I860.] 



THE SOUTHERN PLANTER. 



689 



man, in his Fourth Report of the Agricul- 

 ture of Massachusetts, gives the results of 

 some of his experiments and conclusions 

 drawn therefrom, and says : 



"A peck of Indian meal, taking up as 

 much water as it would contain, gave a ket- 

 tle nearly full of pudding; when half, a 

 bushel of meal imperfectly prepared gave a 

 little more. This seems to demonstrate the 

 great advantage of cooked food, both as it 

 respects its increase of bulk and the im- 

 provement of its nutritive properties/' 



Long continued cooking, and increase of 

 bulk, he thought, added much to the nutri- 

 tive qualities of the meal, and I presume 

 most farmers are of the same opinion. 



But Joseph How, Esq., of Methuen, 

 Mass., arrives at a different conclusion from 

 the above. In the Essex Co. Transactions, 

 1848, he gives the details of feeding five 

 pigs from the 15th of August to the 28th 

 of November, feeding alternately on cooked 

 and uncooked food, changing the food 

 several times during the trial, and weighing 

 the pigs at each change of feed, and he 

 says : 



"That there should be no mistake in re- 

 gard to the above experiments, I have fed 

 them nearly ail the time myself, and weighed 

 them myself, and the result was in favor of 

 uncooked meal" 



In Flint's Agriculture of Massachusetts, 

 1855, Albert Montague of Sunderland, 

 gives the result of an experiment in feeding 

 swine with cooked and uncooked food : 



" The meal cooked and uncooked was 

 alike, one-half corn, one-fourth oats, and 

 one-fourth broom seed. I cooked the meal 

 by stirring it into boiling water, and letting 

 it boil from thirty to forty minutes, by which 

 time it would swell to three times its capaci- 

 ty before boiling. The pigs selected were 

 all doing well upon uncooked food. 1 put 

 four in two pens, side by side, weighed 

 them four different times; kept a correct ac- 

 count of their weight at each weighing, and 

 weighed the same hour of the day each time. 

 I fed two of them with cooked meal four 

 weeks, and they were not so heavy by eleven 

 pounds as at the time I commenced. They 

 were weighed twice during the time. They 

 eat four bushels of meal. I fed eight and 

 one-fourth bushels of meal, uncooked, to the 

 others, and they gained eighty-two pounds. 

 I then fed the last named pigs three and 

 one-half bushels of cooked meal, and in 

 44 



three weeks they lost four pounds. I fed 

 "five and a half bushels of raw meal to those 

 first fed on cooked food, and in three weeks 

 they gained sixty-one pounds. I think this 

 proves conclusively that we cannot fatten 

 swine with profit on cooked food. Had my 

 pigs never had any meal but what had been 

 cooked, I presume they might have improved 

 a little upon it; but taking them from un- 

 cooked and putting them upon cooked food, 

 they did not eat quite so freely at first as 

 they otherwise might — hence a loss. 



"But when we remember that even a hog 

 cannot be so hoggish as to more than fill 

 himself, and one quart of cooked meal 

 would fill as much as three quarts of un- 

 cooked meal, we can easily see that a 

 pig fed on uncooked meal would eat 

 nearly three, or quite three, times the value 

 of meal compared with the one fed on 

 cooked food — providing cooking did not in- 

 crease the value one-third, then a pig would 

 not be able to eat enough to fatten readily, 

 and it must take a certain amount of food to 

 support life, whether cooked or uncooked. 

 Taking swine from uncooked food, in both 

 cases, they lost in weight, but, on the other 

 hand, taking them from cooked food and 

 giving them uncooked food, there was a fair 

 gain." 



A certain amount of food is required to* 

 keep up the warmth of the animal, and re- 

 pair the daily waste going on in the system. 

 A healthy ox, horse or hog, can be so fed a* 

 neither to gain or lose ten pounds in weight; 

 for weeks together. Or if the same animals 

 are judiciously and full fed with, nutritious- 

 food, they will largely gain, both in fat and 

 muscle, because a portion of the flod not 

 needed for keeping up the temperature of 

 the body, and repairing the daily waste of 

 the system, will be assimilated and converted' 

 into " fat, bone and muscle." Now, if one: 

 quart of meal, by being cooked, assumes the 

 bulk of three quarts of raw meal, it is possi- 

 ble that Mr. Montague's pigs could not eat 

 a sufficient quantity of cooked to any more 

 than keep up their weight, or not quite that, 

 while being fed on the cooked food. But 

 when fed upon the raw meal, in the same 

 bulk, they obtained about three times the 

 nutriment. How much of the uncooked 

 meal was assimilated, of course no one can 

 tell, but according to Mr. M's statement, 

 enough to produce a "fair gain." 



Some over two years ago there was pub- 

 lished account of Mr. S. M. Clay's experir 



