Georgia Raffles Hog Traps While Farm Losses Keep Climbing

Georgia’s Hog Down Awards Program is raffling 20 whole-sounder hog traps a year, each worth about $3,500, against feral pigs the state prices at $150 million in annual damage.

The Wildlife Resources Division opened a second cycle on July 1, 2026 that runs through June 30, 2027. Entrants have to kill 10 hogs before they can sit in a drawing for the trap that takes a whole family group at once.

The Drawing Runs Four Times a Year

The Division will award 20 hog traps each year, five per quarter, to Georgia residents drawn at random from eligible entries. Each prize is a whole-sounder feral hog trap valued at about $3,500, funded through the Georgia General Assembly. Hardware for a full cycle comes to $70,000 if every trap is valued at that figure.

Whole-sounder trapping means taking an entire family group in one set, which the Division calls the most efficient way to pull hogs off a property. The 2025 prizes were Pig Brig net-style traps, the kind built to hold a group in a single night. Wildlife Resources Division staff said the agency is not tied to one maker, so the brand can change.

Drawings sit in the first week of October, January, April, and July. The October drawing covers entries from July 1 through September 30. Winners must complete two monitoring surveys, one after the trap arrives and one a year later. Rules can change, and the page says so.

HOG DOWN DRAWING CALENDAR

Charlie Killmaster, the Division’s deer and feral hog biologist, said the point is to reward people already doing control, and to do it in a way that makes them more effective later. A $3,500 trap is that later.

Kill 10 Hogs First to Enter the Drawing

The entry bar is a body count. A resident has to lawfully kill 10 feral hogs in Georgia during the quarter, then upload photos that carry time, date, and location. Road-kills, spoiled carcasses, and live hogs do not count. Screenshots are a bad idea because they often strip the stamp the judges need.

Ten more hogs means another entry. Kill 100, and the form allows 10 entries. A person can still win only one trap in a given quarter. Entries close at noon the day after the quarter ends. The form asks for a name, the counties of take, the method and date, and a DNR customer number or hog control permit number. Entrants certify the hogs were killed lawfully and agree to a polygraph if asked.

WHO CAN AND CANNOT ENTER

• Residents only: Non-residents are barred, even if the hogs died in Georgia.
• Private control: DNR staff, Georgia Association of Conservation Districts hog-control custodians, and any government employee taking hogs on official duty cannot enter, and neither can their immediate family.
• Proof rules: Duplicate photos, shared photos, and incomplete packets are disqualified.
• After the win: The trap arrives with two surveys attached, not a cash bounty.

That last line is the design. A per-hog payout can tempt someone to leave sows and young on the ground as seed for next season. A raffle for a trap that swallows a whole sounder pays off only if the winner then uses the tool. Killmaster has said the state still lacks a clear picture of hog numbers because they are classed as pests, with no harvest reporting.

Drones Counted $107,694 Missing From 14 Fields

Justine Smith, then a University of Georgia doctoral student at the Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources, flew unmanned aircraft over 14 center-pivot fields in southwestern Georgia in 2021 and 2022. The fields averaged 52 hectares and were planted in corn, peanuts, and cotton. A classifier scored damage at 82.1 percent accuracy against human observers. Damage did not differ by crop or year and averaged 1.4 percent of the sampled ground.

When that rate was spread across the 3,517-hectare study area, about 8,690 acres, the paper in Crop Protection put the lost crop value at $107,694 a year across 3,517 hectares. Smith said that figure is direct crop value only, and that it leaves out wages, equipment, and replanting. She also said the total came in below what the team expected, because crews had already been shooting and trapping in the months before planting, leaving a younger, smaller hog age mix that eats less.

Co-authors were Warnell’s Michael Mengak and Roger Lowe, and Mike Conner of the Jones Center at Ichauway. The flights sat inside the Albany Areal Feral Swine Control and Eradication Pilot Project, led by the Flint River Soil and Water Conservation District with USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service. Smith’s line on the money is blunt.

That’s a lot of money for these farmers, and that’s also just based on direct crop value. That’s not talking about how much money was lost in worker wages, equipment or other things you can’t yet quantify. And this is just one small area of an entire region in the entire country.

Justine Smith, doctoral student, University of Georgia Warnell School

Statewide, UGA has long used a much larger working number. A 2020 Warnell partnership note put feral swine at more than $150 million in damage each year to farms and natural areas, and the Division still uses that scale. Hogs now show up in all 159 Georgia counties.

THE DAMAGE IN NUMBERS

• Southwest study area: $107,694 a year in direct crop value on 3,517 hectares of corn, cotton, and peanuts.
• Georgia working estimate: $150 million a year in farm and habitat damage, the figure DNR still cites.
• United States: APHIS puts a floor of $3.4 billion in annual U.S. damages, with about $2.5 billion of that in the farm sector alone.
• Where eradication stuck: 12 states have cleared feral swine since 2014, which Georgia has not.

Pigs uproot seed after planting, tramp young plants, and chew irrigation gear. They also hit ground-nesting birds, tear up wetlands, and compete with deer and turkey for mast. Dr. Tina Johannsen, assistant chief of the Division’s Game Management Section, has said hogs are bad news for nearly every game species in the state, worse for declining ground-nesting birds and sensitive plants, and devastating when they hit a crop field.

