Farmers talk solutions to wild deer, hog crisis

On August 8, a dozen furious farmers gathered at Clemson University’s Allendale extension campus to discuss strategies to rein in wild deer and hogs, who have become an existential threat to farmers in the ­region.

In the southeast, a pack of hungry deer or nonnative pigs can enter a farmer’s field and destroy dozens of acres of a farmer’s crop by morning. Depending on where the farm is and what crops are growing in a field, damage to farmers’ finances and crop yield will vary (in July, The People-Sentinel reported on the topic). No clear, cost-effective solution to the problem exists, and many of the farmers in attendance had lost tens of thousands of dollars in crop damage.

At the event, John Mayer, a wild pig research scientist at Clemson University, told the audience about new emerging threats from wild pig populations. One of these, Mayer said, is the African swine fever virus, a disease that cannot kill humans, but is lethal to pigs and is most prominent in eastern Europe.

“It’s popped up now in Haiti and the Dominican Republic,” Mayer said. “We’ve never been able to deal with disease issues in the wild pig population successfully. … If we ever get a pathogen like [that] it will impact the pork industry like you won’t believe. The impact will be hundreds of billions of dollars to our pork industry.”

There is no simple solution to wild pig populations. Mayer said that while hunting may seem like the solution, Texas has tried hunting its 2 million wild boars and killed under 100,000 in one year. Mayer described this effort as “not even putting a dent” in their population.

“There’s a lot of good research coming out that’s helping us understand this puzzle,” Mayer said. “With any invasive species, the more you know about them, the better your chances are of being able to deal with them.”

Wild pigs and deer are an environmental issue with economic effects. For McArthur Williams, an Allendale farmer, wild deer make his life as a farmer harder than it already is; Williams rents his land from a landowner, unlike most farmers, who own their land. As a result, Williams has to wait for the owner of his land to try to stop wild deer and pigs from munching on his crops.

“When you rent it out, you have to wait for hunters to come in and rely on them,” Williams said. “Sometimes they don’t ever show up. I’ve seen 27 deer in one little corner [of a field]. You go out the next day and see the damage, and they come along and take all the tops out of the soybeans, cotton, corn. It don’t make no difference. These things eat.”

A common frustration that was raised at the event by Williams and other farmers is the legal barriers to being able to hunt deer. In addition to needing deer tags, the deer hunting season only occurs for a few months of the year. Although deer season occurs during a time when farmers are growing, farmers cannot balance doing both farming and hunting, said farmer Sam Grubbs.

Noel Myers, a wild pig specialist at the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, led a presentation on the multiple types of wild pig traps that exist.

One type of trap, called a net trap, allows hungry pigs to enter to get bait, but then prevents the pigs from leaving. Another type of trap displayed at the event was a cage with a door that would snap shut on unsuspecting pigs.

A new, more expensive type of trap is the wireless drop door trap, which has a camera that can be connected to a mobile phone. When pigs walk over the trap’s net, the farmer gets a notification on their phone and can push a button to close the net. However, Myers said, this trap can cost upwards of $20,000, far out of reach for farmers whose finances are already spread thin.

Farmers like Williams and Grubbs say the lack of public awareness surrounding the issue is one of the biggest barriers to solving it.

“To this day it amazes me when I talk to people in South Carolina and you say ‘we got wild hogs in the state’ and they look at you like you’re crazy,” Mayer said. “Back in the 1990s, when the pig bomb was going off across the entire United States, we were trying to tell people that this is a problem but they were laughing at us.”