food daily to enable it to sustain
life, i.e. to replace loss of tissue, to provide heat, progression,
etc., so that if a pig lives six months longer than is actually
necessary to enable it to manufacture a certain weight of meat, it will
have eaten to waste over 3 cwt. of good food.

A pig is like unto any other machine, it will produce the manufactured
article most cheaply when it is fully supplied with the most suitable
raw material. There is not the slightest doubt that the least costly
pork is that which is produced by the pig which spends its whole time in
the object of its existence, the manufacture of pork.

There is a further point of great importance. Wellnigh all those
materials which are used in the feeding of pigs contain the constituents
necessary for the building up of the frame and for the accumulation of
fat or, as it is commonly termed, the making of meat. Evidently nature
intended that the two operations should be carried on simultaneously.
Those constituents which are required in the building up of the frame
cannot be entirely used in the formation of fat, consequently if the
frame is first built up and then an attempt is made to lay on flesh, a
considerable portion of the building up constituents are simply wasted,
since the pig has no need for them and cannot make complete use of them.
They simply pass through the pig after taxing it to digest them, and are
wasted.

Opinions and practices with regard to pig fatting have changed very much
during the past half century, and especially so since the full effect of
the fearful war has been felt. Rather before the first-mentioned period,
the late Sir John Lawes, whose researches and experiments have been of
lasting benefit to agriculturists, undertook to carry out experiments in
connection with pig-breeding, and the result which appears to have
impressed itself most upon the writers of the day was that barley meal
was the best single food for the fatting of pigs. At the time named, our
importations of maize and of many other materials now used in stock and
especially pig-breeding were not of anything the magnitude of the period
prior to the war, still, it seems to be strange to the enlightened
pig-breeder of to-day that more serious endeavours should not have been
made to determine the value of a mixed diet for pigs, since this had
been proved to be beneficial and necessary in the case of human beings
whose organs are so very similar to that of the des