BISMARCK — When tragic events take place, communities can be devastated. Just a simple loss of a home or a business, can devastate a community. What’s going on right now in Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas and and Colorado is mass devastation for dozens of communities and hundreds of families and livelihoods.
The wildfires that have been burning there which we are being told now for the most part are under control, took somewhere between 1.2 and 1.5 million acres, along with people’s homes, farmyards, businesses, their livestock, probably the most heart-wrenching thing to a rancher.
The story we’ve heard coming out of there, not just one time or two times, but dozens of times, that they’re driving across their pasture having to look for these burned or injured animals, and having to euthanize them so they no longer suffer.
The mental anguish that goes with something like that, if you understand the ties that a rancher has to those livestock, those animals. The care and the hours put in every year to keep them healthy, to keep them safe, and when you watch what’s been happening down there, knowing that there is nothing that they can do to keep them safe is devastating.
There’s got to be some efforts to lend a hand. And how can we do that? Because it would be nice for someone to lend a hand if we would ever have to face a mass tragedy like that. And therefore, here at NDFB, we are working through the details on how we can help in a relief fund for those ranchers and those farmers and those communities that have been devastated by the wildfires.
We don’t have all the details hammered out right now, but over the next few days and week, we will have our plan and our details worked out, of how each and every person can do just a little bit to assist those that have lost their livelihoods, and maybe just make a little bit of a bright spot in their day, knowing that those of use in North Dakota care what happens to rural communities four and five states away.
So stay tuned. Details will be coming. But most of all, keep all those families in your prayers in those communities. Because that’s something we can do immediately.
For questions or comments, please contact Dawn Smith-Pfeifer.
— Daryl Lies, President of North Dakota Farm Bureau
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