Harvey evacuee marks 104th birthday, yearns for home,
Because much of the flooding was freshwater, pastures were not killed.
As John Locke looked down from a helicopter at his roughly 200 cattle struggling with Harvey’s rising floodwaters, he saw about 20 becoming entangled in a barbed wire fence and feared the worst.
Bundled in a lifejacket, the 38-yearold rancher jumped in to try and help. But by the time he reached the Brahmans, a beef cow species that originated in India and is known for its distinctive hump, most had already freed themselves and headed for higher ground with the rest of the herd.
“I thought they were going to die, and they’re fine, which is kind of a theme for the whole thing,” Locke said.
The damage Harvey inflicted on Texas’ cattle industry hasn’t been calculated yet, but there’s evidence that it might be less than initially feared and perhaps not as costly as Hurricane Ike. Ike came ashore in 2008 as a weaker storm but with more salty storm surge that wiped out pastures for months. Even though Harvey unleashed catastrophic flooding on counties that are home to 1.2 million beef cattle, which is more than a fourth of the state’s herd, there were apparently only a few instances in which large groups of cows drowned.
To be sure, some ranchers were walloped by Harvey, including at least one family that lost hundreds of cattle in flooding that reached the rooftops of low-lying homes near Beaumont, said Bill Hyman, who heads the Independent Cattleman’s Association of Texas. And even surviving cattle can