No. 4.] SWINE BREEDING AND FEEDING. 203 



I plant squashes in every fourth row. I took a walk this 

 morning through your large market here, and saw the 

 immense amount of squashes piled up there. It. may seem 

 strange to you that I should raise them for hogs, but it is 

 so. I raise from fourteen to fifteen tons in my corn 

 fields for feeding purposes. I have a rotation of two 

 years, and follow corn with peas and small grain. I sow 

 clover with every bushel of grain. When the pigs are with 

 their dam I confine them to the stables until they are two 

 weeks old, but I let the sow go out every morning to take 

 exercise. Western men very often ask me, "How do you 

 get time to do this? Labor is too high with us." Men 

 very often set a high value upon their time, but they never 

 take account of the time they spend sitting in the grocery 

 store at the village. When all the pigs are three weeks 

 old, so that the older ones cannot steal from the younger ones 

 in nursing, I let them go to pasture. My farm is so arranged 

 that my fields are all accessible to my stable by a lane. 

 There is a brook that runs through the farm, which is lined 

 with blue-grass. I turn my pigs upon the blue-grass 

 first. Blue-grass is not good food for pigs after a certain 

 age ; when it becomes hard pigs refuse it, but when it is 

 young they like it, and it gives no abrupt change in 

 feeding. By turning them out early upon this short 

 grass, we do not have to contend with diarrhoea in the 

 pigs. This is not a small matter. The breeders present 

 here know what I am talking about. There are some men 

 who always want to feed something sour to a hog ; they 

 have an idea that a hog must have sour food, forgetting 

 all the time that by fermentation we reduce the feeding value 

 of the food, and especially that of milk. Where a great 

 abundance of sour food is fed to a sow, scours is quite likely 

 to set in, and when it once gets started in a herd it generally 

 goes from stable to stable until every sty is affected with it. 

 It is often caused by a sudden change of food. I give a sow 

 a tablespoonful of sulphur in milk or in some sweet swill 

 three days in succession. You will find that you can always 

 allay the disease in that way. Of course a sow should 

 have access to charcoal, ashes and salt. 



