SIR,—The letter of your correspondent, Mr. Thomas Lodge, puts me
in mind of a time when the economics of pig-rearing in America were apparently not so simple as he imagines them to be. On August 18th, 1934, the following letter appeared in The Commercial and Financial Chronicle:— " Dear Sir,—A friend of mine in New England has a neighbour who has received a Government check for $1,000 this year for not raising hogs. So my friend now wants to go into the business himself, he not being very prosperous just now ; he says, in fact, that the idea appeals to him very strongly. Of course, he will need a hired man, and that is where I come in. I write to you as to your opinion of the best kind of farm not to raise hogs on, the best strain 9f hogs not to raise, and how best to keep an inventory of hogs you are not raising. Also, do you think capital could be raised by issuance of a non-hog raising gold bond ?
" The friend who got the thousand dollars got it for not raising 500 hogs. Now, we figure we might easily not raise 1,500 or 2,000 hogs, so you see the possible profits are only limited by the number of hogs we do not raise. "The other fellow has been raising hogs for 40 years and never made more than $400 in any one year. Kind of pathetic, isn't it, to think how he wasted his life raising hogs when he could have made so much more by• not raising them ? "
I am, Sir, your obedient servant, COLIN MCFADYEAN. 112 Regent's Park Road,
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