HARRIS ON THE PIG. 129 



THE PIG AS A MANURE AND MEAT MAKING ANIMAL. 



BY JOSEPH HARRIS, OF ROCHESTER, N. Y. 



My old friend, the Deacon, thinks it will not pay to feed 

 "merchantable" grain to hogs. And while I have repeatedly 

 disputed this position and given facts and figures to show that 

 it frequently happens that we can better afford to feed our 

 corn and even wheat to well-bred pigs, rather than to sell it 

 at the market price, still it must be admitted that, as a rule, 

 the true office of pigs, on a farm, is to use up and economize 

 food which would otherwise be wasted or sold at alow figure. 



Keeping the idea steadily in view, we shall find in practice 

 that to fully utilize this low-priced or refuse food, it is often 

 necessary to feed more or less of what the Deacon calls 

 "merchantable" grain; or even, as in my own case, to go 

 into the market and buy the food best suited to our wants. 

 Now while it may be true that the actual increase of the pork 

 produced by this purchased food will give us little or no 

 profit, still we can so manage that the purchased food and 

 the food which would otherwise be wasted, taken together, 

 will afford very satisfactory results. 



For instance, it may not pay a farmer to shut up a pig in 

 summer and feed him nothing but corn-meal and bran. But 

 if he has refuse food, or if the pig runs in an orchard, or in a 

 clover pasture, and thus picks up sufficient cheap food to 

 sustain the vital functions, then Ave can well afford to feed all 

 the merchantable grain that the pig will convert into pork. 



I feel that it is not necessary to enter into details, but I may 

 allude to another way by which we can utilize our cheap or 

 refuse food, and at the same time feed merchantable grain to 

 great advantage. We can keep breeding sows during six or 

 eight months of the year at a cheap rate. If a good sow has 

 ten pigs, she will furnish them all the food they need till three 

 weeks old, and for five or six weeks longer, if a good mother ; 

 the sow will take from her own body forty or fifty pounds of 

 flesh and fat previously stored up for this purpose, and stored 

 up from cheap food. With this, and with a little cooked corn 

 or oat meal and skimmed milk, the pigs will grow rapidly 

 till, say two months old. They are then weaned. Up to this 

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