methods and results of the control lies the matter, all
ready for the competent pen, for an epic of the wheat, the fit third
part of the trilogy that Frank Norris began with "The Octopus" and "The
Pit" and had, at the call of death, to leave unwritten.

Another phase of Hoover's food regulatory activity, concerning which
there was, and still continues to be, much discussion, is that of his
attempt to insure a stimulated production of hogs by a stabilized price
which should well reward the grower and yet not lead to such an
exorbitant cost to the consumer as would have been a dangerous hardship
to our own people and an unfair hold-up of our associates in the war.
Next to wheat, pork products were the American food supplies most
necessary to the Allies.

Hogs are a corn product. The cost of production of hogs depends rather
more upon the price of corn than upon any other factor. Investigation
showed that owing to the violent fluctuations in demand for corn and
hogs during the war, there had been five periods between the beginning
of the war and September, 1917, in which it had been more profitable to
sell corn than to feed it to swine at the price of hogs then
prevailing, while there were only three periods when the reverse was
true. In the preceding eight years there had been only two periods in
which the direct sale of corn was more profitable than feeding it to
swine.

The results of these periods of unprofitable feeding was to retard hog
production, as the grower was discouraged from breeding during those
periods. Hoover therefore decided that the maintenance of a proper
relation between the price of corn and the price of hogs was the best
method of assuring an increased production of pork. Furthermore, the
violent fluctuations in the price of hogs tended to lift the price of
the pork products to the consumer unduly, for at every new rise the
stocks already in the warehouses over the whole country were marked up
and the spread between the consumer and the producer thereby increased.
A stabilization of the price of hogs was therefore as necessary for the
protection of the consumer for the sake of a reduction of this spread as
it was in the case of other foodstuffs.

In order that the swine growers should have an opportunity to
participate in the determination of what method would be most fair and
effective in establishing this stabilization and stimulating production,
a committee of leading producers was asked to