of making a little butter (for which I shall get scarcely anything) my
calves are starved, & die, it may be compared to stopping the spigot,
and opening the faucit." Evidently the making of butter was almost
totally discontinued, for in his last instructions, completed only a few
days before his death, he wrote: "And It is hoped and will be expected,
that more effectual measures will be pursued to make butter another
year; for it is almost beyond belief, that from 101 Cows actually
reported on a late enumeration of the Cattle, that I am obliged to _buy
butter_ for the use of my family."

In his later years he became somewhat interested in the best methods of
feeding cattle and once suggested that the experiment be tried of
fattening one bullock on potatoes, another on corn, and a third on a
mixture of both, "keeping an exact account of the time they are fatting,
and what is eaten of each, and of hay, by the different steers; that a
judgment may be formed of the best and least expensive mode of stall
feeding beef for market, or for my own use."

During his early farming operations his swine probably differed little
if at all from the razor-backs of his neighbors. They ranged half wild
in the woods in summer and he once expressed the opinion that fully half
the pigs raised were stolen by the slaves, who loved roast pork fully as
well as did their master. In the fall the shoats were shut up to fatten.
More than a hundred were required each year to furnish meat for the
people on the estate; the average weight was usually less than one
hundred forty pounds. Farmers in the Middle West would to-day have their
Poland Chinas or Durocs of the same age weighing two hundred fifty to
three hundred pounds. Still the smallness of Washington's animals does
not necessarily indicate such bad management as may at first glance
appear. Until of considerable size the pigs practically made their own
living, eating roots and mast in the woods, and they did not require
much grain except during fattening time. And, after all, as the story
has it, "what's time to a hawg?"

In his later years he seems to have taken more interest in his pigs. By
1786 he had decided that when fattening they ought to be put into
closed pens with a plank floor, a roof, running water and good troughs.
A visitor to Mount Vernon in 1798 says that he had "about 150 of the
Guinea kind, with short legs and hollow back," so it is evident that he
was experimenting with ne