Flames amid the fog

BELVIDERE, Ill. — On an early morning thick with fog, a fire blazed out of control, but almost no one could see it. It was at the farm where Daniel and Heather Travis house their heifers, less than a quarter mile from their home farm.

The couple’s alarm went off around 5 a.m. Sept. 12. They saw a vehicle pull in the yard a half-hour later, assuming the visitor was there to buy eggs from their self-serve farm market. Instead, the man was there to deliver bad news.

“The guy walked up and said, ‘You know your heifer barn is on fire?’” Daniel said. “I said, ‘No, I didn’t know that.’ You could just see a little glow through the fog, and he had already called it in.”

A couple of other people also stopped in to say they saw or smelled smoke but did not see a fire.

“It was such dense fog that morning, we couldn’t see anything,” Heather said. “You couldn’t hear, see, or smell the fire from here. It was very eerie.”

The Travis family milks 120 cows with two Lely A5 robots and farms 300 acres at Die Hard Dairy near Belvidere. Daniel and Heather have eight children ranging in age from 3 to 17. The couple took over the farm after Heather’s father passed away in 2016. They were milking 45 cows at the time. Growing from within, the Travis family was milking 100 cows in a 36-stall tiestall barn and switching three groups when they built a robotic barn and storefront in 2024.

When Daniel and Heather arrived at their heifer farm at 5:40, the old dairy barn was already fully engulfed. The fire department had just arrived as well.

“It was gone,” Heather said. “There was nothing anyone could do.”

Within a half-hour, the loafing shed was gone too.

“There was nothing left,” Daniel said.

About 50 heifers were housed at the farm. When first arriving at the scene, Daniel could not see any animals through the fog.

“I thought they were all in the loafing shed,” he said. “I thought they were all gone.”

The fire ignited in the 200-year-old barn that was used to store hay, straw and equipment. The cause of the fire was inconclusive but is suspected to be electrical in nature.

“Everything was so dry, and it was so hot for so long,” Heather said. “We didn’t have rain for a long time. It was such a calm morning, but that barn burned so hot and so fast.”

Daniel and his daughter finally found the heifers in the far corner of the pasture, but not all were accounted for. Some had broken into the burning loafing shed, and some were on the cement lot.

“When the barn collapsed, those in the lot couldn’t get out,” Daniel said. “They got stuck between the barn and the bunk and were trapped. There was nothing I could do. I watched them die.”

Daniel said he wanted to help them, but he knew the consequences.

“You have to value your human life,” he said. “It would have been silly to do anything. The best part is that no people were hurt. Sadly, you can replace cattle.”

When the community asked how they could help the family, the Travises asked people to support their market.

“We have a large following with T-J’s Market, and so many people reached out after the fire,” Heather said. “My Facebook post about the fire reached 191,000 views. You really find your tribe when something like that happens. You don’t realize all the people you reached.”

People dropped off meals for the family, and the coffee trailer that parks at their market several days a week came special the day of the fire to serve free drinks to people helping the Travis family.

“It makes you feel like you matter,” Daniel said.

Heather’s parents, Tim and Janet Mundy, started T-J’s Farm Market with a little wagon in their front yard in 1996.

“The community has been amazing,” Heather said. “Belvidere is a really nice town to be in, has a good outlay of people, and they were very giving.”

Support flowed in from beyond Belvidere as well and included many new faces.

“A lot of people came,” Daniel said.

The Travis family sells fruits and vegetables, eggs, milk from another farm that makes a low-pasteurized product, beef, pork, chicken, cheese, honey, maple syrup, canned and jarred items, soap made from cows’ and goats’ milk, and apparel. In the summer, their specialty is sweetcorn, and in the fall, it is pumpkins and mums. The self-serve market is open 24 hours a day year-round.

“That’s a good selling point for us,” Daniel said. “We try to be community friendly, and people love it.”

Heather said a future goal is to bottle their own milk.

“We’ve got the clientele and the market already,” she said. “You have to diversify at this size of dairy; you can’t just milk cows anymore.”

Daniel and Heather are currently housing their heifers at a neighbor’s farm. They plan to rebuild but are still deciding what that will look like.

“We were going to move everything back here, but then we would have to build all new,” Daniel said. “Over there, I still have a barnyard, etc. We’re still thinking.”

The heartache of losing animals has been the hardest part of this catastrophe, Daniel said.

“We’re still kind of fighting that,” he said.

Heather agreed.

“We only moved 31 that day, and we’ve lost a handful since,” she said. “There’s still one not out of the water that was burnt pretty badly. The vet said it could be nine months to a year before we know how some of them will turn out from inhaling smoke.”

Most of the heifers were pregnant, and many were mid-term to later-term pregnancies. A few heifers also suffered injuries to their feet from walking on hot debris.

“Right now, the majority of the ones left look decent,” Daniel said. “That may be a little bit of good news.”

The family has lost a piece of their farm’s future, with fewer heifers now to calve in.

“I bred those animals, and now they’re gone,” Daniel said. “Our numbers were looking pretty good, and we were considering selling some of those heifers as replacements. We’ll probably hold onto a few cows that we would have switched out for heifers.”

Heather said the impact is far-reaching when considering the generational loss.

“You’re not only losing that cow, but you’re also losing however many calves that cow would have had,” she said. “That’s the hard part with the fire —you have to keep going; you have to keep your head above water. You don’t have a choice.”