By Message Staff
Louisiana Baptists State Disaster Relief Director Gibbie McMillan has issued an urgent call for donations for ranchers who have lost thousands of acres of land and cattle from recent wildfires in several Midwestern states.
The most pressing donations needed are bales or rolls of hay, trucks to transport the hay and money to purchase fuel to transport the hay or purchase additional hay bales.
“It’s hard to get your hands on something this large, especially for us who are not familiar with that terrain and the kind of problems like this,” McMillan said. “But when people are hurting, what they need is a friendly hand and a shoulder to lean on. For the church to be the church, we need to care about people who are hurting. We’re not asking people to give all their hay away but I do know if a person has 100 bales, they should be able to share 10 round bales of hay without it crippling their yield for the year. And those people have nothing. That’s heart wrenching.”
Around 811,000 acres of land in Kansas and Oklahoma and another 750,000 in the Texas panhandle have burned since the fires began.
Six people have also perished due to the fires and the death toll for animals, which is being estimated into the thousands, has not yet been counted as many ranchers are still assessing their losses as they travel their burnt pastures.
Oklahoma Baptist Disaster Relief State Director Sam Porter told the Baptist Message that as of Friday, March 10, Arkansas and Missouri Baptist State Conventions have donated around 1,800 bales of hay. Another significant need throughout the rest of the month is for semi-trucks to haul the hay from Arkansas and Missouri to northwestern Oklahoma.
Louisiana Bqaptists Director of Disaster Relief is making an urgent plea for hay to assist farmers and ranchers in the Midwest and Texas who have been ravaged by wildfires.
“This is a catastrophic blow to the ranchers in the 1.5 million acre fire zone,” Porter said. “Their grass and stored hay are completely burned away in the middle of a major beef production area of the USA. It will be 1.5 months before enough grass will be growing there to sustain their needs. So hay will have to be trucked in.”
Southern Baptist Disaster Relief teams have activated feeding units, sending one just west of Fort Supply, Okla., an area that sustained significant amounts of damage, Porter said. Another unit was expected to begin operating at First Baptist Church in Laverne, Okla, today. More are expected to be activated in the near future.
“DR has been asked to set up a larger mobile kitchen to feed in partnership with the Salvation Army, Red Cross to prepare more than 600 firemen two meals per day, and it could ramp up to 800,” Porter said in a news release. “The food will be delivered to five different locations because of the vast area of the fires including Arnett, Buffalo, Beaver and Laverne.”
This is not the first time Louisiana Baptists have come provided a ‘haylift’ aid of their farming and ranching neighbors to the West. In 2011, more than 90 percent of Texas was in extreme stages of drought. The unprecedented drought — Texas was in its driest 10 months in more than 100 years – prevented grain feed from growing.
Woodland Park and Ebenezer Baptist churches, both in Hammond, took the lead and gathered hay from farms in the Loranger area. The effort grew as others joined in to help. In addition, Northshore Baptist Association and the Louisiana Baptist Convention disaster relief both contributed $1,000 toward the ‘haylift.’
To donate, contact the Eastern Louisiana Baptist Association office at 225-664-9309 or info@elbamissions.org, or the associate associational missions coordinator Freddie Arnold, 225-362-9103 or freddie.arnold@gmail.com.
