PIG FEED

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 19918, 13 August 1927, Page 22 (Supplement)

PIG FEED

VALUABLE CROPS ARTICHOKES AND GREEN MAIZE Local farmers are discussing the value of artichokes and green maize for pig-feeding. According to analysis, the feeding value of artichokes in the raw state is about equivalent of cooked potatoes, and if the former will give the same results as the latter, the saving in labour is at once apparent. But artichokes have the further advantage that they will grow and crop abundantly on almost any soil, and that they arc a very cheap crop to grow. After planting they require nothing more than hoeing between the rows to keep them clean, and they are no more difficult to harvest than potatoes. What is more, it docs not matter when they are harvested. Frost does not injure them, but rather improves them, and the plant is capable of standing any other sort of weather, be it an excess of drought or wet. No does the plant appear to be Hable to any serious disease like the potato. In any season it will bear a crop; in many years it will yield in quite extraordinary fashion. A well cultivated crop will yield a large percentage of plants that will produce as much as a gallon of tubers apiece. Artichokes may be planted at any time during the late winter or early spring. The land should be clean, and it should not have been recently manured. The best method of planting is to set the tubers in rows sufficiently wide apart to admit of horse-hoeing, the roots being 18 inches to 2 feet apart in the rows (states a writer in The Live Stock Journal). The tubers may be grown on the same ground several years in succession if need be, and if the smaller tubers arc left in the ground at digging time there is no need to replant each year. As an alternative, a patch may be planted each season and the pigs turned in to find the roots for themselves. They will do this better than anyone else, and if it be desired to clear the ground thoroughly of the crop, this is about the only way to do it. Many farmers grow maize for cattle but how many ever employ it for their pigs? There seems to be no reason why the plan of turning pigs in to eat off the green crop should not be adopted here with equal success. Pigs certainly do well on it in the States. The plants should not be allowed to get too high and coarse before being fed off, or cut for throwing over into the pens. A crop of green maize should be especially valuable for pig feeding in a dry season when green stuff is scarce and pastures arc dried up to nothing.