BAKER CITY — Matt McElligott said the financial disaster wildfires wrought this summer in Eastern Oregon will linger long after the final ember has cooled.

And it’s a span measured not in months but in years.

“We’ll feel the effects of this fire season for a long time,” said McElligott, a cattle rancher in Baker County between Haines and North Powder, and president of the Oregon Cattlemen’s Association. “The economic losses to the state and the industry are probably the largest ever for a single fire season.”

And as McElligott pointed out during an interview Aug. 12, that season isn’t over.

The fire risk could extend well into September, and even into October, if the rest of summer is nearly as dry, and hot, as July and the first two weeks of August were.

“The fires aren’t out,” he said.

But the damage the flames have done to a region where raising beef cattle is a major industry — the biggest one, in Baker County — is significant, McElligott said.

The fires have burned more than a million acres. Tallying the economic losses is an impossible one at this point, McElligott said. Although firefighters have substantially slowed most of the region’s major blazes, many aren’t fully contained.

During the chaos of a fast-moving fire — the Durkee Fire in Baker County, for instance, raced 18 miles in a single day in July — McElligott said bulldozers cut or crushed fences and gates were open to give cattle a chance to escape the flames.

And with animals from many herds running loose, it will take time to sort all cattle, he said.

Until then it’s impossible to say with any level of accuracy how many cattle were killed outright, McElligott said. Based on anecdotal stories, though, he anticipated the death toll will be “fairly large.”

Something approaching a thorough census might be possible by late September, he said, but even that count won’t be complete. Besides the dead animals, others will need to be euthanized due to burn injuries.

The financial effects aren’t limited to dead animals. McElligott said smoke and heat have damaged the lungs of some cattle.

“You can’t see that,” he said.

Those animals will be more susceptible to pneumonia this fall, he said, when the same storms that end the fire season bring freezing temperatures and snow. And some mature cows will be unable, or less likely, to bear calves in the future.

And McElligott said the chronic effects of fire can be even more insidious.

Cattle exposed to heat and smoke tend to be less productive in general, he said. Calves need more time — and more food, which costs money — to reach the same weight, he said.

Where do cattle go now?

With hundreds of square miles charred, ranchers will need to find places to move their herds and, of course, food for them.

McElligott said some ranchers have hay fields where they can graze their cattle, but that means they can’t harvest hay they normally bale to use as feed during the winter.

Those ranchers will instead have to buy hay. Feed can cost $2.50 to $3 per day, or more, per animal, he said.

McElligott said the Oregon State University Extension Service is coordinating a program for people to donate hay or pasture to ranchers affected by the fires.

“People are being very generous,” he said.

Will Price, an extension agent with OSU in Baker City, said he is compiling a list of potential donors.

There have been only a few requests for hay or pasture so far, but Price said that’s not surprising with ranchers still taking stock of how the fires have affected them.

Ranchers also have their usual workload to deal with.

“Folks have been working hard, getting back on their feet,” Price said.

The OCA also has been working with state lawmakers and Oregon’s congressional delegation to lobby for all available state and federal programs that can help ranchers.

And McElligott said Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek has written letters to the secretary of agriculture, who oversees the Forest Service, and secretary of the interior, which includes the Bureau of Land Management, advocating for exceptions that allow ranchers to use unburned public land grazing allotments longer than usual.

Another exception allows ranchers who aren’t fully using their allotments to temporarily share those areas with another fire-affected rancher, McElligott said.

None of those programs can completely offset the losses, but “every little bit helps,” he said.

Oregon’s U.S. senators, Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley, have endorsed Kotek’s request to federal officials to give ranchers affected by fires more options for grazing on public land.

The senators also wrote in an Aug. 26 letter to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, and BLM director Tracy Stone-Manning, that they, along with ranchers, want to work with the agency during the fire recovery to combat invasive plants and encourage native grasses to flourish.

For ranchers, the senators wrote, “their lives and livelihoods depend on a healthy and functioning range.”

“We urge you to concentrate on timely reseeding and other recovery authorities on Department of Interior lands in eastern Oregon as soon as possible to use these fires as a stepping off point to improve ecological health across the landscape. These actions and resources will not only help communities recover, they will reduce the invasive grasses and noxious weeds across eastern Oregon that are degrading landscape health and contributing fuel to these fires.”

