A PIG PROBLEM [To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] Sia,---I
read Sir W. Beach Thomas's notes each week with interest and pleasure. His remarks on " A Pig Problem " in the Spectator of the 6th inst. specially attracted my attention, probably owing to my having made the breeding of pigs a hobby for nearly seventy years, during which period I have won nearly two thousand five hundred prizes at the leading shows, and have exported breeding pigs to more than forty Colonies and foreign countries, the whole being of my own breeding.
The inference which many of your readers who are not closely connected with agriculture may draw from Sir W. Beach Thomas's comparison of the Danish and the British farmer's methods of pig management is likely not to be strictly fair to the breeders of pigs in this country. It must not be forgotten that our pig industry has grown up solely with a view to satisfy the needs and fancies of the various districts, the residents of which have been by no means free from local prejudices and taStes, whereas the present pig industry in Denmark has been built up during the past forty or more years mainly by the Danish Government to assist the dairy farmers in the profitable disposal of their dairy offals, which were then to a considerable extent unutilized.
In the eighties of the last century I shipped a number of Large White boars to Iielstebro, in Denmark. These
proved to be so satisfactory that the Danish Government sent Konsulent Peter Aug. Morkeberg to this country to inspect various herds of pigs, bacon factories, and markets, and to report. One of the results was a further visit of Mr. Morkeberg, the veterinary surgeon of the Royal Danish Agricultural Society, and a number of the managers of the bacon factories, to whom I sold many breeding pigs of the Holywell breed for the Danish Government, landowners, and the shareholders in the co-operative bacon factories.
Under the able superintendence of Mr. Morkeberg the Danish Government has established governmental breeding and experimental feeding farms and several score private breeding farms, so that the Danish farmers can now purchase breeding pigs from tested parents for at least a third of the cost of pedigree pigs in this country, which have probably been bred more for prize-winning than for commercial purposes. The Danish farmer breeds and fattens his pigs and conveys or sends them into the nearest factory, and thus saves the enormously heavy costs, risks, profits, and wastages which normally attend the transfer of fat pigs from the farm to the butchers and bacon curers, in which hundreds of dealers share. In Denmark everything con- nected with the pig industry is standardized. In England everything is left to chance.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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