A fire truck from Argonia, Kan., heads west towards Lake City, Kan., to help battle a large grass fire Wednesday, March 23, 2016. (Travis Morisse/The Hutchinson News via AP)

Wichita ? The Kansas Forest Service has faced budget constraints as it works to deal with wildfires, including the largest in state history that scorched hundreds of square miles of land last month.

Larry Biles, director of the Kansas Forest Service, told The Wichita Eagle the Kansas Forest Service has a budget of around $3 million, but only about 10 percent has come from the state of Kansas. It also gets funding from the federal government, grants and fees.

Biles has been asking the state to provide at least $1 million in matching funds. Instead, he said, as the biggest fire in state history was raging in March, he was required to send back more than $15,000 as part of statewide budget cuts. The small budget also means the Kansas Forest Service has been able to hire only four staffers whose primary responsibility is fire. Just one of those is specifically tasked with direct fire prevention.

One problem the service has had to deal with is the proliferation of red cedars in the state. In Barber County, which had the most damage from the March wildfire, there were tens of thousands more red cedar trees than there were a couple decades ago. The cedars are unwanted fire fuel in part because they soak up water and can survive in dry conditions.

Between 2005 and 2015, the number of red cedars, sometimes called junipers, on Kansas forestland increased from an estimated 55 million to 85 million trees, according to the Kansas Forest Service’s most recent survey. Between 2007 and 2012, cedars encroached on about 50,000 additional acres.

Some would like to see more prescribed burns to keep the cedars at bay in southern Kansas, like those done in eastern Kansas’ Flint Hills region where ranchers burn nearly 2.5 million of their 5 million acres of pasture every year, according to Walter Fick, a professor at Kansas State University who studies range management. But he said ranchers elsewhere may not have the time or expertise for controlled burns like those in the Flint Hills.

This fire season has been so intense the Forest Service hasn’t yet been able to reassess the heightened risks suggested by the red cedar trees and the historic March wildfire, according to Jason Hartman, who has been trying to promote prescribed burns in his role at the forest service.

“It’s such a small staff and budget,” Hartman said, “we just haven’t been able to keep up.”