Feral Hog Damage Assessment Provides Deeper Understanding in Three States

The Problem

Feral swine — the land-damaging, disease-carrying wild hogs that roam throughout the country — cause millions of dollars in damages every year in the United States. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, feral hogs cause an estimated $1.5 billion in economic damages annually across the United States. The Arkansas Department of Agriculture estimates feral hogs cause about $19 million in damage in Arkansas annually.

To help manage feral hogs in the U.S., the USDA develops damage reports containing data about crop damages. But other land use types, like forestlands and pasturelands, have not been heavily investigated. Understanding the economic impacts of feral hogs is necessary to help drive policy decisions and show the importance of feral hog control efforts.

The Work

Nana Tian, a forest economics researcher for the Arkansas Forest Resources Center, partnered with Jianbang Gan, professor in the Department of Ecology and Conservation Biology at Texas A&M University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and Gordon Holley, professor in the School of Agricultural Sciences and Forestry at Louisiana Tech University, to develop a damage assessment survey aimed at private landowners in the three states.

The researchers obtained 361 survey responses from Arkansas, 319 from Louisiana and 226 from east Texas for an average valid response rate of 22.9 percent for the three states combined. The survey collected data on the estimated damage from feral swine to croplands, forestlands and pasturelands by the acre.

The Results

The survey estimates feral swine damages over five years across all of Arkansas and Louisiana and 38 counties in east Texas. The average amount of land owned by those surveyed was 200 acres.

Forestland and timberland losses were estimated at $17 per acre in both Arkansas and Louisiana and $12 per acre in east Texas for the five-year period.

The survey estimates that landowners’ average agricultural cropland damage was $28 per acre in both Arkansas and Louisiana and approximately $25 per acre in east Texas. The most reported feral swine damage to agricultural crops was to corn, soybeans, rice, wheat, hay, silage and forage crops.

The reported damage to pastureland was very similar in all three states at $11 per acre.

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The Value

The 2021 survey provides a broader and deeper understanding of rural landowners’ perceptions of feral swine damage, which can inform regionwide control measures. The work also provides insights for understanding feral swine damage in the region and could be used to inform future incentive-based policies that would encourage landowners to manage or control the invasive species more actively.

The study provides guidance in designing and implementing more effective management strategies for feral swine, which is a mobile invasive species and requires a collective effort to keep their populations in check. The data from this study shows the importance of wide-scale control needs.

“Feral swine control methods for individual landowners are not working at scale because of their fast breeding rates and mobility,” Gordon Holley at Louisiana Tech University said. “It has to be a collective effort to keep their populations in check, and the data from this study is imperative to show the importance of wide-scale control needs.”

About the Researcher