SKIM-MILK IN DENMARK

Wairarapa Times-Age, 1 August 1939, Page 3

SKIM-MILK IN DENMARK

USE FOR BACON PRODUCTION. The secretary of the Union of Danish Co-operative Factories states that the annual production of skim-milk in Denmark is approximately 850,000,000 gallons. Most milk is separated at factories. At the utmost, 30 per cent of this quantity is used for house-keeping purposes and for cheesemaking, but not less than 600,000,000 gallons are given to the pigs. Reserving 170,000,000 gallons for. sows and sucking pigs, about 430,000.000 gallons of skim milk annually, or 10 gallons a pig, are available for bacon pigs—that is to say, an average of at least 10 gallons of milk for each pig from the time it is weaned till it is delivered to the bacon factory. It is therefore obvious that practically every Danish pig breeder is feeding bacon pigs on milk. Close to the larger towns where cream and milk are in heavy demand, pigs are not fed on milk. The number of such farms, however, is—since the introduction of the regulation of pig production in Denmark in 1932-33 —not more than about 1000, a small number in comparison to the total of more than 200.000 Danish pig breeders. In this connection, the secretary states, it is quite possible to obtain a satisfactory increase of weight by feeding bacon pigs on cereal food and a suitable mixture of protein-rich food, such as blood and bone meal, etc., but a finer meat is produced when pigs are fed on cereals and skimmed milk than when they arc fed on cereals and protein-rich concentrates.