176 THE FARM. 



into Avhicli ho may ignorantly run— but which may be easily avoided— which 

 have caused the death of pigs by the million. The first is overfeeding the 

 BOW with rich, heat-producing feed. I think there is no one cause that has 

 occasioned so much loss as this. Make it an invariable rule to feed sparingly 

 of com for the first week. A failure to pay close attention to the matter of 

 diet at this time will often result in fever, which dries up the milk, the in- 

 sufficiency of which actually starves the pigs to death. When the result is 

 not 80 bad as this, the sow loses appetite, runs down rapidly in flesh, and 

 although the pigs live they do not thrive, and before weaning the mother is 

 a skeleton. For the first week feed house slops and bran, with but one ear 

 of corn at a feed, and then increase gradually, and by the end of the second 

 week you can feed as heavily as you please. The second danger to young 

 pigs is that they become diseased for want of exercise. It the sow is kept in 

 a close pen and proves to be a good suckler, it is often the case that in two 

 or three weeks the pigs get so fat as to die. Many a farmer, ^vith a valuable 

 litter of pigs shut up in a close pen, has seen them die one after the other 

 until the litter disappeared, and yet he had no idea -what was the matter. 

 Lay it down, then, as a second rale in pig raising, that young pigs,must have 

 exercise. 



Still another important thing is a clean bed. If allowed to sleep in dust 

 they are likely to die of thumps, and if in a wet place or a manure pile, they 

 become mangy, or contract colds and die. Biit we will suppose that the 

 farmer is wise enough to guard against the dangers I have spoken of, and 

 has brought the litter safely to the age of four weeks, with the mother in 

 good condition, and having a good appetite. It is now time to begin to pre- 

 pare the pigs for weaning. Make a pen near where you feed the sow, 

 and arrange it so that the pigs can go in and out at pleasure, but let it not 

 be accessible to the sow, and begin feeding with milk and soaked corn. The 

 quantity must be very small at first, and only what they will eat clean. In- 

 crease gi-adually, and by the time they are eight weeks old they will be eat- 

 ing enough so that they can be weaned without checking their growth. If, 

 as is often the case, there are in the litter two or three pigs that are not quite 

 up to the average, it will be good, both for them and the sows, to let theiu 

 run with the mother a week or two longer than the remainder of the Httcr. 

 For four months after weaning feed liberally. No matter whether your pigs 

 are to be kept for breeders, fattened the first fall, or wintered over to 

 pastured the next summer and fed the second autumn, the treatment sho^ 

 be the same. Do not aim to make them fat, but get all the developmenf 

 bone and muscle you can. The food should not be corn exclusively, for| 

 want more of the flesh-formers, and they should have the run of past 

 and be fed on bran slop with the corn. Exercise, a varied diet, with 

 bulky food and not too much corn, will give a profitable hog. 



Overfeeding StocU. — Overfeeding an animal is worse in its etfects than 

 a spare diet. A great many more young animals are checked iu theirj 

 growth, and otherwise injured, by overfeeding than by a deficiency of fo " 

 In illustration of this statement, a correspondent tells the following stor 

 his own experience: 



A rather opinionated and willful hired man, who requires the closest 

 watching in lecding the stock, in defiance of strict orders, gave some Berk- 

 shire pigs some cotton seed meal in their feed, in the expectation that if 

 would help them to grow. Their feed had been slummed milk, with a quart 

 of wheat middUngs to the pailfiil. Considerable more cotton seed meal was 



