‘Pretty sickening’: Texas Ranchers face crippling losses
Justin Homan continued to drive through his sprawling Texas ranch, only to find the same bleak scenes: blackened grasslands, charred cow carcasses and smoldering rubble turned almost entirely to ash.
Then he arrived at the place he considers a hidden oasis: a pond and small lake that, in better times, basks in the emerald glow of twisting, leafy trees and tall grass. As he stepped out of the cab of his truck and onto the scorched grass, his muttering was nearly drowned out by the wind.
“Pretty sickly.”
On a normal Friday afternoon he might check on his flock and then come here with an old friend, pour a glass of whiskey and cast a line into the pond. Now he was confronted with the realization that nearly all of his family’s century-old ranch, a swath of land nearly the size of Manhattan, had burned down this week when the largest fire in state history devastated the Texas Panhandle.
Mr. Homan, 41, finds himself among dozens of ranchers in the Great Plains, facing an uncertain future. Thousands of animals have been killed and outbuildings and homes destroyed by fires in Texas, Nebraska and Kansas. The Smokehouse Creek fire, near Mr Homan’s farm outside the town of Pampa, has spread to more than a million hectares and threatens to spread further this weekend, with windy, dry conditions expected.
The consequences of the fire are far-reaching for farmers like Mr Homan, whose livestock were largely spared. Due to the scorched pasturelands, surviving cows may starve if left alone. For many, the tasks ahead feel monumental: burying dead livestock, repairing broken fences, distributing hay bales trucked in from hundreds of miles away.
“For some, ranching will end,” said Tate Rosenbusch, who represents Mr. Homan met in high school when the two showed cattle together and who worked for a time at an agriculture-oriented bank. “There are some who can’t get back into it – they’re just emotionally or financially exhausted.”
And starting over won’t be easy. Cattle prices are shot up amid the dry conditions of recent years, meaning the idea of replacing dead cows is a non-starter for many farmers.
Interest rates are also high, making loans less attractive, and many ranchers are faced with a pile of bills this time of year as they prepare for spring planting, plowing fields, buying fertilizer and seeds and buying gas for their equipment.
“It’s never a good time, but right now it’s a really, really bad time,” said Mr. Rosenbusch, 41, who owns a farm and also helps run a trucking and towing business.
How quickly the country recovers is largely beyond their control.
“Right now everything depends on the rain,” Mr. Rosenbusch said. “Unfortunately, you have no control over that. You can do all the rain dances you want.
The Smokehouse Creek fire started Monday and spread quickly in sparsely populated areas near the Texas-Oklahoma border.
Mr. Homan and Mr. Rosenbusch cut open gates, hoping the cattle could escape if necessary. When the flames arrived, they drove out in trucks with water tanks to try to extinguish the flames. For a while they kept the fire at bay, but then the wind changed. All was lost.
“We worked hard on it for 30 hours and saved maybe 40 hectares,” Mr Homan said. He and Mr. Rosenbusch recalled putting out a fire on a piece of land only to turn around a few minutes later and see it on fire again.
Now many ranches are littered with dead and injured animals.
For those who have lost a large number of animals – some lost hundreds – the immediate problem is figuring out how to bury them all. A government contractor, Lone Star Hazmat, was trawling the roads this week, loading dozens of dead cows onto a truck that had made it to the road before they died.
And even for the cattle that survived, Mr Homan said, the fire and smoke could eventually cause health problems or cause pregnant cows to give birth prematurely.
That could mean a financial hit a year from now when farmers have fewer yearlings to sell, either for reproduction or to meat producers. And for now, there is the pressing problem of keeping the cows fed without grass to nibble on.
On Friday, Mr. Homan and Mr. Rosenbusch visited several dozen cows on farmland that Mr. Homan operated near his ranch. The cows had eaten the remains of corn and sorghum harvested last fall, and the fire passed them by. Mr Homan said he normally moves the cows to his farm around this time of year but has not yet got around to doing so, a delay that has ultimately saved the lives of many cows.
The cows lowed and jostled with each other as Mr. Homan dumped cubes of feed from his truck for them to eat. For now, ranchers are largely dependent on truckloads of hay brought in by generous farmers, most of them from many miles away.
“I couldn’t believe it,” said Sam Schafer, a rancher who described himself as semi-retired and marveled at the piles of hay delivered this week. Wearing a cowboy hat and a white button-up shirt, he helped deliver one bale at a time to area ranches, including Andy Jahnel’s.
Mr. Jahnel said he fled his home as the fire raged toward his property, which had been in his family since the early 1900s.
“I left because there was a cloud of smoke coming like a tornado,” Mr. Jahnel said. “Just dark black.”
Of his 1,120 hectares, only about 25 percent remained unscathed, he said. All thirteen horses had miraculously survived.
The temporary solution of delivering hay is one that won’t last long for many farmers. Mr. Homan and Mr. Rosenbusch said that after the donations stop coming, feeding livestock individually — instead of letting them graze — no longer makes economic sense.
“If you have to feed them every bite, they will eat and you will go bankrupt,” Mr. Rosenbusch said.
When Mr. Homan inspected the property on Friday, he and Mr. Rosenbusch tried to find something positive in the devastation caused by the fire. The fire was moving so fast that it had only burned around the ranch structures. And if they were lucky, the inferno probably would have also taken away the moles that chewed through electrical lines and wiped out those invasive Russian olive trees.
But the path ahead felt tough.
“Find as many cows as you can and move on,” Mr. Homan said. “In this industry you can’t just throw up your hands and walk away. You married it.”
Mitch Smith reporting contributed.