By: Ashley Paredes ’25
From late February to mid-March, the Smokehouse Creek Fire, the largest wildfire in Texas history, burned through more than a million acres of land across the panhandle, which is home to over 85% of the state’s beef cattle.
The fire tore through ranches, leaving behind cattle with skin burnt off, barely surviving. Many ranchers stated they had to put down animals due to post-trauma health concerns.
“We’ve lost over 3,000 head, which is a very small number, that will double or triple easily. We’ve got cattle that we’re going to have to euthanize because of the damage to their hooves, their udders. We’ll just have to put them down,” Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller said.
The Texas cattle business is home to about $4.1 million in beef cattle, with the industry worth an estimated $15.5 billion.
“The losses could be catastrophic for those counties,” Miller said. “Farmers and ranchers are losing everything.”
Many of these ranchers have cultivated their cattle for years and with such a great loss as this, it can be hard to recover. With thousands of animals killed and many possibly too traumatized to produce, the future of many of these ranches could be at stake.
In addition to losing animals, affected ranchers have also lost their property. The land is ravaged and barns, fences, and hay went up in the blaze.
“We know that the loss of cattle is extraordinary, but it goes beyond that,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott said. “We are looking at the big picture, holistically, ways in which we can assist both the ranchers and the farmers to be able to recover from this.”
Although people who lost livestock and horses are ineligible to receive Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) disaster assistance, Abbott has provided many grants from the state to help ranches in the recovery process from these fires. In all counties affected, there will be locations set up where ranchers can go and get help from the Texas Division of Emergency Management staff to apply for these grants.
The Texas Department of Agriculture is also working to provide relief efforts by setting up its “Hay Hotline,” which is to aid farmers in need of hay.
Many cattle ranchers in the region are left with barren land and are at a loss on how to move forward. Farmers from across the region are sharing hay bales so that the remaining cattle have something to eat, but many of the livestock will have to be relocated.
“I’ve seen this country, how it is with grass and sagebrush and cattle roaming out there, and the next day we come down here; it’s a barren desert,” Brandon Meier, a local rancher, volunteer fire chief, and agricultural science teacher at a high school in the panhandle town of Canadian, said.
Arthur Uhl, president of the Texas & Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association, a trade organization for cattle raisers and landowners, has expressed concerns over the possible effects of the loss with the wildfire on the meat industry.
“Texas is cattle country,” Uhl said. “When you lose what I call a significant part of your cow herd, the supply goes down and prices go up.”
It is not determined yet whether the prices will go up but with the major losses, farmers are expecting anything.
David P. Anderson, a professor of agricultural economics and extension livestock economist with Texas A&M University AgriLife Extension, pointed out that the cattle lost in the Panhandle fire is only a fraction of the overall supply of cattle in the U.S. He expressed that it could take years for Texas ranchers to recover, but it should not affect national cattle and beef prices.
“Even a fire that burns a million acres and is as big and terrible as it is, it is a relatively localized thing if we think about cattle production over the whole United States,” Anderson said.
As ranchers and their communities begin to recover over the next coming months, many programs have been set up to aid those affected and hopefully save the current environment in the Texas Panhandle.
THE BEAR FACTS 