Hoghouse

There should be appended to the hoghouse an open yard for straw, litter, weeds, &c., which the hogs, during summer, will work into manure, and into which the dung is thrown from the pen. Hogs are subject to various diseases, particularly if shut up in a close pen during the time of fattening, which are often suddenly fatal. Prevention is here easier than cure; and many farmers prefer giving their hogs yardroom where they can root in the earth, which is deemed a preventive.

It is a long recognized fact that a greenhouse roof admits the maximum amount of sunshine, but it is only recently that the sunlit hoghouse has been actually put into use. It has been conceded by leading stockmen that the best hoghouse is the one admitting the most sunlight, but it remained for the agricultural engineers of the Iowa State College to demonstrate the practicability of the greenhouse type of roof for the hoghouse.

There is no building on the farm that needs ventilation any more than the type of hoghouse that is being built today. The pigs are not only suffering for fresh air but the temperature varies greatly, often getting too high, and the frost nuisance is worse in the hoghouse. We cannot expect to build a hoghouse warm, with walls and roof practically air tight, put aerators on top, and expect it to be ventilated.

One Amish farmer, confronted with the problem of scours in his hogs, handled the problem in the following way. After first trying to save as many animals as he could, he then discontinued raising them in the hoghouse and instead turned his chickens loose in that building. He noted that the disease did not bother the chickens and that the "chicken bugs seemed to destroy the hog bugs." After about a year when he turned the chickens out and once again began to raise hogs in the hoghouse, the animals were no longer bothered with scours.