Ranchers on the Great Plains Now Burn Each Other's Pastures. The Fire Is the Easy Part.

Across the Great Plains, neighbours form prescribed burn associations and staff each other's fires to push back eastern redcedar. A 2012 survey of 1,094 burns found no deaths and a 1.5 percent escape rate; in March 2026 their old burns helped stop Nebraska's Cottonwood Fire.

Seth Coffey is a fire ecologist and a burn boss, and on most days in the burning season he is also somebody's neighbour with a drip torch. His family's ranch, the Double C Cattle Company, covers about 30,000 contiguous acres in the Arbuckle Mountains of southern Oklahoma. When part of it passed to the Coffeys in 2010, trees covered roughly 60 percent of the ground in many places. That section is now down to 17 percent. One year the burns they organise around the ranch covered some 22,000 acres. His father Chuck puts the ranch's philosophy in four words: "Grass comes first, cows second."

The trees in question are eastern redcedar, and on the southern and central plains they are less a species than a slow flood. For most of the last century people put out every fire they saw, and the cedars, which fire used to keep in the creek bottoms, walked out into the grass. They grow fast, they drink water that would otherwise reach streams and aquifers, nothing much grows under them, and cattle do not eat them. When a wildfire reaches them they burn hot and throw embers.

Most coverage of the subject stops at the fire. Prescribed burning is old. Plains tribes did it, and in the Flint Hills of Kansas ranchers never really stopped; around 2.5 million acres are burned there every year. The thing worth writing about is what the Coffeys are part of: the Arbuckle Rangeland Restoration Association, where Seth and his brother Aaron serve as officers. It is a prescribed burn association, and the interesting part of that phrase is the word "association".

A barn-raising, with fire

The problem a burn association solves is labour. A single rancher can light a pasture. What one rancher cannot do is hold the edges of a 300-acre fire, watch for spot fires across the road, run a water truck and keep an eye on the weather at the same time. So neighbours sign up to show up. Members pool equipment bought with grants and donations, train together, write a burn plan for every fire and staff each other's burns. Then they go home and do the same thing on the next ranch.

The first serious look at how this works came from a survey John Weir of Oklahoma State University ran with Dirac Twidwell and Carissa Wonkka of the University of Nebraska in 2012. They wrote to all 50 associations then active in five plains states. Twenty-seven answered. Between them they had carried out 1,094 prescribed burns on 472,235 acres since forming, the oldest in 1995. On an average burn 8.7 members turned up — anywhere from three to fifteen. Every single association required a written plan. The most common reason given for burning was not cattle or wildlife but killing cedar and stopping it spreading.

The safety record, read carefully

People who hear "ranchers setting fires" tend to think first about the fire that gets away. The survey asked about that directly. Across those 1,094 burns there were no deaths and one minor injury, described by the association that reported it as burns from heat, "mainly due to lack of experience and burning too close to the fence."

Spot fires, embers landing outside the line, happened on about one burn in five. That sounds alarming until you read the next finding: the same frequency had been recorded for an experienced professional crew in the same region. Crews expect them. What matters is whether the people on site put them out. Sixteen fires across the survey period got away badly enough that the association had to call for outside help, which is 1.5 percent of burns. For comparison the authors give a figure of 0.8 percent for federal agencies in 2012. The largest association escape covered 2,000 acres, the largest federal one 21,000, and 72 percent of associations had never had an escape at all. At the time of the survey nobody had filed an insurance claim against any of them.

Those numbers carry the usual self-reporting caveat. Associations counted their own fires, a 54 percent response rate leaves room for the quieter groups to have had worse years, and 2012 is a long time ago. A separate survey by the Nebraska Prescribed Fire Council put the share of escapes needing outside help at 1.6 percent, which at least suggests the older figure was not a fluke.

This spring, both sides of the argument

In March 2026 Nebraska had the worst wildfire season in its records. By early May close to a million acres had burned, among them the Morrill Fire in the Panhandle, the largest in modern state history. The Cottonwood Fire started near Maxwell and Brady on 12 March and burned 129,253 acres across Dawson, Lincoln and Frontier counties before it was contained.

