Greg Gardiner said he'd been made whole from the Starbuck Fire. Just that week.
Gardiner runs Gardiner Angus Ranch outside Ashland, Kansas. On March 6, 2017, the Starbuck Fire burned 42,000 of his 48,000 acres and killed 1,400 of his cattle. Nine years to rebuild. Herd genetics can't be rushed. Fencing takes money and time. Pasture comes back on its own schedule.
"It's a three-year cycle of producing an animal to get it to the public's table."
The Starbuck Fire, he told RFD-TV, was embedded in their history and their memory. But he'd recovered. Just that week.
Then the Ranger Road Fire came through and followed nearly the same path. Over 280,000 acres across Oklahoma and Kansas. This time Gardiner lost between 250 and 300 head. He mobilized faster, applied what 2017 taught him, kept the number from being worse. "When you put it in perspective," he said, "I know on either side of us, there's been operations that have lost homes, they've lost whole herds."
He got the number down from 1,400 to 300. The interval between fires didn't change.
On March 12, winds gusting to 90 miles per hour drove new fires across western and central Nebraska. The Morrill Fire became the largest single fire in Nebraska history, burning over 820,000 acres through the Sandhills. An area about the size of Rhode Island, gone in two days.
The Sandhills are sugar sand underneath thin grass. Beautiful country. Fragile, too. A rancher near North Platte watched the fire cross his place in a few hours on March 13. He saved a cabin. His grass burned. He figures with decent rain he could graze again by mid-summer. But the Sandhills ranchers further north won't be that lucky. "That soil up there is sand," he told DTN/Progressive Farmer. "If you graze too early, the cows' hooves would dislodge grass roots and then you have nothing."
So you wait. You feed cattle you can't turn out on grass, with hay you may not have, because the fires also burned the hay being stockpiled for exactly this kind of situation.
Chuck Ardissono has farmed and ranched near Oshkosh for over 40 years. His family learned years ago to hold hay back from the previous season. They think they'll have enough to dry-lot the cows. But they're looking for grass to turn out on for summer, even if it's many miles away. That's preparation. It still depends on rain that may not come, before a fire that probably will.
Nebraska Extension estimates 25,000 to 35,000 cows won't have summer pasture. Some estimates run as high as 45,000. The search for alternative grazing runs into the fact that 70 percent of the nation's cattle are in areas already suffering abnormal dryness or drought.
The U.S. herd stands at 86.2 million head. The smallest since 1951. The fires hit an industry already at its most vulnerable point in 75 years.
Major Plains fires in 2017, 2024, and 2026. On March 18, NIFC issued a fuels advisory identifying continuous fuel beds across more than 100 million acres of the Central and Southern Great Plains. The landscape is already primed for next time, and next time keeps coming sooner.
Brenda Masek, former Nebraska Cattlemen president, said the fires destroyed fencing and hay reserves alike. "If we don't get rain, there's going to be a lot of cattle that are unfortunately going to have to hit the markets or be shipped to a feedlot."
Gardiner got better at surviving fires. He learned to move faster, read the wind, protect what he could. He got better at it and it kept coming more often.
A rancher who sells after the third fire in nine years doesn't show up in any dataset. He retired early. Got out of cattle. The departure doesn't generate climate data. Just an empty pasture where the grass grows back eventually, on its own schedule, with nobody there to graze it.