300 SWINE IN AMERICA 



PROGRESS IN FEEDING KNOWLEDGE 



In the three or four decades ending with the year 

 1908 a variety of new ideas as to fattening swine has 

 come to be accepted, and practices strongly approved of 

 formerly, such as cooking feed, have been carefully 

 tested and abandoned in the interest of economy or for 

 other suflicient reason, while new feeds and new methods 

 have won established places on their merits or been cast 

 out as wanting. The main principles of breeding have 

 been established longer, and changes in them in recent 

 years have not been so notable as in feeding and fatten- 

 ing. The work of the state experiment stations has been 

 especially progressive since 1898, when it was stimulated 

 by the publication of Prof. W. A. Henry's incomparable 

 handbook on ''Feeds and Feeding," in which he felt 

 compelled to remark that "no extended work has yet 

 been done in this country on the influence of feeds on 

 pork, and for the present we must l)e guided by the 

 statements of foreign observers." Since that time 

 much experimentation in swine feeding has been carried 

 on at the stations in different states. 



No animal on the farm is better adapted to turning 

 good feed quickly into marketable meat than the hog, 

 and none can better repay, from a market standpoint, a 

 discriminating system of feeding. This is particularly 

 true as to first costs, for the hog is by nature planned to 

 utilize the least expensive feeds and will manufacture into 

 toothsome pork much that might otherwise be reckoned 

 of little value, if not waste. In any phase of farm 

 economy the hog is a feature, and his proper feeding 



