e economically and quickly and vastly
improved by following the system referred to above. The scarcity and
high market value of miller's offals and of meals such as used in the
past to be utilised to a great extent in the feeding of pigs, has
caused pig-keepers to seek for other foods to take their place. The
residuum from the crushing of palm nuts, cocoa-nuts, and ground nuts has
been most successfully used in connection with various forms of
vegetable food; even sows have reared good litters of pigs on about 2
lbs. of a mixture of the meals remaining from the extraction of the oil
from the nuts mentioned, with the addition of some form of vegetable
food. This last has comprised cooked potatoes, raw artichokes, mangolds,
kohl rabi, swedes, cabbages, etc., during the winter months, and grass,
lucerne, clover, vetches, cole seed, etc., during the summer months.
Fattening pigs will require a somewhat larger quantity of concentrated
food and a reduced amount of vegetable food. The pre-war belief that
sharps or middlings only was the most suitable food for sows with
litters and for newly weaned pigs has been somewhat modified. Whether or
not the quality and price of middlings will be restored after the war
and thus its use become general as of old, must be left, but it is
probable that in the future a certain proportion of the meals referred
to will continue to be used for both breeding and fattening pigs.

CHAPTER XV

PIG-FATTENING

If there be one task which is considered to be within the capacity of
any individual, it is that of feeding a pig. In the good old times, the
one thing needful was a good supply of barley meal, as much of this as
the pig could possibly eat was placed into its trough each day until the
pig was thought to be fat enough for slaughter. This was a very simple
and at the same time a very costly process and was looked upon as the
second of the two chief acts in the life of a pig. The first consisted
of building up a frame on which fat could be stored. Just why these two
processes were not combined has never been fully explained. One excuse
made for this uneconomical process is that our forbears must have
considered that there must be two distinct periods in the life of any
animal intended for the food of man, that in which the structure was
erected, and that in which the building was completely furnished with
the material--flesh--in a state which most nearly satisfied the
requirements or fa