Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1871 [PAGE 237]

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229 think who has had no experience in the matter of making exact divisions through a crop of growing grain. In the feeding of animate, I would be particular, as I mentioned, to have but a single animal in a pen. If I was going to feed twenty animals on a given feed, I would place each one in a pen by itself, and then would confine them to a single article of food. It would be an important matter to test the nature of corn meal, and corn prepared in different ways, as food for swine. The natural mode that would be suggested, conducting the experiment, would be to put a number of swine in a pen, and give four or five of them corn unground, four or five more of them cooked corn meal, and four or five more uncooked corn meal. But I apprehend the results of the experiment would be very unsatisfactory, to say the least. I would not like to place any very great amount of reliance on it. I would prefer to take the same number of hogs and put them in pens separately, and feed them with unground corn, and follow that up until I got the range of variation between the animals. Then I would take the same number and feed them corn meal, and if your arrangements are of sufficient extent, you may have these experiments going on at the same time. We have been feeding swine for a number of years, and have from ten to fifteen pens. We have fed nothing but raw meal thus far. The question is often asked, " W h y don't you feed cooked meal ?" I have not yet got the standard of comparison with raw meal, by which I can compare results with the cooked meal. There is a great range of variation in the animals, and there would be made a serious error in the experiment. This error has arisen very much from the force of circumstances. We could not get animals of uniform size and uniform ages to fill our farms, and for that reason, the attempt to do the two things which I have mentioned, is objectionable. There has been so much variation in this matter, that we need to have more experiments with cooked meal, and I would hardly know what to compare them with so far as raw meal is concerned. Notwithstanding the great variation, the rule I laid down holds almost uniformly; the greater increase of food consumed during the early stage, and the dissemination in the amount of fat, as the animals fatten. The animals for feeding should not only be of the same age, but they should be as near as possible of the same size, and of the same degree of fatness when they are put into the pen, in order to get a fair opportunity for comparison. I do not wish to take up too much time on this, because I would like to hear from others. I have but one other suggestion to make in regard to the methods of conducting experiments, and that is the'method