https://www.ajc.com/news/georgia-ne...b-damageyear/BTCMZKYFCRD2NHQZIRNBTDWXS4/

By JANET McCONNAUGHEY, Associated Press
5 hours ago
Eight years into a U.S. program to control damage from feral pigs, the invasive animals are still a multibillion-dollar plague on farmers, wildlife and the environment
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Eight years into a U.S. program to control damage from feral pigs, the invasive animals with big appetites and snouts that uproot anything that smells good are still a multibillion-dollar plague on farmers, wildlife and the environment.

These prolific hogs gone wild have been wiped out in 11 of the 41 states where they were reported in 2014 or 2015, and there are fewer in parts of the other 30.

But despite more than $100 million in federal money, an estimated 6 million to 9 million feral swine still ravage the landscape nationwide. They tear up planted fields, wallowing out huge bare depressions. They out-eat deer and turkeys — and also eat turkey eggs and even fawns. They carry parasites and disease and pollute streams and rivers with their feces.

Total U.S. damages are estimated at a minimum $2.5 billion a year.

Adam McLendon, whose family farms about 8,000 acres (3,200 hectares) of peanuts, corn and cotton in several counties in southwestern Georgia, estimates feral pigs have cost them more than $100,000 a year for the past 15 years.

That’s about what one of Mississippi’s two levee boards pays each year to trap and kill feral hogs and to repair damage from their rooting, commissioner Hank Burdine estimated. “That is nominal compared to what we would have if we didn’t take care of it and had a flood,” he added.

Near the Red River in north Texas, hogs are so hard on corn that Layne Chapman and his neighbors no longer even try to grow it.

“I can remember the first day someone called me and said, ‘You’ve got a pig in your wheat field,’ and I said, ‘No we don’t have pigs.’ That was in 2006,” Chapman said. He stopped planting corn in 2016.

The animals root out rows of freshly planted peanuts and corn, leaving huge ruts that must be smoothed before the field can be replanted -- weeks after the best planting time. Hogs return to cornfields when the crop is ripening, trampling stalks, taking bites out of ears and wallowing to cool their sweatless bodies.

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The story continues in the link, if y'all are interested. A lengthy and expensive war.