Destructive swine

Jared Sylvester looks over the field and shakes his head in disgust.
The 25-acre field had been prepared for planting crops in March but now the longtime rice and crawfish farmer will have to go back and start from scratch.
Why does Sylvester have to start over? Because herds of feral hogs have torn up not only the 25-acre field he is standing in but an additional 25 acres.
“It looks like the hog problem is back and worse than ever,” said Sylvester, who farms nearly 100 acres of land in St. Landry and Avoyelles Parishes. “Ask any farmer about wild hogs and they will tell you it is very frustrating. It is hard enough to make a living farming as it is but to have hog damage makes it that much more difficult.”
Farmers from all across Louisiana, including Evangeline Parish, have been dealing with the nuisance that is wild hogs for more than a decade.
The feral swine, which can grow anywhere between 150-600 pounds, are one of the most invasive and destructive species in the world, and experts estimate that there are roughly half a million feral hogs in the state.
“It has been a wide spread problem for quite a few years,” LSU AgCenter Extension Agent for Evangeline Parish Todd Fontenot said. “It has affected rice producers to corn producers and everyone in between. Several home owners are also having problems with them.”
“They are tearing up the crops in the field and doing a lot of destruction,” said Don Morein, whose family farms around the Ville Platte area. “They will wipe out a couple of acres here and a couple of acres there.”
In addition, an economist with the Louisiana State University AgCenter estimated that more than $30 million in damages was done to crops on state farms in 2013 alone.
“The pig damage a few years ago was so bad that it was causing me to lose money,” Sylvester said. “It was getting worse and worse. I talked to my landlord and I told him that I like farming your land but I could possibly go bankrupt if we don’t do something about the hogs.”
Sylvester, like many other farmers across the state, began hunting and trapping the hogs as a way to combat or reduce the animal’s destruction.
“It got to the point that we didn’t have to shoot the hogs anymore or even trap them anymore,” Sylvester said.
The past few years Sylvester hasn’t had to trap or shoot the feral hogs but now they are back rooting for food (worms, acorns, eggs and even fawns) along the roadways of the fields while trouncing through the actual fields, making them unsuitable for planting. Sylvester estimates that damage done in his fields were probably done by a herd of 20 to 30 hogs.
“This field was already fixed and ready to plant,” Sylvester said. “Now I can’t plant it this way. Now I have to go spend money on fixing it for it to be ready to plant again and it is not a quick fix.”
Rice and soybean farmer Kurt Sittig, who works land south and east of Eunice, has been dealing with feral hogs this year.
“Last year they affected my neighbor more than me but this past crop I had a lot of damage,” said Sittig, who tries to hunt the feral hogs year round. “We couldn’t keep them out. In a 70-acre field, we were off about six barrels to an acre.
“Right now they are already in my second crop and they have done damage. We have killed six hogs in the last three weeks.”
In addition to the damage they do on crops they also carry numerous diseases such as brucellosis, leptospirosis, salmonellosis, toxoplasmosis, sarcoptic mange, Escherichia coli-related illness and trichinosis.
Feral hogs are difficult to get eradicate for a number of reasons.
With the exception of a rare alligator encounter, the prolific animals that roam Louisiana have no rival predatory species. This allows the hog offspring to grow to maturity. A feral sow for example can have up to 10 piglets per litter and can produce two litters per year.
“They have no natural enemies,” Morein added. “The only enemy they have is man so they are not afraid of anything. They just go where they want.”
The other issue with combating feral hogs is the fact that they are mainly a nomadic animal, meaning that they are constantly on the move.
“Sometimes you can put enough pressure on them that they will move away but the problem is that they come back,” Fontenot said.
Many farmers use all types of traps too but their effectiveness is minimal at best.
“We put out traps and you might catch a few with that but then they get wise to them,” Morein said. “We even hunt them at night but you can only get so many. It almost doesn’t do much good.”
A new method of wiping out feral hogs is using sodium nitrite, which is more toxic to pigs than people.
Australia and New Zealand both use the method in trying to eliminate the feral hog problem but the method is yet to be approved by the USDA.
So farmers like Sylvester must prepare to once again protect their livelihood anyway they can.
“They are going to be back when it is planted,” said Sylvester, who is planning on using scare guns to keep the hogs at bay. “They will be back and they are going to tear up this field again unless we do something.”