THE RAZORBACK
We have now launched three of the four principal industries of our factory farm. The fourth is perhaps the most important of all, if a single member of a group of mutually dependent industries can have this distinction. There is no question that the farmer's best friend is the hog. He will do more for him and ask less of him than any other animal. All he asks is to be born. That is enough for this non-ruminant quadruped, who can find his living in the earth, the roadside ditch, or the forest, and who, out of a supply of grass, roots, or mast, can furnish ham and bacon to the king's taste and the poor man's maintenance. The half-wild razorback, with never a clutch of corn to his back, gives abundant food to the mountaineer over whose forest he ranges. The cropped or slit ear is the only evidence of human care or human ownership. He lives the life of a wild beast, and in the autumn he dies the death of a wild beast; while his flesh, made rich with juices of acorns, beechnuts, and other sweet masts, nourishes a man whose only exercise of ownership is slaughter. The hog that can make his own living, run like a deer, and drink out of a jug, has done more for the pioneer and the backwoodsman than any other animal.
Take this semi-wild beast away from his wild haunts, give him food and care, and he will double his gifts. Add a hundred generations of careful selection, until his form is so changed that it is beyond recognition, and again the product will be doubled. The spirit of swine is not changed by civilization or good breeding; such as it was on that day when the herd "ran down a steep place and was drowned in the sea," such it is to-day. A fixed determination to have its own way dominated the creature then, and a pig-headed desire to be the greatest food-producing machine in the world is its ruling passion now. That the hog has succeeded in this is beyond question; for no other food animal can increase its own weight one hundred and fifty fold in the first eight months of its life.
All over the world there is a growing fondness for swine flesh, and the ever increasing supply doesn't outrun the demand. Since the dispersion of the tribes of Israel there has been no persistent effort to depopularize this wonderful food maker. Pig has more often been the food of the poor than of the rich, but now rich and poor alike do it honor. Old Ben Jonson said:—
"Now pig is meat, and a meat that is nourishing and may be desired, and consequently eaten: it may be eaten; yea, very exceedingly well eaten."
Hundreds have praised the rasher of ham, and thousands the flitch of bacon; it took the stroke of but one pen to make roast pig classical.
The pig of to-day is so unlike his distant progenitor that he would not be recognized; if by any chance he were recognized, it would be only with a grunt of scorn for his unwieldy shape and his unenterprising spirit. Gone are the fleet legs, great head, bulky snout, terrible jaws, warlike tusks, open nostrils, flapping ears, gaunt flanks, and racing sides; and with these has gone everything that told of strength, freedom, and wild life. In their place has come a cuboidal mass, twice as long as it is broad or high, with a place in front for mouth and eyes, and a foolish-looking leg under each corner. A mighty fall from "freedom's lofty heights," but a wonderfully improved machine. The modern hog is to his progenitor as the man with the steam-hammer to the man with the stone-hammer,—infinitely more useful, though not so free.
It is not easy to overestimate the value of swine to the general farmer; but to the factory farmer they are indispensable. They furnish a profitable market for much that could not be sold, and they turn this waste material into a surprising lot of money in a marvellously short time. A pig should reach his market before he is nine months old. From the time he is new-born until he is 250 days old, he should gain at least one pound a day, which means five cents, in ordinary times. During this time he has eaten, of things which might possibly have been sold, perhaps five dollars' worth. At 250 days, with a gain of one pound a day, he is worth, one year with another, $12.50. This is putting it too low for my market, but it gives a profit of not less than $6 a head after paying freight and commissions. It is, then, only a question of how many to keep and how to keep them. To answer the first half of this question I would say, Keep just as many as you can keep well. It never pays to keep stock on half rations of food or care, and pigs are not exceptions. In answering the other half of the question, how to keep them, I shall have to go into details of the first building of a piggery at Four Oaks.
As in the case of the hens, I determined to start clean. Hogs had been kept on the farm for years, and, so far as I could learn, there had been no epizoötic disease. The swine had had free range most of the time, and the specimens which I bought were healthy and as well grown as could be expected. They were not what I wanted, either in breed or in development, so they had been disposed of, all but two. These I now consigned to the tender care of the butcher, and ordered the sty in which they had been kept to be burned.
I had planned to devote lot No. 2 to a piggery. There are five acres in this lot, and I thought it large enough to keep four or five hundred pigs of all sizes in good health and good condition for forcing. Some of the swine, not intended for market, would have more liberty; but close confinement in clean pens and small runs was to be the rule. To crowd hogs in this way, and at the same time to keep them free from disease, would require special vigilance. The ordinary diseases that come from damp and draughts could be fended off by carefully constructed buildings. Cleanliness and wholesome food ought to do much, and isolation should accomplish the rest. I have established a perfect quarantine about my hog lot, and it has never been broken. After the first invoices of swine in the winter and spring of 1896, no hog, young or old, has entered my piggery, save by the way of a sixty-day quarantine in the wood lot, and very few by that way.