(suspenseful music) - [Emily] Land has always been a big part of Texas's identity.

- [Sasha] When the land starts to change, what happens to this way of life that people have lived for generations?

- [Linda] I think it would be very sad if we lost the rice industry in this area.

- [Shane] It's getting to be much of a normal thing around here.

- [Emily] Losing that connection, that is so terrifying to me.

(gentle music) (wind howling) (gentle dramatic music) (gentle music) (typing) (gentle upbeat music) - What I found fascinating about this story is that you're talking about the past versus modernity.

When the landscape starts to change, what happens to this way of life and this industry that people have lived for generations?

My name is Sasha von Oldershausen.

I'm a writer with "Texas Monthly" and I wrote "Farewell to a Crop?"

(somber music) (birds chirping) Texas has this really deep connection to the land, but the land is changing drastically.

Whether it's from climate change or shifting industry, you're seeing drought more and more often.

Urban sprawl that has led to a greater demand in water resources.

Rice is a particularly thirsty crop and needs water but, in recent years, Texas has had to cut off water resources to these rice farmers.

People have to adapt, especially in places like El Campo where you have this legacy and this history of rice farming.

And it feels like there's this existential threat to this way of life.

- I used to bring a thermos every day.

My dad did also, growing up and kind of in the last year I finally backed off so I try to limit myself to two cups a day.

(tractor engine revving) - LG Raun is a rice farmer in El Campo, Texas.

He and his family have been farming rice for three generations.

When I first reached out to talk to him, he sent me an email back and he signed off, "Have a rice day."

(chuckling) Yeah, it's just rice, rice, rice all day, all night.

- Right here, I'm looking at the pentacles.

One of these is a pentacle, can have up to 100 or more grains on a pentacle.

This rice is ready to cut, but the ground conditions aren't there yet.

If the sun will keep shining like it is right now, we're gonna be okay.

You're with nature out here.

The animal and wildlife gives me a lot of good feelings.

There's good people I work with out here.

They love nature also, they love being out here.

And I like that every day's different.

And so you have a different challenge and you think maybe you know what you're gonna do the next day and you get out here and say, "Ah, change the plans.

"We're gonna have to do something else today."

- [Sasha] Prior to writing this story, I didn't even know that Texas had any like large stake in rice production but, in fact Texas, used to be the second largest producer of rice in the country but, in recent years, that's been changing.

The Texas Rice Belt is a region of Texas that is sort of near the Gulf Coast and is made up of a handful of counties.

Within Texas you had about 600,000 acres of rice farms.

But that number, in the past few decades, has decreased to about 142,000.

- [Producer] How old were y'all do you think?

- 35, I would say.

- [LG] She's the chief financial officer, for sure, she keeps me in line.

- The rice industry here has been around since the early 1900s and it's been one of the pillars of ag in this area.

So that's LG's dad and his two uncles who all farmed but now, it's just LG and his brother Tim are left and Christopher, a nephew.

Water is one of the huge challenges, so the water for the rice industry here has been curtailed the last three years.

It definitely affects our industry and makes it hard.

With the price of rice, which is based on a global market, our cost of production is more than our price, so we are facing challenges there too.

- Along with all of these other issues of water resources, of urban sprawl, there's been this emergent industry and that's renewables.

Suddenly, solar farms were starting to spring up in the middle of these rice farms and row crops.

And you had windmills popping up as well.

- We've seen more and more of it.

And so as the solar panels go in, prime farmland is going out.

It's been a challenge in this area.

- Renewable energy is an issue that is really divisive in our increasingly polarized world.

And you sort of think that people fall into one of two camps: you're either pro or you're against.

What I found in going to this community is there's so many other aspects to consider.

(gentle upbeat music) - My name is Richard Ramsey, I'm a retired farmer.

My wife and I have been here farming for over 50 years.

We had gotten in a situation where I was getting older and my number one man's health was going down and farming was tough, prices weren't good.

This opportunity came around.

Things just lined up just right.

Hekate Energy came here and made a proposal to us to lease the property and this was a way to make sure the land stayed in the family.

- As these renewable energy companies started to show up in town, farmers began to realize they presented a possibility to get out.

Being able to lease the land to a solar company gave them something that can ease them into retirement so that they don't have to do this physically intensive thing until they die.

- This was the first big one in Wharton County.

The neighbors took a damned view of everything to start with.

Kind of funny, later on, one of 'em called me after he had raised a lot of stink about the whole thing and want to know if he could be added into the project.

- [Sasha] For folks who are in their 70s and 80s, you know, looking to retire, I understand.

But I also understand the perspective of the rice farmers who are thinking about how this personal choice has a larger impact on the community.

In El Campo, there's a fear that this industry that defines their town and their families will become obsolete.

