‘Pretty Sickening’: Texas Ranchers Face Crippling Losses

Justin Homan kept driving across his vast Texas ranch, but he only found the same bleak scenes: blackened grassland, charred cow carcasses and smoldering debris turned almost entirely to ash.

Then he arrived at the place he thinks of as a hidden oasis: a pond and small lake that, in better times, bask in the emerald glow of looping, leafy trees and tall grass. As he stepped out of the cab of his truck and onto the singed grass, his mutter was nearly drowned out by the wind.

“Pretty sickening.”

On a normal Friday afternoon, he might check on his herd and then come here with an old friend, pour a glass of whiskey and cast a line into the pond. Now, he was facing the realization that almost all of his family’s century-old ranch, a swath of land nearly the size of Manhattan, had been burned this week when the largest fire in state history tore through the Texas Panhandle.

Mr. Homan, 41, finds himself among scores of cattle ranchers across the Great Plains looking at an uncertain future. Thousands of animals have been killed, and outbuildings and homes have been destroyed in fires across Texas, Nebraska and Kansas. The Smokehouse Creek fire, near Mr. Homan’s ranch outside the town of Pampa, has expanded to more than one million acres and threatens to grow further this weekend with windy, dry conditions expected.

“It’ll end ranching for some,” said Tate Rosenbusch, right, who met Justin Homan in middle school when the two would show livestock together.