SUNDAY, AUG. 30, 2015

Ranchers face loss of livestock, livelihoods in Washington fires

DANVILLE, Wash. – The burned carcasses blend into the scorched landscape, just more black and ash among the haunting outline of trees. “There she is,” rancher Doug Grumbach says, pointing up the steep slope near his ranch. “It looks like she was trying to run and froze in that mode.”

The cow is now obvious: A perfectly shaped head, a body covered in skin that’s become cured leather – taut and solid like a drumhead. She’s upright, wedged between two burned trees, ribs exposed, a flurry of maggots working furiously. Her calf lies in a heap nearby.

Grumbach is silent. He rubs his jaw and points to another carcass farther up the hill on the grazing land in the Colville National Forest, just south of the Canadian border. The land recently burned in the Stickpin fire.

Grumbach, like cattle ranchers across fire-ravaged north-central Washington, isn’t sure of his total losses. The devastation includes not only body counts but hundreds of miles of fence, grazing land and water sources on his family’s fourth-generation ranch. So far, he knows of eight dead cows and four calves, a loss of about $35,000. Thirty more of his Angus herd is missing. In his corrals at home are a cow and several calves with burned hooves.

Livestock toll still ‘a wild guess’

For some ranchers, this is the second year of hardship – first stemming from drought and now another round of deadly fire.

Chris Bieker, of the federal Farm Service Agency in Spokane, doesn’t know how many cattle died in the fires. There are places livestock owners haven’t been able to get into because of fire and road closures.

“At this point, anything is just a wild guess,” he said.

That’s especially true about the numerous ranches located in the Okanogan Complex of fires in north-central Washington. Together, the Okanogan Complex has burned about 475 square miles and is considered the largest wildfire in state history.

Cattle production is Washington’s fifth-largest commodity with about 1.1 million cows and calves valued at $706 million in 2013, according to the Washington state Department of Agriculture. Behind wheat, hay is the state’s second-most-productive field crop.

Bieker said the Farm Service Agency still is trying to process payments for lost livestock from last year’s brutal Carlton Complex fires in the Methow Valley, which was until this year the largest wildfire recorded in Washington. More than 1,000 cattle burned along with 500 miles of fencing. Some fear this year’s losses are worse.

Bieker added that it’s important for ranchers to report their losses within 30 days, under the federal Livestock Indemnity Program – an often difficult task when they still are digging fire lines and trying to rescue cows. That program, part of the 2014 Farm Bill, allows cattle owners and others to recoup 75 percent of the market value of livestock that died because of “adverse weather.”