No, Texas wildfires have not burned 80% of the state's cattle grazing land | Fact check

Chris Mueller, USA TODAY
·3 min read
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The claim: Texas wildfires destroyed 80% of state's cattle grazing land

A March 4 Instagram video (direct link, archive link) shows a man talking about the devastation wrought by wildfires in Texas.

"Texas is a major producer of beef and it just so happens that these recent wildfires have taken out the place where 80% of the cattle in Texas graze," the man says.

Text above the video reads, "Coincidence that 80% of Texas' cattle grazing land is destroyed in fires?"

The video was liked more than 1,000 times in eight days.

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Our rating: False

The wildfires in Texas have not burned 80% of the state's cattle grazing land, according to a state official. A series of fires that began in late February have burned about 1.2 million acres, but that's only a fraction of the state's 88 million acres of pasture and rangeland.

Wildfires have burned more than 1 million acres, but not 80% of cattle grazing land

Texas firefighters have nearly contained wildfires that started in late February and tore across the state's Panhandle region, leaving thousands of cattle dead. About 1.2 million acres in total have been burned in the wildfires, according to the Texas A&M Forest Service.

The Smokehouse Creek fire, which became the largest wildfire in Texas history, has alone burned more than 1 million acres since it started Feb. 26 in Hutchinson County about 60 miles northeast of Amarillo, The Texas Tribune reported.

But while they've been devastating for many ranchers, the wildfires have not burned 80% of the state's cattle grazing land, Marshall Webb, a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Agriculture, told USA TODAY.

"There is plenty of grassland left in the state of Texas," Webb said in an email.

In 2022, Texas had about 88 million acres of pasture and rangeland, according to data from the National Agriculture Statistics Service provided to USA TODAY by Wilbert Hundl, director of the agency's Southern Plains Regional Field Office. That includes about 7.8 million acres in the Panhandle.

Webb, though, said it is true that more than 80% of cattle raised in the state reside in the Panhandle.

Texas agriculture commissioner Sid Miller previously told USA TODAY that there are more than 11 million livestock animals in Texas, and about 85% are in the Panhandle.

Fact check: Video falsely links Biden comment to Texas wildfires conspiracy theory

The man speaking in the Instagram video makes several other claims, including that the World Economic Forum, a frequent target of misinformation, shut down beef production in the U.S., Ireland and the Netherlands. There are no credible reports to support that assertion. A similar claim has appeared on a website that frequently publishes false information.

It is correct, though, that New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a lawsuit in late February against meat producer JBS claiming it made misleading claims about its greenhouse gas emission goals to boost sales, the Associated Press reported.

And it's also true that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is the largest private farmland owner in the U.S. with nearly 250,000 acres of "highly productive farm ground spread out over 17 states," according to The Land Report, which tracks the country's largest landowners.

USA TODAY reached out to the social media user who shared the post for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

Lead Stories also debunked the claim.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: False claim Texas wildfires burned 80% of grazing land | Fact check