Nebraska Ranchers Use Fire to Fight Fire—And It's Working

When Fire Chief Jason Schneider watched flames roar back to life behind his crew during Nebraska's Cottonwood Fire, he thought they'd lost the battle. Then local ranchers showed up with a game-changing technique that's been hiding in plain sight for centuries.

The South Loup Burn Association, a group of landowners who practice controlled burning, taught Schneider's volunteer firefighters how to set strategic "back burns" ahead of the wildfire. These small, controlled blazes consumed all the flammable material in the fire's path, starving it of fuel and stopping its deadly advance.

"It would have burned a lot more if they hadn't showed up and helped us get it stopped where we did," Schneider said. The technique worked so well that it's now at the center of Nebraska's fight against increasingly destructive wildfires.

This year marked Nebraska's worst wildfire season on record, with nearly one million acres burned by early May. But the Cottonwood Fire showed that prescribed burns, when done right, can be the solution rather than the problem.

The practice replenishes soil nutrients, controls invasive cedar trees that explode when they burn, and even saves ranchers money. The grass that grows back after a controlled burn is healthier and more nutritious for cattle.

Rancher Tucker Thompson was skeptical when he first helped with a prescribed burn in the early 2000s. He thought the whole idea was crazy. But after seeing cedar trees slowly choke out his grassland and watching how controlled burns could restore the land, he became a convert.

The Ripple Effect

The movement is spreading across Nebraska's ranching communities. The Nebraska Prescribed Fire Council reports that 2025 saw more acres intentionally burned than any recent year, as landowners take fire prevention into their own hands.

Fire ecologist Dirac Twidwell explains the logic simply: "You don't get rid of fire, you just change the nature of it." By removing fire from landscapes entirely, we've accidentally set ourselves up for infrequent but catastrophic blazes instead of frequent, manageable ones.

Climate change and decades of fire suppression have filled Nebraska's grasslands with volatile fuel. Cedar woodlands now creep across native prairies, creating tinderboxes waiting to explode. Prescribed burns clear these dangers before nature lights the match.

The practice isn't without controversy. Some communities in Nebraska's western Sandhills remain deeply skeptical, with one fire chief recalling that residents nearly "lynched" a group trying to establish prescribed burns in their area.

But the science is clear: controlled burns prevent uncontrolled disasters. States across America, from Mississippi to California, are already burning hundreds of thousands of acres intentionally each year to protect millions more from destruction.

Nebraska's volunteer firefighters, who make up 92 percent of the state's fire departments, are now learning from ranchers who've kept this knowledge alive. Together, they're rediscovering an old truth: sometimes you have to light a small fire today to prevent an inferno tomorrow.