I have tested over a dozen concoctions and 3 commercial products. Nothing works actually better than corn. A lot of things will work, no doubt about it, but I haven't found anything that can be shown to perform any better than what corn does by itself.
If you read or watch on TV, when special baits or attractants are claimed to work so well, they are placed in a location that is already ripe with hogs or is a location where hogs have been continually fed for a prolonged period of time, such as at deer feeders. So when a hog comes it, it is proclaimed as proof that the special concoction worked. It isn't proof of that at all. It is proof that it was found an eaten and/or that that the hogs just happened to return to the feeder where they have been feeding over and over again and found something new to eat.
You never see testing done where there are no hogs already ravaging the immediate area or set up with a completely new feeder. In other words, the tests are biased to be successful. And if they don't work for somebody, the claim is that no bait works all the time.
Let me put it another way, if these special concoctions worked so well, then when do the hunters that use them actually use them exclusively and have reliable repeatable success? It is because they really don't work any better than just plain corn.
Note that most of the magical mythical concoctions involve CORN, not all, but most. Why do you think that is?
People often confuse baits with delay mechanisms. A pipe pig isn't bait. alsaqr isn't saying it is either, but he put the item in the pig bait category. I have seen it mentioned as bait as well. A pig pipe, if found, will keep the pig around longer because it takes a while to dribble out the corn. It will give you more opportunity to make your keep. Put one out empty and the pigs will ignore it.
Burying corn/concoction - another delay tactic. They have to work at the earth to get at the corn. This means you gotta dig a hole first and if you are a good lease member or landowner, you have to refill the whole after the hogs expand it to giant size.
For giggles and grins, I am currently involved with the theory that you spread a large container of berry-flavored Kool-Aid on the ground around your feeder. I have set up a feeder on a new property where there are currently no signs of hogs. The reason why you use things like berry-flavored Kool Aid or a stinky soured corn mix for baits is that the smell travels over long distances, supposedly, to really bring in the hogs. In this case, the powder on the ground is supposed to get on the hooves of deer and hogs who then track it along the trails. It then makes the proverbial large scale attracting device that leads directly to the feeder. You spread out a fresh batch of Kool Aid ever two weeks. It costs about $2.50 for the container of Kool Aid. The guy who swears by it says that it brings in more and bigger boars...as if Kool Aid was gender-specific. So far, I have coons and deer coming, but no hogs. As near as I can tell on inspection, the powder was absorbed into the soil with the first heavy dew. I predict yet another bait bust.
Bottom line, if you don't have hogs already present, the bait/attractant won't do a thing. Unless you are in an area where the hogs are starved, and I would not expect that to be the case in Indiana, then they are not going to come in from long distances to feed. They will have plenty of food between your bait and where they are. Besides, if the hogs have such a great sense of smell as claimed, then by golly they can smell the corn just fine and you don't need to add jello or Kool Aid to it.
Special baits are really nothing more than just wishful thinking. Like I said, hogs will eat a lot of stuff, so you can use just about anything, but corn works as well as anything else, is easy to distribute, in inexpensive, environmentally safe, and readily available.
