In short, without hogs, farming could not go on; and it never has gone on in any country in the world. The hogs are the great stay of the whole concern. They are much in small space; they make no show, as flocks and herds do, but without them the cultivation of the land would be a poor, a miserably barren concern.

Willian Cobbett was the British Contrary Farmer of the early 19th century. His classic book, “Cottage Economy”, has long been a favorite of mine, not only for the ideas presented, but also for the flair with which Cobbett presents them. Thankfully, Cobbett’s masterpiece is now available on Google books.

The book is a quick read - a riotous, opinionated, spirited romp through home economics, politics and health, beginning with a treatise on why the British “cottager” must at all cost put down their teapots and return to drinking home-brewed beer for breakfast! But Cobbett has a lot to say about pigs as well, and I’m not talking about the other white meat.

The cottager’s pig should be bought in the spring, or late in winter; and being then four months old, he will be a year old before killing time; for, it should always be borne in mind, that this age is required in order to insure the greatest quantity of meat from a given quantity of food. If a hog be more than a year old, he is the better for it. The flesh is more solid and more nutritious than that of a young hog, much in the same degree that the mutton of a full mouthed wether is better than that of a younger wether. The pork or bacon of young hogs, even if fatted on corn, is very apt to boil out, as they call it; that is to say come out of the pot smaller in bulk than it goes in. When you begin to fat, do it by degrees, especially in the case of hogs under a year old. If you feed high all at once, the hog is apt to surfeit, and then a great loss of food takes place. Peas, or barley meal, is the food; the latter rather the best and does the work quicker. Make him quite fat by all means. The last bushel, even if he sit as he eats, is the most profitable. If he can walk two hundred yards at a time, he is not well fatted. Lean bacon is the most wasteful thing that any family can use. In short, it is uneatable, except by drunkards who want something to stimulate their sickly appetite. The man who cannot live on solid fat bacon, well fed and well cured, wants the sweet sauce of labour or is fit for the hospital. But then it must be bacon, the effect of barley or peas, not beans and not of whey, potatoes or messes of any kind. It is frequently said, and I know that even farmers say it, that bacon thus made costs more than it is worth! Why do they take care to have it then? They know better. They know well that it is the very cheapest they can have and they who look at both ends and both sides of every cost would as soon think of shooting their hogs as of fatting them on messes; that is to say for their own use, however willing they might now and then be to regale the Londoners with a bit of potatoe pork.

OK, he may be a little over the top, but nonetheless he does have some good points. The best pork is from large, older, well-finished pigs, not the overgrown piglets the industry serves up. Also, peas and barley are the best diet to finish pigs on. Our pigs are currently eating this mixture of peas and barley in addition to hay and any pasture they can still scrounge up in December. No potatoe pork for our customers. And, oh yeah, all of our pigs can walk 200 yards.

Cobbett also points out, correctly methinks, that pretty much all of societies ills stem from country children not appreciating the value of good sweet lard. See if you can follow his argument:

Country children are badly brought up if they do not like sweet lard spread upon bread as we spread butter. Many a score hunch of this sort have I eaten and I never knew what poverty was. I have eaten it for luncheon at the houses of good substantial farmers in France and Flanders. I am not now frequently so hungry as I ought to be but I should think it no hardship to eat sweet lard instead of butter. But now a days the labourers and especially the female part of them have fallen into the taste of niceness in food and finery in dress; a quarter of a belly full and rags are the consequence. The food of their choice is high priced so that for the greater part of their time they are half starved. The dress of their choice is showy amd flimsy, so that to day they are ladies and to morrow ragged as sheep with the scab. But has not nature made the country girls as pretty as ladies? Oh, yes! (bless their rosy cheeks and white teeth!) and a great deal prettier, too! But, are they less pretty, when their dress is plain and substantial, and when the natural presumption is, that they have smocks as well as gowns, than they are when drawn off in the frail fabric of Sir Robert Peel, “where taudry colours strive with dirty white,” exciting violent suspicions, that all is not as it ought to be nearer the skin, and calling up a train of ideas extremely hostile to that sort of feeling which every lass innocently and commendably wishes to awaken in her male beholders? Are they prettiest when they come through the wet and dirt safe and neat; or, when their draggled dress is plastered to their backs by a shower of rain? However, the fault has not been theirs, nor that of their parents. It is the system of managing the affairs of the nation. This system has made all flashy and false and has put all things out of their place. Pomposity, bombast, hyperbole, redundancy and obscurity both in speaking and in writing; mock delicacy in manners; mock liberality, mock humanity, and mock religion. Pitt’s false money, Peel’s flimsy dresses, Wilberforce’s potatoe diet, Castlereagh and Mackintosh’s oratory, Walter Scott’s poems, Walter’s and Stoddart’s paragraphs with all the bad taste and baseness and hypocrisy which they spread over this country; all have arisen, grown, branched out, bloomed and borne together; and we are now beginning to taste of their fruit. But, as the fat of the adder is, as is said, the antidote to its sting; so in the Son of the great worker of Spinning Jennies, we have, thanks to the Proctors and Doctors of Oxford, the author of that Bill, before which this false, this flashy, this flimsy, this rotten system will dissolve as one of his father’s pasted calicoes does at the sight of the washing tub.

Um, so, I guess make your kids eat their lard and like it.