My thoroughbred calves have brought me an average price of $12 each at four to six weeks, sold to dairymen, and I am satisfied to do business in that way.  The nine milch cows which I bought to complete the herd cost, delivered at Four Oaks, $1012.

All the grain fed to cows, horses, and hogs, and a portion of that fed to chickens, is ground fine before feeding.  The grinding is done in the granary by a mill with a capacity of forty bushels an hour.  We make corn meal, corn and cob meal, and oatmeal enough for a week’s supply in a few hours.  All hay and straw is cut fine, before being fed, by a power cutter in the forage barn, and from thence is taken by teams in box racks to the feeding rooms, where it is wetted with hot water and mixed with the ground feed for the cows and horses, and steamed or cooked with the ground feed for the hogs and hens.

Alfalfa is the only hay used for the hens, and wonderfully good it is for them.  Besides feed for the hogs, we have to provide ashes, salt, and charcoal for them.  These three things are kept constantly before them in narrow troughs set so near the wall that they cannot get their feet into them.

We carefully save all wood ashes for the hogs and hens, and we burn our own charcoal in a pit in the wood lot.  Five cords of sound wood make an abundant supply for a year.  I think this side dish constantly before swine goes a long way toward keeping them healthy.  Clean pens, well-balanced and well-cooked food, pure water, and this medicine can be counted on to keep a growing and fattening herd healthy during its nine months of life.

It is claimed that it is unnatural and artificial to confine these young things within such narrow limits, and so it is; but the whole scheme is unnatural, if you please.  The pig is born to die, and to die quickly, for the profit and maintenance of man.  What could be more unnatural?  Would he be better reconciled to his fate after spending his nine months between field and sty?  I wot not.  The Chester White is an indolent fellow, and I suspect he loves his comfortable house, his cool stone porch, his back yard to dig in, his neighbors across the wire fence to gossip with, and his well-balanced, well-cooked food served under his own nose three times a day.  At least he looks content in his piggery, and grows faster and puts on more flesh in his 250 days than does his neighbor of the field.  If the hog’s profitable life were twice or thrice as long, I would advocate a wider liberty for the early part of it; but as it doesn’t pay to keep the animal after he is nine months old, the quickest way to bring him to perfection is the best.  One cannot afford to graze animals of any kind when one is trying to do intensive farming.  It is indirect, it is wasteful of space and energy, and it doesn’t force the highest product.  Grazing, as compared with soiling, may be economical of labor, but as I understand economics that is the one thing in which we do not wish to economize.