Why Shooting a Few Hogs Often Backfires

Night hunts with thermal scopes feel like progress because something dies. The problem is the pigs that leave. UGA Extension in Lincoln County puts it plainly: shooting is not very effective for long-term management, because it takes a few animals from a sounder and teaches the rest to avoid bait. Every hog that walks away is free to breed. One leftover pig, the same guidance says, can put about 24 young on the ground in the next 12 to 14 months.

That is why the leftover hog is the expensive hog. A sounder that gets shot at becomes trap-shy, and the next bait pile sits empty while the group shifts onto a neighbor’s peanuts. Operators who actually clear fields wait until every pig on the camera is inside a corral or a drop net, then shut the gate from a phone. Take 11 of 12 and the free animal rebuilds the group.

Ted Will, director of the Wildlife Resources Division, drew the same line when the raffle launched.

If you talk to almost any landowner, regardless of acreage size, I bet they can tell you a story about the destructive nature of feral hogs on their property and how they regret not taking action sooner and more often against them. And, while hunting is an effective way to remove small numbers of hogs, whole sounder trapping is your best bet to make a dent in the actual population on your property. You can remove much greater numbers of animals at a time, and at less effort.

Ted Will, director, Georgia DNR Wildlife Resources Division

Killmaster has told growers the baiting window is winter, when natural food is thin and hogs come to corn. After spring green-up, and once crops are in the ground, they are hard to pull into a trap. The raffle still asks people to shoot 10 hogs in whatever season they can, then hopes the winners spend the following year doing the slower work.

212 Entries and More Than 2,000 Hogs

The first drawing showed how many people were already killing pigs without a trap in the shed. On October 20, 2025, the Wildlife Resources Division said the opening quarter produced 212 successful entries and more than 2,000 feral hogs taken off the landscape. At 10 hogs per entry, 212 packets represent at least 2,120 animals, which matches the Division’s round number.

The five October 2025 winners were Eric Forehand, Jack Green, Taylor Childers, Mark Patterson, and Cecil (Daniel) Richardson. A February 6, 2026 update named the next five as David Stevens, Canton Moore, Daniel Richardson, Jason McGovern, and Daniel Brown. The program allows a win only once per quarter, so a name that returns in a later drawing is a second, separate prize.

THE FIRST YEAR ON THE GROUND

1. July 1, 2025: The Hog Down Awards Program opens as a one-year pilot.
2. October 20, 2025: DNR posts the first winners and cites 212 entries with more than 2,000 hogs removed.
3. December 31, 2025: The second quarter closes; packets are due by noon on January 1.
4. February 6, 2026: DNR names the next five trap winners and opens the January-March window.
5. July 1, 2026: The Division extends the raffle through June 30, 2027.

Those 2,000-plus hogs were taken to earn a ticket, mostly by hunting. The traps go to five people. The other 207 packets from the first quarter went home with a photo album and the same rifle they walked in with. If the conversion works, some of those hunters buy or borrow a corral anyway. If it does not, the state has paid for 20 nets and collected a pile of geotagged carcass pictures.

After the Veto, Control Still Runs on a Raffle

The same General Assembly that put trap money in the Hog Down budget also moved a hunting bill. House Bill 946, signed by Gov. Brian Kemp, drops the special permit for trapping feral hogs on private land so long as the animals are killed on site, allows hunting from motorized vehicles on private property and private roads, and authorizes drones to locate hogs. Killmaster had spent years, he said, stripping rules off hog control. HB 946 finished a lot of that work.

The money did not follow. In the FY 2027 budget Kemp line-item vetoed a $1 million public-private hog-management pilot and a $200,000 wild-pig eradication program, $1.2 million in all. He described a structural deficit of about $1 billion and said he did not want to leave a mess for the next governor. Nick Atwood, an Atlanta volunteer with the group Rooting for Pigs, had written the governor in April arguing that bounty-style programs fail at wildlife control. Hog Down is not a bounty, but it is now the public-facing state prize for private hog work after those larger lines died.

Smith’s own study sat inside a federal eradication pilot that already had crews on the ground. She warned that the damage number would have been higher without that pressure, and that farm country needs more people doing removal, not fewer. “You can’t take your foot off the pedal,” she said. The raffle keeps a foot on the pedal for 20 landowners a year. It does not replace the crews the veto removed.

The Trap Comes With Two Monitoring Surveys

Because Georgia does not require hog harvest reports, the surveys attached to the prize are one of the few times DNR can ask a private trapper what the net actually caught. Winners fill out one form when the trap arrives and another a year later. That is a thin data stream, 20 people, but it is more than the blank space Killmaster described when he said pest status means no reporting.

The second cycle is already open. Packets for July 1 through September 30, 2026 feed the October drawing. The same 10-hog bar, the same five traps, and the same two surveys apply. Feral swine have been on this landscape since the 1500s, a mix of escaped domestic pigs and Eurasian boar brought in for sport, and they reproduce faster than any other mammal of their size. Twelve other states have pushed them out since 2014. Georgia is trying to teach 20 landowners a year to catch a whole sounder, after asking them to shoot 10 first, and after cutting $1.2 million that would have paid for something larger than a raffle.