Mr. Evans: Can the pecan be used as a forage crop for pigs?
Professor Smith: I don't think we are willing to let him have them.
Mr. Evans: Would a pig eat them?
Professor Smith: Observations show that the pig will eat them if you give him a chance; he will eat with great gusto the hickory nuts and a grown hog will also crack black walnuts; the pecan he simply grinds up. I suggested the pig as a way out of the problem of overproduction; the pig wants the products when we don't.
Mr. Storrs: I come from a country where we grow the pig on corn, and it is hard for me to believe that he will get fat on acorns and chestnuts.
Mr. Lee: I also would like to ask whether a hog will get fat on acorns. I had an experience this fall; a man on my farm had some pigs and he kept them in a pen and fed them corn. I was going to begin to feed my hogs, but I had a woods and I said let them eat the acorns. At the end of a month they had eaten the acorns but they were not as fat as they had been at the beginning. They had worked so hard to get the acorns that they had worked off all the fat.
Professor Smith: There are two hundred thousand hogs on the job in the federal forests today. The Portugese pig in the spring is a lamentable looking object. The method is to keep him alive until acorns get ripe and they count on a pig multiplying himself one hundred to two hundred per cent in the short season from the beginning of September to the first of the year. They keep him ordinarily eighteen months; they carry the spring or fall pigs through one winter, and at the beginning of the fattening season a pig that weighs fifty or sixty pounds is counted on, in the short time when acorns can be picked up, to jump up to one hundred and fifty or two hundred pounds. There is much evidence on both sides of the Atlantic to the effect that acorns fatten hogs if the supply is good.
PRESENT STATE OF THE CHESTNUT BLIGHT
J. Franklin Collins, Washington, D. C.