McElligott said some ranchers had insurance that covered the loss of cattle due to fire, but he didn’t have an estimate for what percentage were covered.

One “small ray of hope,” he said, is cattle prices have been strong the past couple years, and ranchers who sold animals because they did not have a place to pasture them will get a good price.

But he said inflation, which affects the price of fuel and equipment, will offset the relatively robust beef market.

He said many ranchers had to spend money to run their own heavy equipment to fight fires. They also have to pay for any damage to the machines during the firefighting.

Damage to rangeland

Cattle during the spring, summer and fall graze much of the land, public and private, that wildfires burned. Those acreages support tens of thousands of cattle each year.

The Durkee Fire, for instance, burned all or parts of 63 public land allotments, a total of 118,742 acres, according to the BLM’s Vale District. Combined, those allotments are permitted for 19,069 “animal unit months” — AUMs. One AUM is the amount of forage a cow-calf pair eats in a month.

Of those 63 allotments, the grazing season for 22 ended before lightning started the fire on July 17, according to BLM.

Another 22 allotments had cattle grazing on them when the fire started, and 19 other allotments have a grazing season that starts Sept. 16.

The Durkee and other fires burned hotter in certain places, causing more severe damage to the vegetation and soil, Price said.

He said he toured a few areas within the Durkee and Badlands Complex fires and severity of damage varied considerably. In some places the fire was moving so rapidly it burned the vegetation but didn’t scorch the soil.

If enough rain and snow fall this autumn and winter, there could be a decent grass crop in 2025, Price said.

“This coming fall and winter is going to be really critical,” he said. “We might see pretty good recovery pretty quickly.”

But in other areas, he said, the fire effects were much more severe.

“Those places are going to need a lot of help” to recover, Price said, potentially including grass seeding.

And gauging the fires’ long-term effects is impossible at this point, he said, in part because the geographic scale is so massive. The Durkee Fire alone, for instance, is bigger than Multnomah County.

“It’s just about overwhelming to figure out the damage, the scope of it,” Price said.

Despite the varying effects, McElligott said it’s common that burned public allotments are closed to cattle for the two years following the fire — the 2025 and 2026 grazing years, in this case.

A document from the BLM’s Vale District states that, “in general, the plant communities consumed in the Durkee Fire are resilient to fires and will likely recover within the next two years. However, there may be areas where intensive restoration such as noxious weed control and desirable plant seeding will be needed.”

Restoration also might be needed on burned private land, McElligott said — another expense for ranchers.

He said private allotments potentially could recover sooner, but it’s likely those won’t be available for grazing in 2025.

The best case scenario, he said, is enough rain falls this autumn and next spring to spur the growth of new grass. Some private rangeland might open for grazing next year, he said, although it wouldn’t support as many animals for as long as usual.

Other expenses

Range fence costs around $13,000 per mile to build, McElligott said, and the fires burned “hundreds and hundreds of miles” of fence, as well as barns and other outbuildings.

There was a shortage of fence contractors before the fires, and McElligott said he worries that with such a massive construction task, some ranchers won’t be able to find anyone to do the work.

The Oregon Cattlemen’s Association has set up a wildfire relief fund. Donations can be made online at orcattle.com.

Farm Service Agency offices

offer assistance for ranchers, farmers

The Farm Service Agency has information about a variety of financial assistance programs for ranchers and farmers affected by wildfires.

Agency offices in the region:

Baker County: 3990 Midway Drive in Baker City. The phone number is 541-523-7121, ext. 2.

Umatilla County: 1 SW Nye Ave., Suite 100, Pendleton. The phone number is 541-278-8049.

Wallowa County: 401 NE First St., Suite E, Enterprise. The phone number is 541-426-4521.

Union County: 1901 Adams Ave., Suite 6, La Grande. The phone number is 541-963-4178.

Morrow County: 430 West Linden Way, Heppner. The phone number is 541-676-9011.

Grant County: 721 S. Canyon Blvd., John Day. The phone number is 541-575-1274.

“We’ll feel the effects of this fire season for a long time. The economic losses to the state and the beef cattle industry are probably the largest ever for a single fire season.”

— Matt McElligott, Baker County rancher and president of the Oregon Cattlemen’s Association