SWINEHOUSING AND FATTENING. 987 



" To learn the value of sour milk for feeding pigs, I weighed 

 three pure-bred Berkshire pigs, about seven weeks old, and fed 

 them for ten days. They weighed one hundred and four pounds. 

 I fed them five hundred and twenty pounds of sour milk, and then 

 weighed them again. They had gained thirty-five and one-half 

 pounds, showing that less than fifteen pounds of milk had made 

 a pound of live weight of pork. I was surprised to find so large 

 a gain in the weight of the pigs for so small an amount of milk." 



In my judgment, milk fed in connection with other food 

 would, by increasing its digestibility and making it more palat- 

 able, be worth much more than it would when fed alone. A 

 slop made with one gallon of milk to eight or ten of bran, meal, 

 and water will be eaten in larger quantities and will be less 

 likely to produce indigestion than any slop that can be made 

 from meal and water alone, and our object in fattening a pig is, 

 not to see how cheaply we can keep him, but how can we get 

 him to eat and digest the most feed. 



While there can be no question that the cheapest pork can 

 be made by feeding good spring pigs for a fall market, it is ob- 

 vious that this system can not be adopted universally, for sev- 

 eral reasons : 1st. The market demands more or less hogs at all 

 seasons of the year. 2d. The cattle feeder wants thrifty stock 

 hogs to run with his cattle in winter. 3d. It is often the case 

 that from unusually bad weather, or some other cause beyond 

 the control of the farmer, he loses his spring pigs, and must 

 breed for a second litter or do without hogs ; or in cases where 

 the farmer has adopted the plan of getting two litters a year 

 from his mature sows. 4th. On farms where large numbers of 

 hogs are kept it is difficult, if not impossible, to take such care 

 of the pigs that all can be profitably made ready for market the 

 first fall, and with many farmers who wish to clover their hogs 

 through the summer it is not desirable. 



On many farms both systems of feeding might be followed. 

 The sows could be bred to come in early in March, and the best 

 and thriftiest of these pigs fed for a December market, and the 

 lighter pigs and the September litters fed to be sold at an earlier 

 period the next year. 



