Navigating the New Normal With wildfires becoming a fact of life across the Plains, ranchers are learning to adapt. Jason Abraham, owner of Mendota Ranch in Canadian, Texas, can remember a time when things like this didn’t happen. “These big fires haven’t always been with us,” he says. “Before 2006, this ranch hadn’t burned for 70 years. But I remember telling people in late 2023 we were due for a fire that would beat what we’d seen in 2006 and 2017. Two months later, there it was.” The “it” Abraham refers to is the Smokehouse Creek fire of February 2024. Over the course of three weeks, the fire burned well over 1 million acres in Texas and Oklahoma, causing at least two fatalities, destroying hundreds of structures and killing thousands of cattle. While the exact cost may never be known, Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service estimates the economic damage to Texas agriculture at over $120 million. Abraham, who also operates
a helicopter service, had a literal bird’s-eye view. “This fire blew through pretty quickly. Ninety-nine percent of what burned was within 24 hours. Folks don’t realize how fast a million acres will burn. When the fire hits these junipers and other invasive species, they just explode. From the ground, you can’t see it, but fires like this move at 75 or 80 mph.” When a fire reaches that point, Abraham says, there’s only one thing to do. “We try to forecast as much as we can,” he says, get out of the way.
We have spots on the ranch where we can take shelter and let the head fire blow over; we’ll come in after and save what we can. That’s all you can do. We saved all the structures, but lost tons of equipment — all the horse trailers, hay equipment tractors; they all burned. We did pretty well at the house. We’re prepared. We have everything ready to roll.” Grazing Program, ‘Water Lots’ Help Save Cattle Among the ironies of the fire cycle the Plains and Western states find themselves in now is the fact that as ranchers adopt measures to boost grass production and improve overall land stewardship, the amount of fuel available to an advancing fire has increased. “We’ve become better stewards to our native grasslands,” says John Haley, Haley Bros. Cattle Company. “We’ve learned to graze better, to rotate and rest our ground, and that’s good for it. But there are multiple reasons for the fires being more frequent, and only one of those is better stewardship. I don’t think we should throw out our stewardship. We just need to adjust and account for the new reality.” At Mendota Ranch, Abraham is also reluctant to give up on practices that have improved soil and forage quality. “Ranchers graze differently now,” he says. “Now we do rotational grazing, so we have more fuel to burn. Plus, a lot of the farmland around here went into the Conservation Reserve Program, so we don’t graze it and the fuel just builds up. The ranchers are doing a better job, but the problem is getting worse. So this is kind of the new norm.” Abraham says he was fortunate to only lose a handful of cattle in the blaze; he credits his grazing program and the establishment of what he calls “water lots” for keeping the losses low. “We do a simple rotation,” he says. “We’ll rest two pastures and graze one. We have pens with shared waterers and multiple gates, so the cows can move from one to the other and still use the same waterer.” The gates and shared waterers provide an easy and fast way to move cattle to areas where vegetation has been grazed and trampled — and, therefore, have no fuel to feed the advancing fires.”
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