1-22 IAN Fighting Fires

It's so depressing these days to hear consistently that we're out of money. How could that be? Who was out of money? The United States? Yeah the good old US of A. So at a very micro level what that means is that when range fires occur that can devastate our cattlemen, we don't have the full complement of firefighting that we need from state and federal authorities. Enter the Oyhee County Rangeland Farm Protection Association which puts on fundraisers and gathers volunteers to act as quick responders when fire breaks out on the range. Idaho Cattle Association executive vice president, Wyatt Prescott helped guide the movement to start up the Associations. "it actually started out in Oyhee County during the governor's trail ride outside of Jordan Valley on the Idaho side, we had some Oregon ranchers over who had started there's and had a successful rangeland fire protection Association and some working relationships with BLM, the state and the ranchers and we took their model that year and went to work on it and worked on our state code and worked with the federal land and management agency and I believe the first one was out of Mountain Home. We are seeing them spring up all over the place, the ranchers are really interested in them because it unties their hands when they see a problem out there and they are able to go out and get some of those fires licked before they become a problem.