THIRD ANNUAL YEAR BOOK — PART VII. 443 



No other state in the union has been able to send a James Wilson 

 into the cabinet, no other state has an Ames Agricultural college and no 

 other state has a Beardshear nor a Curtiss. 



May we all love the business in which we are engaged, may we be 

 proud of our state and may we never dishonor nor forsake either one. 



SWINE BREEDING AS A PROFESSION. 



W. M. McFadden, West Liberty, Iowa. 



To have spoken of swine breeding a few years ago as a profession 

 would have caused something more than a smile of derision. Not so very 

 long ago the opinion prevailed that any man could be a farmer or stock 

 raiser and that those who had failed in other lines of work or business 

 might be depended upon to make more or less of a success at farming. 

 But ideas along this line have changed materially, brought about largely 

 by the agricultural colleges of the middle west. It has been demonstrated 

 that while it may not be quite so absolutely essential that a farmer or 

 stock raiser have a course of instruction as is required in some of the 

 professions, yet whatever measure of success an individual might be able 

 to obtain in conducting a farm, the success will be made much greater 

 if it is fortified by a proper course of instruction, now so easily obtained. 



So it happens that to speak of swine breeding as a profession sounds 

 much more appropriate than would have been the case some time ago. 

 The necessity for the most up-to-date ideas is recognized by the hundreds 

 of breeders who attend the various judging schools. Such meetings as 

 this of the Iowa swine breeders are only kept alive by the recognized need 

 for interchange of ideas as a means of posting up along the lines in 

 "hogology." 



There are two branches of the hog breeding business in which a 

 person must be well posted in order to be successful. The first and 

 most important is that of form. The score card has a great many sins to 

 answer for, and because some blunders and some things that might be 

 called by worse names have been made in the name of the score card, 

 a great many are inclined to say that it has done more harm than good. 

 It has become a generally admitted fact that there is a certain point in the 

 use of the score card by a breeder beyond which it is not wise to go, but 

 nothing that has yet been devised will so readily fix the proper type in 

 the mind of the breeder as the score card. There are a great many breed- 

 ers who do not know and never will know a really good hog when they 

 see it. There are those breeders that you can visit year after year and 

 note little or no improvement. They are usually a long ways from the 

 best standard of the breed they handle and do not realize how far from the 

 right standard they really are. This class of breeders frequently breed a 

 herd that has in it great uniformity, but uniformly poor ones is not the 

 best uniformity for a successful business. Unless a man can get a fixed 

 and definite idea of what the proper standard of the breed should be, he 



