Kansas ranchers find out too late that Trump doesn't give a sh*t about them
Beyond the toll of the fire, a frustration also crops up in conversation after conversation. Ranchers said they felt overlooked amid the tumult in Washington, and were underwhelmed by the response of a new president who had won their support in part by promising to champion America’s “forgotten men and women.”
“This is the country that elected Donald Trump,” said Garth Gardiner, driving a pickup across the 48,000-acre Angus beef ranch he runs with his two brothers. They lost about 500 cows in the fires. “I think he’d be doing himself a favor to come out and visit us.”
Mr. Gardiner voted for Mr. Trump, and said he just wanted to hear a presidential mention of the fires amid Mr. Trump’s tweets about the rapper Snoop Dogg, the East Coast blizzard and the rudeness of the press corps.
“Two sentences would go a long way,” Mr. Gardiner said.
Weeks without snow or rain and late-winter temperatures scraping 80 degrees are threatening to create even more blazes in Western states grappling with the growing fire danger posed by climate change. Hundreds of homes were evacuated this weekend because of a wildfire that erupted in the dry hills near Boulder, Colo. By Monday, the fire was about 80 percent contained.
The Kansas fires — the largest in state history — burned more than 400,000 acres here in Clark County alone. Ten days later, Mr. Gardiner was still burying cows on his family’s ranch. One by one, an orange loader scooped them off the bare sandy soil and trundled them to a pit being dug by a backhoe.
Ranchers said the cattle they had lost were worth more than the $2,000 they could fetch at an auction. Each cow was an engine that drove their farms and finances, giving birth to new calves every year or producing embryos through artificial insemination that could be implanted into other cows.
Emergency programs run by the federal Department of Agriculture — which is facing 21 percent cuts under Mr. Trump’s budget proposal — will help ranchers, up to a point.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/20/us/burying-their-cattle-ranchers-call-wildfires-our-hurricane-katrina.html?hpw&rref=us&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0
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