CHAPTER VIII 



AGE, TIME AND SEASON FOB BREEDING 



I am a firm believer that for best results animals should not be 

 bred too young. Many breeders and farmers make a great mistake 

 in selecting the sows they wish to breed from the spring gilts each 

 year, also selecting from his own herd, or some other, a young boar 

 from a spring farrow, rather than carry over his older sows and 

 keeping a mature boar. I am positive that it is much better to use 

 only mature animals for breeding or those as nearly matured as 

 possible. We all know that a sow from two to five years old bred to 

 a boar of about the same age will produce stronger pigs with con- 

 siderably more size and weight at birth, than will a young gilt, 

 and yet many men each year purchase young bred gilts. 



I think the average litter also is larger in number from mature 

 animals. Furthermore, it has been my observation that the farmer 

 who each year selects young gilts and breeds to a young boar and 

 follows it up for a number of years, gradually reduces by this 

 process the stamina and vitality of his herd, causing them to be in 

 a condition to contract disease much easier than would older ani- 

 mals. For this reason I would advise that, for best results, nothing 

 be bred under one year old, which would bring the litter at about 

 sixteen months of age, at which time the animals are well along 

 toward maturity. After having started a sow to breeding and it is 

 found that she is a good producer, a good mother, careful of her 

 litter and a good suckler, by all means keep that sow as long as 

 she produces satisfactorily, and when you strike the best mating, 

 or one that proves highly satisfactory, continue to breed her to the 

 same boar, rather than take chances by changing. 



It is not necessary to do as we have done once or twice, to keep 

 a sow almost up to the limit of the average usefulness of produc- 

 tion, or you might get caught as we did, by having quite a number 

 of sows, that had been valuable breeders, but by holding too many 

 years, all quit breeding at once. It is very hard when one has a 

 sow that produces very high-class animals to quit using her until 

 he is obliged to. 



We bred a sow once in her 13th year and she produced one 

 pig; of course she had been a valuable sow or we would not have 

 retained her in the herd until that age. When she farrowed her 

 litter of only one pig we concluded it was time to stop, so we fat- 

 tened her and sold her to the local butcher. He remarked as he 

 looked her over that she was no spring chicken, and some weeks 

 after when I asked him how the old sow turned out, he said all right 

 in every way. 



Breeding Season. The season in which it is best for sows to 

 be bred depends entirely upon the part of the country in which 



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