When we think of wildfire fighters, we picture helicopters dropping water, firefighters battling flames, and evacuations in the nick of time. But there’s another group on the frontlines—farmers and ranchers. For hundreds of years, the people growing our food have been quietly saving our landscapes as well.
As wildfire resilience educators and researchers through our organization Farmer Campus, we’ve surveyed hundreds of farmers and ranchers. What we found surprised us: Family farmers and ranchers are actually key actors in building large-scale wildfire resilience. Our other major finding? We are losing them in increasing numbers with each disaster.
Farmers experience devastating losses that go largely underreported: entire crops destroyed, a season’s income lost or severely reduced, damage to infrastructure, threats to workers’ health, and death or illness of livestock, among other impacts.
When farmers have their properties destroyed by fire, they not only lose their homes but their livelihoods, along with the livelihoods of those they employ. Even the indirect impacts of wildfire—smoke, ash, evacuations, and loss of access to urban markets affected by wildfire—make these disasters almost impossible to bounce back from in an already risky profession.
In just four years since founding Shepherdess Land & Livestock, a sheep and goat grazing business in Los Angeles County, Brittany “Cole” Bush has faced nearly every kind of disaster—drought, wildfires, floods, earthquakes, a pandemic, and even a hurricane. But Bush, a graduate of our farming through wildfire season program, uses climate-beneficial agriculture, land stewardship, and prescribed grazing to reduce wildfire risk.
When we checked in with her during the recent fires, she told us, “The most innovative problem-solvers I know are farmers and ranchers—people who engage with the land every day. But I think the general population needs to know what it actually means for us to be doing the work that we do and for providing the things that we provide.”
In other words, many farmers and ranchers are skilled practitioners, if not pioneers, of wildfire risk management. They are leading innovators in fighting wildfires, which means we should be listening to them.
A University of California, Davis, UC Cooperative Extension, and Farmer Campus survey of more than 500 California farmers and ranchers affected by wildfires between 2017-2023 found that a whopping 93 percent reported employing wildfire risk management practices. For instance, many are actively reducing the amount of flammable material, known as the “fuel load,” in the environment.
Beyond active prevention and mitigation, we’ve uncovered something else unexpected: Farmers and ranchers are often the first on the scene, acting as frontline responders when wildfires strike. Our survey showed that 67 percent of farmers and ranchers with fires on their property actively engaged in firefighting to protect their or their neighbors’ properties. More than 91 percent of farmers near wildfires provided direct support to their neighbors and emergency responders. The most recent spate of fires is no exception: Bush and myriad others worked nonstop to help rescue livestock, despite their own losses.
To be sure, certain kinds of farming, especially industrial-scale agriculture, can exacerbate conditions for wildfires by guzzling water, creating flammable crop residues, and generating greenhouse gases. But not all farming is the same.
Our research shows that it’s the regenerative family farmers and ranchers who are most actively preventing and mitigating wildfires. When these farms are lost, we lose one of the most powerful tools we have in the fight against destructive fires and climate change: the skills and knowledge of family farmers and ranchers and the social fabric of our rural communities that protect the land and grow our food.
In the same survey, we found that more than one-third of impacted farmers and ranchers have considered abandoning farming or ranching due to wildfires, and nearly half know someone who has quit farming due to wildfires. As Bush shared, “We [farmers] can only take so much.”
Especially considering the billions of dollars we’re pouring into fighting wildfires after they start, it might be time to bolster the people helping to prevent them. Let’s give some much-deserved attention—and support—to the farmers who are not only feeding us but also helping us prepare for a future of fires.
This column was produced for Progressive Perspectives, a project of The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.