Texas Got $6.2 Million of the Federal Hog Money. It Went to Nine Counties.

The federal announcement landed on Nov. 3: the Natural Resources Conservation Service was putting $51.9 million into 29 feral swine projects across 13 states through the Feral Swine Eradication and Control Pilot Program. Texas was named as one of the states. The Texas number was not in it.

It showed up Tuesday. Three projects led by the Texas State Soil and Water Conservation Board will receive a combined $6.2 million, according to reporting by the Texas Farm Bureau, covering Baylor, Brown, Coleman, Fannin, Haskell, Knox, Lamar, Runnels and Red River counties. About 900 agricultural producers are expected to be served, and the work is projected to touch nearly 2.7 million acres of working land over the next five years.

The county list is two clusters with a lot of empty map in between. Baylor, Haskell, Knox, Runnels, Coleman and Brown run through the Rolling Plains and into the western edge of Central Texas, cattle and small-grain country where rooting damage to pasture and hay ground is expensive to fix and cheap to ignore. Fannin, Lamar and Red River sit in the northeast, along the Sulphur and Red River bottoms. What the nine have in common is that they are rural, agricultural, and mostly not the places that make the news when hogs get into a subdivision.

Arithmetic on the award: $6.2 million across 2.7 million acres is about $2.30 per acre over the full five years. Texas's share is roughly 12 percent of the $51.9 million national pot, in a state that TPWD's wild pig reference estimates holds around 2.6 million of the animals — a figure drawn from the 1982-to-2016 population series the agency cites, not a fresh census.

The pilot program does not pay for a body count. It pairs removal work with help restoring the ground the hogs damaged, and participating landowners get technical assistance and educational resources on top of the operational support. The soil and water board will run it in partnership with NRCS, APHIS, local soil and water conservation districts, the Texas A&M Natural Resources Institute, AgriLife Extension and AgriLife Research, and the Texas Wildlife Damage Management Association.

"Feral swine continue to be a costly challenge for Texas agricultural producers, threatening both their livelihoods and the natural resources they work to protect," TSSWCB Executive Director Kendria Ray said in the announcement. "Through these projects, we look forward to providing landowners with the tools, resources and support needed to reduce feral swine populations and protect Texas working lands for generations to come."

The pilot has been running since 2020, and the national ledger attached to it is $92.9 million across 63 projects, more than 6,700 landowners and nearly 9 million acres. That is a program that has been measuring itself in acres assisted rather than hogs removed, which is a fair description of what a cost-share program can actually do. Trapping and aerial gunning are the removal tools; the acres and the producers are what the federal money buys participation with.

Worth keeping in view is how little of the map this covers. TPWD's reference material, drawing on the national series, notes that El Paso was the only Texas county feral swine had not occupied as of 2019, that the animals' northward range expansion accelerated from roughly 4 miles a year to 7.8 miles a year between 1982 and 2012, and that annual population growth has been estimated at 18 to 21 percent. Nine counties and five years is a test of whether coordinated, funded, landowner-level work changes anything on that trajectory — or whether it just moves the sounder across a fence line into the next conservation district.