HOMESTEAD HOG PRODUCTION

Image Gallery Excellent Poland China boar which has good-qulity pigs and is a fine representative of his breed.

Excerpts fromPRACTICAL ANIMAL HUSBANDRYby Jack Widmer are reprinted by permission of Charles Scribner's Sons.
Copyright 1949 by Charles Scribner's Sons.

Back in 1949—before factory farming and the "pump 'em full of chemicals" school of agriculture blitzed the country—a fellow named Jack Widmer wrote a little book called PRACTICAL ANIMAL HUSBANDRY. Now that manual wasn't what you'd call completely exhaustive, the writing style wasn't the best and a few of the ideas it advanced-such as confining laying hens in cages—were later refined into the kind of automated farming that so many of us are fighting against these days.

Still, PRACTICAL ANIMAL HUSBANDRY contained a good deal of basic information that today's "homesteaders" all too often need and don't know where to find. I'm pleased, then, that the publisher of the book, Charles Scribner's Sons, has granted me permission to reprint excerpts from this out-of-print manual. I think that many of my readers will find the following information both interesting and informative.—MOTHER.

As meat animals, hogs make more rapid gains, for the feed consumed, than any other members of the home barnyard. Seven-month-old hogs weighing 220 pounds (an ideal butchering weight) are not at all unusual, and contrary to general belief, one need not live in a corn-producing area to be successful with porkers, either on a commercial scale, or for the production of excellent meat for the table. Then, too, the feeding of one or two pigs for home consumption eliminates the necessity of edible garbage removal, furnishes profitable animals for the consumption of skim milk, whey or buttermilk, and produces the fine hams, bacons and fresh cuts that have made pork the favorite meat of rural America.

As to feeds necessary for the finishing of hogs, all manner of grains, sorghums, peanuts, acorns, hay and permanent pastures are ideal and there are few farms, be they large or small, that do not waste enough garbage, milk products and roughage that would make the feeding of a limited number of pigs a profitable enterprise.

Despite many people's objections to the odors produced by the hog lot, there is no necessity for this obnoxious aroma, for hogs if given half a chance are fundamentally clean animals with most objectionable odors being the fault of man rather than that of the porkers themselves. Then too, expensive feeding arrangements are not at all necessary and if feeding utensils are kept clean, and if hogs are supplied with a reasonable amount of fresh bedding, they will be found no more objectionable than other members of the home barnyard.