What excatly is a ' Corn hog economy '

[Komsomol]

After the death of Stalin, Nikita kruschev implemented a massive drive towards a consumerist economy, and in order to do so, he wanted the state farms to produce the same sort of ’ Corn hog economy’ That the US had sucessfully done, I was wondering, what excatly is a ‘Corn hog economy’

[toadspittle]

Try this:

http://www.macalester.edu/courses/Geog11/NAFarming.html

In the early nineteenth century, all roads west seemed to lead to southwestern Ohio. Three streams of immigrant farmers converged and fashioned what became the fundamental form of modern mixed farming. From New England and New York came farmers who specialized in wheat as a cash crop. Pennsylvanians brought mixed crop and livestock and the use of manure. Virginians brought corn and tobacco. These crops were grown in a rotation that featured corn rather than wheat. Corn was planted in a field the first year. Then it was followed by wheat or sometimes oats. The small grains were followed by clover or alfalfa. The crops were fed to animals and which in turn were driven to markets in the east. Hogs fit best in the system because they can digest corn efficiently and sows produced litters of several piglets each year so herds expand rapidly.…

The core areas of the Corn Belt were developed first along the rivers, where forests were available for fuel and the waterways provided easy access to markets. The heavy wet soils were avoided until economical ways to drain them were developed in the mid 19th century. The railroads opened up the prairie for corn farms and John Deere invented the self-scouring plowshare that enabled men to break the tough prairie sod. By the 1870s, a major interregional system of trade was developing. The farmers began to buy cattle raised in ranches on the western plain along with their own pigs and chickens. They grew corn for two years, then a year of oats and finally alfalfa. The fertile prairie soils, if supplemented with manure, could produce bountiful corn harvests. The crop rotation kept pests and weeds under control. The feed lot industry was made possible by the railroad connection to the west and the rapidly growing demand for meat in the industrial cities of the great lakes shore and the north coast seaboard…

So I’m guessing N.K. wanted to duplicate the profitable grow-corn-feed-it-to-hogs cycle of the U.S. (vs. the less-profitable wheat-based farming systems that were probably in use then) as well as implement in marginal Soviet farmlands some of the methods that American farmers used to transform the “desert” of the plains and prairies into a breadbasket.

[bare]

And I do believe you are refering to a Corn, Hog economy.

[sailor]

excatly

[CalMeacham]

Anthropologist Marvin Harris talks about the U.S. farm economy of corn and pigs at length in the chapter on pigs in his book Good to Eat (AKA The Sacred Cow and the Abominable Pig). He essentially agrees with what’s written above, arguing that pigs were extremely efficient at converting corn to pork, and also in helping transport the product to market – pigs can walk, but corn can’t (If you didn’t use pigs, he argues, the most efficient way to get your goods to market, in terms of dollars received minus transportation costs divided by your input, was to convert the corn to whiskey). Pigs and Corn, he says, “was a match made in heaven”, and in the 19th century Americans ate far more pork than beef.