AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT STATION. 97 



days Lot 5 ate skimmed milk, corn meal and potatoes, and Lot 6 

 corn meal and potatoes, and the former animals made nearly twice 

 the growth of the latter, the respective nutritive ratios being 1 : 5.2 

 and 1 : 9.4. Lot 5 was then put on a ration of pea meal, corn 

 meal and potatoes, the materials of the food of Lot 6 remaining 

 unchanged. Here the ratios were 1 : 6.1 a-nd 1 : 9.3, and the gain 

 of Lot 5 receiving the more nitrogenous ration, was in 108 days 

 68 lbs. more than the growth of Lot 6. 



The pigs of Lots 5 and 6 were then not fed weighed rations for 

 several months, the intention being to fit them for the market. 

 During this time their food was milk, bran and meal. On the first 

 of October these animals had reached an average live weight of 

 275 lbs., and it was decided to "finish them off" so that they 

 would command the best market price. For this purpose it was 

 determined to test a full ration of corn meal against one more 

 nitrogenous. The food that was selected to combine with the corn 

 meal was gluten meal, which is really a corn meal residue from 

 which much of the starch has been extracted. This residue con- 

 tains about three times as large a percentage of protein as corn 

 meal. In this experiment the animals were given all they would 

 eat readily, with one lot of hogs the food consisting of one-third 

 gluten meal. In 77 days the gluten mebl and corn meal mixture 

 produced with two animals 57 lbs. more of fat hog than did the 

 corn meal alone. This result may be relied on as involving no 

 large error, for the experiment was so planned as to eliminate the 

 effect of individual differences in the experimental animals. It is 

 worthy of remark that the mixture of gluten meal and corn meal 

 seemed to be fully as favorable to the production of fat as the 

 clear corn meal. 



The lesson of these several feeding tests with swine is that not 

 only do nitrogenous foods exert a very favorable influence on 

 growth, but they seem also to materially increase the rate of gain 

 during the fattening periods. 



What shall we conclude in the light of these experiments? Do 

 these results encourage a farmer who has hogs to fatten, and who 

 must buy food for that purpose, to purchase corn meal exclusively, 

 simply because it costs less per pound than other concentrated 

 foods? Certainly if there is any place where exclusive corn meal 

 feeding is likely to prove satisfactory it is in the "ripening off" of 

 hogs, and yet we see that for this purpose 172 lbs. of gluten meal 

 not only took the place of that amount of corn meal but caused a 



