FEEDING EXPERIMENTS WITH PIGS. 



PARTI 



G. H. WHITCHER. 



The work reported in this Bulletin was designed to show 

 something of the feeding or pork producing value of skim-milk, 

 a matter of no small importance in connection with dairy farm- 

 ing. Within our state to- day there are probably 100,000 cowsi, 

 producing 300,000,000 pounds of milk, of which about three- 

 fourths, or 225,000,000 pounds, is made into butter. Now, oa 

 an average we get not far from eighty per cent of the whole 

 milk as skim milk, consequently the annual quantity of skim- 

 milk that the farmers of New Hampshire have to dispose of is 

 180,000,000 pounds, and if this is worth twenty-five cents per 

 hundred it represents a value of $450,000. 



While the original plan of these experiments covered only 

 the financial side of the question, later it was found desirable to 

 conduct digestion experiments to determine just how much of 

 the food eaten was actually utilized by the pigs. This work was 

 put into the hands of the Station chemist. Prof, Morse, whose re- 

 port is to be found in Part II of this Bulletin, 



The six pigs selected for this work were bought of a neigh- 

 boring farmer, August 24, 1889, at which time they were six 

 weeks old. While of no particular breed, they evidently had a 

 good proportion of Chester White blood, and proved rapid grow- 

 ers and were remarkably uniform in shape and weight. 



August 24 each pig was marked and his weight recorded, 

 and at the same time they were divided into two lots as follows: 



No. of Pig. 123 



Lot I, live weight Aug. 24, 28 25^ 285^ Total, 82 



No. of Pig. 456 



Lot 2, live weight Aug, 24, 26 32^ 25 Total, 83^ 



During the preparatory period, from Aug. 24 to Sept. 3, 

 each lot received daily thirty pounds of skim-milk, and at the 



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