Our ranch is comprised of 48,000 acres, 42,000 in native range (grass) and the balance in wheat and alfalfa. We had 2,000 cows, both spring-calving and fall-calving. We sell genetics for a living. We have our annual production sale in 19 days. The ranch is run by myself, my two brothers, our kids and five full-time employees.

Of our 48,000 acres, 42,000-plus acres burned. We had 600 cows dispersed on grass to calve. These pastures had been saved to calve on, hence they had much more grass/fuel to burn.

In general, if a cow was on grass, 90% of them died. We know we have lost over 500 cows and the count is still mounting. The estimates of cattle losses is 10,000-plus head that are gone in our county.

I personally lost my house. No one else on our ranch lost their house, but, all told, there were 30-plus houses that were totally burned in our county.

Our county, Clark County, has a total of 625,000 acres in it. Some 461,000 of the 625,000 acres have been burned. The grassland that burned is all warm-season grasses, which means they start growing as the weather warms up, which is now, but we will need rain to bring it along.

An issue will be that the majority of this land is extremely sandy. Hence, it will blow and be hard to hold together until it rains and we get some cover from grass which will be hard to do, due to the blowing sand.

Think of snow drifting with the winds. The sand will drift and blow in some areas for years. It will take a long time to re-establish these native range grasslands. If it rains, that will make for a quicker recovery; if it does not, it will take longer. Some of these sandy lands will not heal for years, if not decades.

The fences are gone. They will need to be rebuilt. We estimate we will have to build 300 miles of fence – this is just for one strand of wire. Most fences have a four-strand wire, so you are actually talking about 1,200 miles of fence. Our entire county will need to fence about 2,881 miles – so that equals 11,525 miles of fence.

We are fortunate to have the majority of our cattle for our 1 April production sale that were not hurt. We will proceed with our production sale.

Most of our cattle that were on wheat pasture are OK. We use a lot of embryo transfer in our programme.

We will make more of the embryo transfers away from our ranch and on other ranches than we typically do. We will replace our lost production with the use of this technology in about six months.

This gives us flexibility that frankly most of our neighbours cannot apply. The reason is that this technology costs quite a bit more than a traditional commercial calf, due to the value of our genetics that we sell versus the pure commercial animal that is only worth the market price per pound.

Dad often told us “we can do this, so let’s get to doing!” That is what we are doing, with amazing friends, neighbours, customers and family.