SWINE HOUSING AND FATTENING. 975 



food, but in every case the labor and expense seemed to me to 

 outweigh any gain received from it. I still, however, accepted 

 as true the statement that one-third of the food could be saved 

 by cooking, and attributed my want of success to the fact that 

 I did not keep hogs enough to make it an object, and that fuel 

 was expensive, as my farm is without timber. Finally, I deter- 

 mined to investigate the matter more fully. On looking around 

 among my neighbors I could not find a single one who had 

 begun the practice of cooking food some years before but had 

 abandoned it. When asked why they were not cooking food for 

 their hogs the general reply was, "too much trouble." 



In 1877 Mr. Simon Emerick, an enterprising farmer of Mont- 

 gomery County, Ohio, determined to investigate the matter, and 

 entered into correspondence with a large number of farmers 

 living in ten different States, with a view to getting at the 

 truth of the matter. He found wonderful claims for the supe- 

 riority of cooked food from those who were new in the business 

 or who were interested in the sale of apparatus for cooking, 

 some claiming that a given amount of corn fed raw gave but 

 five pounds of pork, while the same amount cooked gave over 

 fourteen pounds, and when ground and cooked gave from six- 

 teen to eighteen pounds. Others stated that half the corn was 

 saved, and still others, one-third. 



Mr. Emerick kept up his investigation for several years, and 

 found that some of the most ardent advocates of cooking food 

 changed their minds. For example, a gentleman in Wisconsin 

 wrote in 1872 as follows: "I find by a test with the scales 

 that seventy-two pounds of ear corn steamed made twenty 

 pounds of pork ; the same amount fed raw made ten and a half 

 pounds. I sold at eight cents a pound, and this paid me 

 eighty-four cents for raw corn, and one dollar and sixty cents 

 for cooked." 



Seven years later the same man wrote Mr. Emerick : " I 

 have had considerable experience in cooking food for stock. I 

 do not consider it of any increased value for cattle, but think 

 that in warm weather or with warm pens in winter there is a 

 saving of about one-third the grain when fed to hogs, but the. 



