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This year's wildfire season is defined by massive range fires. Close to half of the 6 1/2 million acres that's burned this year is in cattle country. From Texas to Oregon, the cost for ranchers is huge. Here's NPR's Kirk Siegler.
KIRK SIEGLER, BYLINE: Before these ranges of sunbaked eastern Oregon were engulfed in flames in July, cattle ranchers like Bert Siddoway were getting along pretty good, fetching high calf prices. Now, overnight, everything's changed.
BERT SIDDOWAY: Of the million acres that burned, almost all of it would have had cows graze it at some point in time in the year.
SIEGLER: Put together, range fires across the country so far this year have burned an area roughly the size of Connecticut. Siddoway figures most all of his range has burned, some 100,000 acres - a lot of it on federal land he leases. Now that the flames have died down, they're looking for missing cows.
SIDDOWAY: My family's lost a few. We don't know exactly how many yet. We won't know until we get done gathering in the fall.
SIEGLER: But the biggest deal is probably not the lost cows. It's the barns, the corrals and the fences that will cost up to $15,000 a mile to replace. Out here, Mother Nature also provides free food. Spring rains make this high desert bloom with lush grasses that are no more, so hay prices will go through the roof.
SIDDOWAY: We'll have to buy hay and then rent pasture somewhere's else. There's just 12,000 cows looking for a new home.
SIEGLER: These are all big, devastating losses locally, but zoom out, and most of us probably won't even notice at the grocery store.
DAVID ANDERSON: The fires, in terms of the overall cattle market, are pretty insignificant unless it's your ranch.
SIEGLER: David Anderson is a livestock economist at Texas A&M. This past March, the biggest fire in Texas history blackened more than a million acres in the Panhandle. It's home to 85% of the Lone Star State's 12 million cows, but almost all of them are in feedlots and dairies that didn't burn.
ANDERSON: It's really devastating if these fires hit your ranch. In the broader cattle market - beef market, to us consumers - we really don't see any impact, because we really are in a national market.
SIEGLER: Which, despite being at its lowest herd numbers since 1961, is still big. This year's range fires are a blip, especially in the arid West, where it may take 40 acres of land or more just to sustain one cow. Anderson says the national market is still clawing back from prolonged drought from Texas to the West Coast, and that's why beef is still so expensive.
ANDERSON: You're really not going to see any effect of these fires on our beef price at the grocery store.
SIEGLER: The fallout will be on many rural economies around the fires, he says, because they hit at the worst possible time - in Texas, during spring calving season. Recent range fires in Wyoming and Montana came during the best time for grazing. But there is a potential upside. University of Nevada climatologist Tim Brown says these range fires are flashy, but they may not harm the soils as much as big forest fires.
TIM BROWN: And one way to think about that is there's a lot of agricultural burns that take place where they're actually burning off, say, wheat stubble or corn stubble. And, of course, things come back.
SIEGLER: So it's a question of whether ranchers like Bert Siddoway can hold on for the next year or two while their range recovers. He says it'll be tough, but they'll get through it.
SIDDOWAY: It might bother the weak-hearted, but this isn't weak-hearted country. You know, ranchers will still be here ranching after all this black has gone away.
SIEGLER: At one point, fires were burning in all directions, with 130 miles of uncontained flanks. He says it's a miracle ranchers out here lost as few cows as they did. Kirk Siegler, NPR News, Durkee, Ore.
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