Part of the reason it stopped where it did is that it ran into pastures that burn associations had already burned. Members of the South Loup Burn Association came out to work beside the volunteer fire crews. "It would have burned a lot more if they hadn't showed up and helped us get it stopped where we did," the local fire chief, Jason Schneider, told the Flatwater Free Press. Tucker Thompson, a rancher near Gothenburg who spent five years in the early 2000s taking cedar off 400 acres with a chainsaw and watched it come back, belongs to two burn groups now. He helped hold the Cottonwood Fire even though it was burning his own grazing.

The same week the Road 203 Fire grew out of a prescribed burn in the Bessey Ranger District of the Nebraska National Forest. It was set by the Forest Service, not by ranchers, and according to the agency heavy winds carried a spot fire over the line more than a day after lighting had finished. It burned nearly 36,000 acres. A planned fire had become one of the season's biggest, and critics were right to say so. Becky Potmesil, who ranches in the western Sandhills, said that anyone who would light a prescribed burn out there "is crazy." The Sandhills are sand. Once grass is off it, it can blow.

Why the neighbour matters more than the torch

Why cooperation matters here is partly physics, and a 2023 study in PLoS ONE by Victoria Donovan, Dillon Fogarty and Dirac Twidwell put numbers on it. Under extreme wildfire conditions, embers from a burning grassland can start new fires up to 1.4 kilometres away. From grassland with cedar moving into it, that distance rises to 4.3 kilometres. From a juniper woodland it reaches 7. Your own cedars are not your own problem. A rancher who keeps his pastures open still sits inside the ember range of the neighbour who did not. The same study found that spot-fire distances under prescribed-burn conditions were two to three times shorter than in a high-wind wildfire at the same stage of encroachment. You pick the day, and the day does a lot of the work.

What keeps an association going is people rather than money, according to the widest study of them yet, published in 2025 in the International Journal of Wildland Fire by a team led by Alison Deak. They counted more than 140 associations across the United States, and new ones kept appearing in every region between 2020 and 2023. On the Great Plains 93 percent of them run entirely on volunteer leadership. The leaders were asked what it took to start a group and what it takes to keep one. Help from agency staff mattered to 43 percent at the founding and to only 30 percent over the long run. Motivated landowners went the other way, from 70 percent to 77.

That is the fragile point. It is also the hopeful one. A burn association is not an agency with a budget line that can be cut. It is a dozen people who trust each other enough to put fire on each other's land. "Grasslands are going to burn," says Daniel Mushrush, whose family has ranched the Flint Hills for seven generations. "It can be on our terms or on Mother Nature's terms."

Sources

• Brianna Randall, "Why Great Plains Ranchers Are Setting Fire to Their Own Land", Reasons to be Cheerful, 21 September 2026 — https://reasonstobecheerful.world/great-plains-ranchers-prescribed-burns/
• J. Weir, D. Twidwell, C. L. Wonkka, "Prescribed Burn Association Activity, Needs, and Safety Record: a survey of the Great Plains", Great Plains Fire Science Exchange, publication 2015-6 — https://gpfirescience.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/PrescribedBurnAssocSurvey-1.pdf
• A. Deak, J. E. Fawcett, L. Quinn-Davidson, C. Adlam, J. R. Weir, J. Stackhouse, "Burning from the ground up: the structure and impact of Prescribed Burn Associations in the United States", International Journal of Wildland Fire 34(3), 2025 — https://doi.org/10.1071/WF24178
• V. M. Donovan, D. T. Fogarty, D. Twidwell, "Spot-fire distance increases disproportionately for wildfires compared to prescribed fires as grasslands transition to Juniperus woodlands", PLoS ONE 18(4): e0283816, 2023 — https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0283816
• Anila Yoganathan, "Starting fires helped contain a Nebraska wildfire — and ignited another", Flatwater Free Press with Grist, 15 May 2026 — https://flatwaterfreepress.org/starting-fires-helped-contain-a-nebraska-wildfire-and-ignited-another/
• "2026 Nebraska wildfires", Wikipedia (fire sizes and dates) — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Nebraska_wildfires