And what is El Campo without rice farming?

- I would hate to see this field right here have solar panels all over it.

I'm out of a job for one thing and all the businesses that I work with in town are gonna be hurt by that.

Right now, a lot of those are being placed on highly productive agricultural lands.

And there's other land around here that doesn't have rice, or other crops, or even livestock growing on it that's sitting out there where these solar panels could be.

Linda has asked me, "When are you gonna retire?"

And I said, "I don't think ever "because I've gotta have a reason to get up in the morning."

I can't imagine not being able to come out here every day.

In fact, I told my wife when I die, you know, if we're gonna do ashes, I'd like them scattered right over here in the corner of the field, just love that area.

- What I learned from reporting this story is that these otherwise sort of hot button political issues are so much more complex on the ground.

And that I had questions I hadn't considered before.

Like where do we put our solar farms?

If enough people make the same choice, are we just going to lose the distinct identity of all of these towns as all of them start to resemble each other?

Or does it make sense to grow rice in Texas anymore where water is increasingly scarce?

I don't know.

- I think it would be very sad if we lost the rice industry in this area.

And it's happening worldwide, really.

Young people really are not getting into farming because it's not as lucrative as other jobs.

You know, you have to really have a passion and a dedication and you almost have to have been born into it.

- [LG] Grandpa grew his first crop in 1915.

We've been growing rice ever since.

It's what this land's good for here.

It's what we know how to do.

- It's one of those stories where there's no real answer, there's no like real solution, but who better to talk about what's happening in our natural world than farmers, who are interacting with it every single day of their lives?

(wind gently blowing) (gate clattering) (horse snorting) (horse neighing) - [Emily] Land has always been a big part of Texas's identity.

We are a place of wide open spaces and giant Texas skies.

It's not just dirt for us, it's us.

And there are forces threatening that, now.

- This is, it's real bad.

- The idea of losing that connection, that is so terrifying to me.

I'm Emily McCullar, I'm a senior writer at "Texas Monthly" and I wrote the story, "The Panhandle is Burning."

My family has some land in central Texas that has been in my family since the 19th century.

I was raised out there, it is a huge part of not just my day-to-day way of life, not just, you know, some of the work that I do.

It is part of my identity.

A couple weeks ago I was out here and I was just driving around in the truck.

I was thinking about my grandfather driving around here like when he was a kid in the '30s and when he was like an old cowman in the '50s and '60s.

My mom died when I was 10, both her parents were gone before I was born, so there's a lot of people on that side of the family that I just didn't know.

They feel like they're here.

(gentle music) In August of 2020, I got a call from my dad that there was a fire out near our ranch.

(suspenseful music) The fire that burned here and burned like on multiple properties over here was 10,000 total acres.

So like all of those grayish trees, bushes over there, that's all fire damage.

Those are all trees that burned in 2020.

Once the fire got more contained, my dad and I drove out here.

I think it's the only time I've seen him speed was when we got to a point where we could see the smoke and he just hauled ass, and it was wild.

The fire that we had in 2020, that made me wonder what those ranchers up in The Panhandle were dealing with?

There were five fires that ignited in The Panhandle at the end of February 2024 and the Smokehouse Creek Fire ended up being the largest one.

(suspenseful music) (fire crackling) The Smokehouse Creek Fire was the biggest fire in recorded Texas history.

In the end, it burned over a million acres within Texas and Oklahoma.

I remember when the fires were burning and following along with the Forest Service Twitter, seeing the news as it was growing, and growing, and growing.

It was just terrifying how big and unwieldy this one could become.

(suspenseful music continues) I couldn't even fathom the size of the fire and that there were people up there whose homes were there, who were trying to run family ranches out there.

Ranching is part of my family's identity and not something to easily let go of.

(suspenseful music continues) And if you are a Panhandle rancher who is rebuilding, or starting over from scratch, what do you even do?

The Smokehouse Creek Fire burned kind of all over the northeastern part of the Texas Panhandle, but a lot of my reporting was centered around Canadian, which is pretty close to the Oklahoma border.

(gentle upbeat music) Cattle ranching is a big deal in Canadian.

It's just a central part of the community.

- It's a good place, Canadian's a good town.

Yeah, it brought everybody pretty close together 'cause most everybody was dealing with the same thing.

You know, it hit everybody pretty hard.

- When I got up to Canadian in the summer, a few months after the fire went through, even though these ranchers, they were past the immediate trauma, they were starting to look toward the future, but they were in an existential crisis.

Fire's not new to The Panhandle.

The Panhandle has burned from millennia.

That's kind of how the ecology of The Panhandle was born.

What is different now, is that there have been three huge fires in the past 20 years: in 2006, in 2017, and 2024.

The last time there was a fire that big was 1906 and there've been three in the last 20 years.

