Arkansas Game and Fish honored six partners at the 2026 Natural State Private Lands Expo, using the event as the annual public marker for a private-lands habitat portfolio that has grown fast enough to reshape where and how the state’s hunters find deer, turkey, quail, and waterfowl.
Six honorees is a small number for an event that reports hundreds of attendees at each Expo. What the agency does with that small number, though, is set the annual benchmark for what a landowner in Arkansas can accomplish in partnership with the state — timber-stand improvement work that turns closed-canopy pine into brood habitat, native warm-season grass conversion on retired pasture, wetland reflooding for waterfowl and shorebirds, and stream-mile buffer plantings that push cool water into smallmouth and warm-water fisheries.
The scale behind the awards is what matters for hunters. The state’s Conservation Incentive Program has positively influenced nearly 100,000 acres of Arkansas private land in the program’s first full year, 2024, according to the agency’s recap. The 94th General Assembly reserved $3.5 million for the pilot, and once federal cost-share and biologist-driven landowner projects are counted, total habitat spending associated with the private-lands portfolio approached $7 million, the agency reported.
Private-lands biologists made 1,142 site visits in 2024 alone. And 226 landowners who took part in the program’s feral-hog component reported eliminating 6,628 feral hogs from their properties — a number that matters not just for the individual landowners but for the deer, turkey, and quail populations that share ground with hog activity. Turkey nest-success research in the Southeast has repeatedly tied hog rooting to poult mortality; every hog off the landscape is habitat pressure removed.
The Expo’s award slate is the ceremonial layer on top of that work. Six partners named this year, hundreds of landowners in the audience — and, in the background, the seven-figure funding baseline and the biologist workforce that decide whether the next Arkansas hunter walking onto private land finds cover that holds game or cover that does not.
