The results of these periods of unprofitable feeding was to retard hog production, as the grower was discouraged from breeding during those periods. Hoover therefore decided that the maintenance of a proper relation between the price of corn and the price of hogs was the best method of assuring an increased production of pork. Furthermore, the violent fluctuations in the price of hogs tended to lift the price of the pork products to the consumer unduly, for at every new rise the stocks already in the warehouses over the whole country were marked up and the spread between the consumer and the producer thereby increased. A stabilization of the price of hogs was therefore as necessary for the protection of the consumer for the sake of a reduction of this spread as it was in the case of other foodstuffs. In order that the swine growers should have an opportunity to participate in the determination of what method would be most fair and effective in establishing this stabilization and stimulating production, a committee of leading producers was asked to investigate the whole matter. This committee made a report late in October, 1917, which, after setting out the situation in detail and calling attention to the imperative need of a stimulation of production, declared that although hog production for the ten years ending 1916 had been maintained on a ratio of 11.66 bushels of corn to 100 pounds of hog, there had been but little profit to the grower on this basis and that it would be desirable for the sake of stimulation to pay at least the equivalent of 13.33 bushels of corn per hundred pounds of average hog and, if possible, as much as 14.33 pounds. On this latter ratio the committee believed that production could be increased fifteen per cent above the normal. The Committee added an expression of its belief that "the best emergency method of immediately stabilizing the market and preventing the premature marketing of light unfinished pigs and breeding stock would be to establish a minimum emergency price for good to select hogs of sixteen dollars a hundred pounds on the Chicago market."