- [Shane] But yeah, it's getting way too to be much of a normal thing around here, I feel like.

- So you have infrastructure from electrical companies and oil equipment, that's the match, but climate change is creating the conditions that can take ignition into something absolutely uncontrollable.

Like the Smokehouse Creek Fire.

(ominous music) One rancher, Adam Isaacs, shared a lot of footage that he had taken as the fire was rolling in.

- [Adam] This is hard for me to watch this.

And then, there's calves and horses, our calves and horses that I can't do anything about.

- At one point, he's standing in a field trying to get his yearlings and his horses somewhere where maybe they'll be, okay.

- [Adam] Gosh, this is hard for me, guys.

Sit and look at this and there ain't nothing I can do about it.

Front's hitting in 20 minutes they say.

- [Emily] These ranchers had been through multiple fires.

They'd been through multiple red flag fire warnings, but the speed with which it got to them this time was pretty hopeless for them.

- [Adam] Okay, it's time to go.

Wind's fixing to shift out of the north.

Oh, that's scary.

(ominous music) - [Emily] They met up with Adam's parents in a wheat field that was far enough away and they were sitting in the car watching the camera that they had set up on the front of their house right as it breached the fence into their front yard.

(ominous music continues) (flames whooshing) I've talked to one rancher, Craig, who was out helping other ranchers and local firefighters, try to keep the fire at bay.

- It's the worst one I've ever seen.

It'll be over a million acres by the time it gets done.

Just keep praying, this is, it's real bad.

- I had never seen video like that.

We all understand fire, like we all see it, but, like, a raging fire that's a monster.

(somber music) I mean the trauma of watching a fire come towards you and barely escaping with your life, like that's enough of a thing.

The aftermath is a whole other nightmare.

(ominous music) It's estimated that 15,000 cows died in total.

Some of those were burned and killed by the fire, but a lot of those had to be put out of their misery by ranchers.

- The connection with the cattle is something that it's hard to explain or describe, if you're not with 'em every day and, basically, your whole life is taken care of 'em.

(horn whirring) It was sickening, you know, to see all that labor, and that hard work, and just the animals you cared for their whole life burned up in a horrific way.

It was horrible, I wouldn't wish it on anybody else.

(somber music) The ranch has a excavator and we use it to grind up seed or brush, and mesquites.

And we brought it down here after the fire 'cause we knew we needed to dispose of these cattle that we lost and ones we had to put down.

So dug a big old pit here and we just started hauling 'em up here just to get rid of them.

It's a sad spot for sure.

I don't really like coming up here.

- Emotionally, logistically, financially, I mean that's when the real trouble begins.

- To go replace a cow is really expensive right now.

They're high, I'm hearing.

I know a lot of people had to sell out after a lot of this and so I hope people can, eventually, rebuild it, but the price they are, it's going to be a slow process, I feel.

- The herds take years to build.

These are genetic lines that these ranchers have built over generations of cows.

If that gets wiped out by the fire, not only did you lose the literal value of the individual cows you lost, you lost 20 years of work on a genetic line just up in 20 minutes.

(wind blowing) In the ag industry, profit margins are pretty thin.

You're beholden to a lot of forces outside of your control, so it's already a struggling community.

It's hard enough when it's not burning.

How can you do it when you burn every six years?

(wind blowing) There weren't any easy answers for how they can build back and what do we do to make their lives better?

What do we do to stop these fires from happening?

There's nothing really easy and quick for that.

- This is Tino, we raised her on a bottle.

She'd calved like a couple weeks before the fire and she actually lost her calf in the fire.

We were down on the west end looking for cattle a day or two after and she came up out of there, came right straight to us, and started eating cake out of our hand.

That was a bright spot in all this.

Yeah, no, I don't feel deterred by the fire.

I think my love and hope for the land and this way of life is even stronger because of it.

I don't think I could do anything else.

I don't think I'd be truly happy if I did.

It's a great place to raise kids and our family, and couldn't imagine taking them anywhere else, but right here.

- Something I heard over and over again was even though the idea of rebuilding or starting over from scratch, even though that was daunting, and difficult, and sometimes unfathomable, they were going to rebuild.

There was no question because that's what they do.

I understood that because when I think about my ranch, there is no other option for me.

Leaving and walking away isn't on the table.

For the people of Canadian, it wasn't just land, it wasn't just cows, it was family, it was history.

- It's more than just an industry, or a job, it's their identity.

In Texas, there's this legacy of the land that defines these communities.

- [Emily] I mean, what is Texas without cattle ranches?

- [Sasha] All of these changes contribute to a sense of anxiety over what the future holds for the state.

- [Emily] But for us, as Texans, what are the things we can actually adapt and change?

(gentle upbeat music)