When Roy Angermiller was a college student in Alpine, Texas, he worked part‑time riding pastures and checking calves for screwworm‑eaten navels.
“We would have to rope them and calm down and doctor the screwworms,” he recalls. “I couldn’t start to tell you how many — it was a lot.”
Back then, he says, “everybody had horses and long rope” and “they had the cowboys” to do the work. With New World screwworm confirmed in Texas in June 2026, Angermiller and others agree the industry is confronting the parasite with a fraction of the labor force it once had.
Today’s ranches run more cattle, face heavier wildlife pressure and, as Angermiller puts it bluntly, “there’s a cowboy shortage.”
A Parasite That Demands Labor
A key to slowing down the spread of NWS is getting eyes on livestock and then treating and reporting the infestation.
State Rep. Don McLaughlin, who represents Texas House District 80, doesn’t hesitate when he’s asked if cowboy labor will hold back the NWS response.
“It’s gonna be a huge problem,” he stresses. “We don’t have the cowboys that we did before. We don’t have the day labor — those men are gone.”
From the producer side, Angermiller sees the same pattern. He remembers a time when young cowboys lined up for day work. Today, many sale barns and ranches are scrambling to find help to get eyes on cattle.
The Wage Gap and the H-2A Hurdle
Underneath the NWS headlines is a more basic question: What will it take to attract and keep the people who can do this work?
“What we paid 10 years ago isn’t going to work today,” McLaughlin says. “You’re going to have to pay the going rate and accept it. If we want to pay the $10 an hour that we were paying 10 years ago, that’s not going to work today.”
At Southwest Livestock Exchange, co-owner Jimmy Speer is trying to line up enough hands to move cattle through the barn, follow any new inspection rules and keep commerce flowing.
“The labor force is not here as far as cowboys,” he says. “Labor is going to be the question of how well we can get this thing managed.”
He notes some outfits are already turning to H‑2A workers for cowboy skills — but the process is neither quick nor simple. Speer says screwworm isn’t going to wait three months for paperwork. For many ranchers, that mismatch between government timelines and real‑time animal health is a serious concern.
Angermiller agrees the challenge could be bigger this time. Three shifts worry him the most:
- Fewer cowboys and horses
- More cattle per person, often in larger or rougher country
- Heavier wildlife pressure, giving NWS more wild hosts
Today, many ranches lean on feed trucks, side‑by‑sides and helicopters. Those tools help gather quickly — but they don’t automatically replace daily, close‑up visual checks for wounds.
Can Technology Help Cover the Gap?
Some producers point to technology as a potential answer in a world with fewer boots in the stirrups.
On one South Texas operation, virtual fencing collars are making surveillance and monitoring more efficient. Others are working with game cameras and AI tools to flag injuries instead of expecting someone to flip through thousands of photos.
“We’re trying to figure out how to train a model that can actually detect injury in trail‑camera pictures so we’re not looking at thousands of images of grass movement,” says Jason Sawyer, East Foundation chief science officer.
Even with technology tools, somebody must respond when a collar pings or a camera flags a suspicious image.
When the U.S. eradicated screwworm in 1966, the fight relied on sterile insect releases along with day cowboys who rode sunup to sundown roping and doctoring calves. Today’s cattle industry includes more animals with fewer people, and that efficiency might come at a cost when a labor‑intensive pest returns.
Angermiller’s question, echoed by McLaughlin, Speer and others, is one every rancher should ask now, before screwworm shows up at their gate: If NWS lands in my area, do I have the hands to deal with it?
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