Greg Gardiner tends thousands of cattle between Ashland and Englewood in Clark County, Kansas. By late February, he had lost around 300 head to the Ranger Road Fire.
The fire ignited February 17 in the Oklahoma Panhandle and burned 283,283 acres across Beaver and Harper counties into southwest Kansas. At its peak it consumed an area equal to three to four football fields every second, driven by winds above 30 mph and humidity in the low teens. What it left behind is the color of ash and char for miles, fence posts burned to wire, pasture reduced to black dirt.
Michael Kelsey of the Oklahoma Cattlemen's Association said roughly 1,000 members live in the impacted area, many of them fifth- and sixth-generation ranching families. "One gentleman has lost 400 cattle so far," Kelsey told Brownfield Ag News. A farming family near Kismet faces roughly $1 million in damages.
Look at the calendar. The Smokehouse Creek Fire burned over a million acres of the Texas Panhandle in February 2024. The Starbuck Fire hit the same region in 2017. The East Amarillo Complex in 2006. Since 2005, Southern Plains fires have accounted for just 3 percent of all U.S. wildfires but 49 percent of all acres burned. Each catastrophic fire lands on a ranching economy still absorbing the last, and the interval between them keeps compressing.
One source told High Plains Public Radio:
"Ranchers spend a lifetime building their herds, building that genetics. It's not the monetary loss, because cattle are worth a lot of money today. It's that genetic loss, that lifetime of building those genetics is gone."
Genetics bred into a herd over generations cannot be purchased at auction. When a rancher sells surviving breeding stock to cover immediate costs and prices rise before they can buy back in, the loss becomes permanent, disguised as a market transaction.
The federal response so far: Fire Management Assistance Grants reimbursing 75 percent of eligible firefighting costs for local governments. That covers volunteer fire departments' suppression expenses and stops there. Gardiner's 300 dead cattle, the miles of fencing, the Kismet family staring at a million dollars in damage — as of early March, no major disaster declaration has been issued, and without one, individual agricultural losses have no confirmed federal pathway.
Senator James Lankford described the broader context on the Oklahoma Farm Report: FEMA offices on a "skeleton crew," staff unable to process claims because of furloughs, disaster relief scattered across roughly 30 agencies. "Once you've experienced a disaster, you're trying to actually recover. You don't have time to go chase down where to apply and what to do, especially if it's all going to be a dead end anyway."
So the Oklahoma Cattlemen's Foundation launched its own relief fund. Britt Hilton, who farms near Knowles in Beaver County, told RFD News that neighbors have been in constant contact, comparing damage, coordinating help. The gap between what federal systems deliver and what families need is being filled by cattlemen's associations, neighbors on the phone, and volunteer departments running on reimbursements that haven't arrived.
No aggregate damage figure for the Ranger Road Fire has been published. No one is counting the ranchers who, after the third or fourth fire in a decade, will quietly sell and move to town. Their departures will register as retirement, if they register at all.