ALFALFA FOR SWINE 219 



"Wliere barley or emmer is fed to hogs it is more 

 profitable to make the ration one-half corn than to feed 

 emmer or barley alone (Experiment No. 1 1). 



''The cost of gain is not a reliable criterion of profit. 

 -V cheap gain may be so slow as to be unprofitable. Time, 

 labor and investment should be considered when reckon- 

 ing profits. A full grain ration, though making the gain 

 more costly, usually gives greater profits, because of the 

 larger amount of business transacted in a given time 

 \uith a given number of hogs (Experiments Nos. i, 2 

 and 3). 



"Alfalfa may be fed with profit to growing or fatten- 

 ing hogs in almost any form so long as it does not make 

 up too large a proportion of the ration. \Mien cut 

 (chopped or chaffed) and fed as one-quarter of the ra- 

 tion with ground corn it materially reduced the cost of 

 gains and increased the profits." 



J. W. Robison of Butler county. Kansas, an exten- 

 sive grower of swine, says: "I had 65 sows about one 

 year old in 1907, of Berkshire and Poland-China blood, 

 which farrowed (their first litters) in April, May and 

 June, and these sows, with their pigs, were pastured in a 

 i6-acre alfalfa field from the middle of April to the 

 middle of October — six months. Some of the sows were 

 no doubt too young to give the best results as breeders. 

 During the six months mentioned alfalfa and plenty of 

 good water were all the sows and their pigs had as a 

 diet, except, of course, that the pigs had the milk of 

 their mothers, which, from appearances, was abundant. 

 The pigs ran with the sows all summer and weaned 

 themselves. The sows that farrowed (all but five or 



