Locals Get Together to Help an Often Unseen Victim of Wildfires: Cattle
The fires in Eastland County last month burned more than 50,000 acres of pasture along with an untold amount of hay stacked in barns and fields. Ranchers up there will have a tough time feeding livestock this spring and summer.
Fellow cattlemen from around the state are pitching in to help out, including some here in Fayette County.
Curtis Carden and Butch Moore were at the Colorado River Cowboy Church last Wednes day loading an 18-wheeler with hay for the ranchers in Eastland County. It wasn’t the first time the pair helped fellow ranchers in the Big Country area of Texas.
“Eight years ago we went up there after a fire and helped them rebuild fences,” said Moore. “One of the guys still had Curtis’ phone number. He called Curtis and said, ‘We need hay and we need it bad – like 20,000 bales. There’s not any grass and we’re hurting for hay.’”
Carden sprang into action and organized a donation drive at his church, the Colorado River Cowboy Church in Kirtley. Ranchers from around the area started dropping off bales of hay at the church. Carden teamed up with Moore, who works with the Texas Baptist Men (TBM) disaster recovery group. TBM sent an 18-wheeler with a flatbed trailer to pick up the hay and deliver it to a distribution site in Carbon, one of the towns devastated by the Eastland Fires.
“They’re providing the truck, the trailer, the driver and the fuel,” Moore said. “The fuel is the hard part right now. I asked the driver yesterday how much the fuel bill was, and he said, ‘Man, you don’t want to know.’”
Moore estimated that they’ve already sent close to 300 round bales from the area.
Kenneth Landers, the volunteer truck driver for TBM, showed up to pick up a load on Wednesday. He was driving a shiny International Eagle with custom purple and yellow paint and chrome trim. His voice sounds like it belongs on a CB radio.
“The town I’m going to, Carbon, population 300, lost about fifty homes in the fire,” Landers said. “The fires are out and they’re cleaning up, but all the fences are down. About 10 miles out, you start smelling smoke and all the grass is burnt.”
Landers said he’s also hauled a few loads of donated hay from Good Samaritans in Navasota and Hempstead.
“We’re hauling to a big hay field up there, and the ranchers can go there and pick up what they need,” Landers said.
Cole Dismukes and Preston Davis own the La Grange Farm and Ranch and Somerville Farm and Ranch stores. They teamed up with Round Top Farm and Ranch Supply to supply an 18-wheeler load of cattle cubes to the ranchers in Eastland County.
Dismukes said Purina Feed put the three stores in touch with a distribution point at a ranch in Eastland County. Each store pitched in eight tons of cubes for a total of 24 tons. That’s about 880 fifty pound bags. He said the ranch they delivered the cubes to was completely scorched.
“Every square foot was burned except for their headquarters,” Dismukes said. “There’s no grass, nothing for the cows to eat. That’s their livelihood. It could force them to go under.
“You never want to experience anything like that,” he added. “You almost feel obligated to help. We know they’ll repay it if anything like that happens to us.”