of infornaation with reference to these experiments are 

 given in the following table: 



