Part 9 (2/2)
”I have purchased twenty three-year-old Holstein cows, in calf to advanced registry bulls, and they are to be delivered to me March 10. I shall want you to go and fetch them. I also bought a young bull from the same herd, but not from the same breeding. These twenty-one animals will cost, by the time they get here, $2200. I shall give the bull to my neighbor Jackson. He will be proud to have it, and I shall be relieved of the care of it. Be good to your neighbor, Thompson, if by so doing you can increase the effectiveness of the factory farm. We will start the dairy with twenty thoroughbreds and six scrubs. I shall probably buy and sell from time to time; but of one thing I am certain: if a cow cannot make our standard, she goes to the butcher, be she mongrel or thoroughbred. What do you think of Judson as a probable dairyman?”
”I shouldn't wonder if he would do first-rate. He's a quiet fellow, and cows like that. He has those roans tagging him all over the place; and if a horse likes a man, it's because he's nice and quiet in his ways. I notice that he can milk a cow quicker than the other men, and it ain't because he don't milk dry--I sneaked after him twice. The cow just gives down for him better than for the others.”
CHAPTER XXI
THE RAZORBACK
We have now launched three of the four princ.i.p.al 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 gra.s.s, 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 owners.h.i.+p. 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 owners.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sion 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 nouris.h.i.+ng 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 cla.s.sical.
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 ma.s.s, 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 epizootic 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.
My pigs are several hundred yards from the public roads, and my neighbor, Jackson, has planted a young orchard on his land to the north of my hog lots, and permits no hogs in this planting. I have thus secured practical isolation. I have rarely sent swine to fairs or stock shows. In the few instances in which I have broken this rule I have sold the stock shown, never returning it to Four Oaks.
Isolation, cleanliness, good food, good water, and a constant supply of ashes, charcoal, and salt, have kept my herd (thus far) from those dreadfully fatal diseases that destroy so many swine. If I can keep the specific micro-organism that causes hog-cholera off my place, I need not fear the disease. The same is true of swine plague. These diseases are of bacterial origin, and are communicated by the transference of bacteria from the infected to the non-infected. I propose to keep my healthy herd as far removed as possible from all sources of infection. I have carried these precautions so far that I am often scoffed at. I require my swineherd, when returning from a fair or a stock show, to take a full bath and to disinfect his clothing before stepping into the pig-house. This may seem an unnecessary refinement in precautionary measures, but I do not think so. It has served me well: no case of cholera or plague has shown itself at Four Oaks.
What would I do if disease should appear? I do not know. I think, however, that I should fight it as hard as possible at close quarters, killing the seriously ill, and burning all bodies. After the scourge had pa.s.sed I would dispose of all stock as best I could, and then burn the entire plant (fences and all), plough deep, cover the land white as snow with lime, leave it until spring, plough again, and sow to oats. During the following summer I would rebuild my plant and start afresh. A whole year would be lost, and some good buildings, but I think it would pay in the end. There would be no safety for the herd while a single colony of cholera or plague bacteria was harbored on the place; and while neither might, for years, appear in virulent form, yet there would be constant small losses and constant anxiety. One cannot afford either of these annoyances, and it is usually wise to take radical measures. If we apply sound business rules to farm management, we shall at least deserve success.
I chose to keep thoroughbred swine for the reason that all the standard varieties are reasonably certain to breed true to a type which, in each breed, is as near pork-making perfection as the widest experience can make it. Most of our good hogs are bred from English or Chinese stock.
Modifications by climate, care, crossing, and wise selection have procured a number of excellent varieties, which are distinct enough to warrant separate names, but which are nearly equal as pork-makers.
In color one could choose between black, black and white, and white and red. I wanted white swine; not because they are better than swine of other colors, for I do not think they are, but for aesthetic reasons. My poultry was to be white, and white predominated in my cows; why should not my swine be white also,--or as white as their habits would permit? I am told on all sides that the black hog is the hardiest, that it fattens easier, and that for these reasons it is a better all-round hog. This may be true, but I am content with my white ones. When some neighbor takes a better bunch of hogs to market, or gets a better price for them, than I do, I may be persuaded to think as he talks. Thus far I have sold close to the top of the market, and my hogs are never left over.
Perhaps my hogs eat more than those of my neighbors. I hope they do, for they weigh more, on a ”weight for age” scale, and I do not think they are ”air crammed,” for ”you cannot fatten capons so.” I am more than satisfied with my Chester Whites. They have given me a fine profit each year, and I should be ungrateful if I did not speak them fair.
I wished to get the hog industry started on a liberal scale, and scoured the country, by letter, for the necessary animals. I found it difficult to get just what I wanted. Perhaps I wanted too much. This is what I asked for: A registered young sow due to farrow her second litter in March or April. By dint of much correspondence and a considerable outlay of money, I finally secured nineteen animals that answered the requirements. I got them in twos and threes from scattered sources, and they cost an average price of $31 per head delivered at Four Oaks. A young boar, bred in the purple, cost $27. My foundation herd of Chester Whites thus cost me $614,--too much for an economical start; but, again, I was in a hurry.
The hogs began to arrive in February, and were put into temporary quarters pending the building of the house for the brood sows, which house must now be described.
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