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Nebraska Governor to Address Wind Conference

Eric OKeefe — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 16:20:30 +0000

Gov. Dave Heineman is slated as one of the keynote speakers next month at the Nebraska Wind Power 2009 Conference. Scheduled for Nov. 9-10 in Kearney, the conference will feature nationally known experts on wind and wind power and focus on numerous issues of vital interest to landowners seeking to capitalize on this opportunity to generate revenues from renewable energy.

According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, wind energy is one of the fastest-growing forms of electricity generation in the world. The United States can currently generate more than 25,000 megawatts (MW) of electricity from the wind, which is enough to power about 7 million average American homes. Industry experts predict that, with proper development, wind energy could provide 20 percent of U.S. energy needs.

For more information on the Nebraska Wind Power 2009 Conference, read HERE.

Tour the Flying D With Ted Turner

Grant Gannon — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 07:00:20 +0000

Want an opportunity to meet the top gun on The Land Report 100 on one of his many ranches? Now you can, thanks to a Montana fundraiser. Tickets to tour Ted Turner’s 119,000-acre Flying D Ranch are still available, and they’re going for $1,500. Proceeds go to the Greater Yellowstone Coalition; Turner is a board member.

Your $1,500 fee gets you a driving tour of the ranch from the nation’s largest landowner, cocktails on his back porch, and a dinner featuring ranch-raised bison. Turner has the world’s largest private herd of bison, which he raises on the Flying D and markets through his restaurant concept, Ted’s Montana Grill, with over 50 locations in 18 states.

At last report 10 of the 60 tickets remained.

Read more at:
“Enviro Group Plans Fundraiser at Turner Ranch,” Billings Gazette, June 5, 2009.

For Sale: Split Rock Ranch

Grant Gannon — Wed, 13 May 2009 19:25:03 +0000

As previously reported, the Bell Ranch is the largest piece of property for sale in the United States today. At more than 290,000 acres, the massive holding would instantly qualify its new owner(s) for inclusion on The Land Report 100.

But what about the second largest land listing? I did a little digging and came up with a much different type of landholding: the 193,000-acre Split Rock Ranch in south central Wyoming, which is listed with Ranch Marketing Associates.

This is a much different transaction. First off, only 16,000 acres of the ranch are deeded. The rest is BLM, state, and private leases. The second proviso is that the $14 million purchase price is for a 50 percent interest. The remaining 50 percent interest would be owned by a silent partner.

Split Rock is a working cattle ranch and runs 2,400 pair, plus 600 yearlings. It features 12 miles of Sweetwater River on the property. This isn’t the sort of property a weekend warrior need consider.

That’s not to say a little fun couldn’t be had on the property like trout fishing in the Sweetwater or world-class hunting for elk, deer, and antelope.

Sold! 1,789 Acres of Kansas Farmland for $765 Per Acre

Eric OKeefe — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 19:00:34 +0000

Nebraska’s York College sold off a 1,789-acre bequest in Ellis County, Kansas. The college got $1.369 million ($765 per acre) at the January auction and retained the mineral rights.

Of note is the fact that 1,760 acres are subject to a wind lease with Hays Wind, which is controlled by Iberdrola Renewable Energies. Iberdrola has been granted a conditional-use permit to construct a 200-megawatt wind farm south and west of Hays, Kansas.

The acreage had been willed to the college by Donald Kraus, an Ellis County resident, but college officials reported that York wasn’t interested in going into the farming business. The auction was conducted by Farm & Ranch Realty.

North Dakota Bucks the Recession

Eric OKeefe — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 16:45:45 +0000

The rest of the U.S. may have fallen into a recession, but at the north end of the Great Plains a robust economy and a tight labor supply is keeping North Dakota humming. Unemployment rate? Holding steady at 3.4 percent. New car sales? Up 27 percent. Foreclosure rate? Among the nation’s lowest. And the primary legislative budget issue? What do with a $1.2 billion surplus. What about land prices?

In 2008, land values increased 18 percent, up for the ninth straight year, to $765 per acre, according to the North Dakota Agricultural Statistics Service. Since 2004, when farmland prices equaled the 1982 record average of $455 per acre, a new record has been set every year, said Brian Kugel, a statistician with the North Dakota Agricultural Statistics Service.

Among the reasons being cited are strong farm commodity prices and a surge in oil production.

Nationally, farm real estate values averaged a record $2,350 per acre in January, up about 9 percent from 2007, according to the USDA. The agency cited strong commodity prices, farm programs, and tax incentives among the reasons for the increase.

More specifics on North Dakota land values can be found in this article from the Bismarck Tribune. A good overview of the overall picture in the Sioux State can be found in Saturday’s New York Times.

Federal Reserve Bullish on Great Plains

Eric OKeefe — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 07:00:32 +0000

Farmland in Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Wyoming, and parts of New Mexico jumped 20 percent in the third quarter of 2008, according to a report released by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City this week. Here are some of the reasons why.

The robust demand for ethanol continued to bolster the price of corn as did worldwide demand for commodities. Keep in mind that it was this combination of lean supplies and strong demand that created farmland booms in the 1970s and the mid-1990s. Another essential element of the 1970s boom was the weak U.S. dollar, a factor that created substantial demand for exports then and now.

And don’t forget what happened in the 1980s. Farmland values plummeted 5.2 percent annually, thanks to a global recession, a stronger U.S. dollar, and federal policy decisions. Sound familiar?

Sold! Montana’s 15,800-acre Bar Diamond Ranch

Grant Gannon — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 14:22:44 +0000

There seems to be no sign of an economic fallout in Montana’s still strong recreational land market. That’s the takeaway from the Billings Gazette, which reports that the 15,800-acre Bar Diamond Ranch has closed.
Former H&R Block CEO Richard Brown is the new owner. The ranch had belonged to the families of Vince Carpenter and Jack Dietrich. The two friends bought the Yellowstone County landmark in 1964. Located just north of Billings and within an easy drive of the Billings airport, the Bar Diamond is that ultimate combination: a recreational property with enormous potential upside. The ranch has been utilized mostly for cattle and will continue to do so under the new owner according to the report.

Even with a slow down in the market, good properties will still sell. That’s a point not lost on the sellers. “We think we were really lucky when we sold it because the market really went flat after April and May,” David Dietrick told the Gazette.

The exact sale price was not disclosed, but the Bar Diamond went on the market in 2007 with an asking price of $19 million. That’s an average per acre price of $1,187. Brown, also a former CEO of Dallas-based EDS, has land holdings on the East Coast as well.

Ted Turner Tops the 2008 Land Report 100

Eric OKeefe — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 07:00:59 +0000

For the second year in a row, Ted Turner take top honors as America’s largest landowner with more than a dozen properties totaling more than 2 million acres.

Add to this more than 100,000 acres in Argentina, where he owns two estancias in Patagonia and one in Tierra del Fuego, and the media mogul’s holdings are an empire unto to themselves, ranking larger than 48th state, Delaware.

Here, in a Land Report exclusive, is an excerpt from his recently published memoir, Call Me Ted , is the story of how he went about creating Turner Ranches, an entity that dates back to his acquisition of Montana’s Bar None Ranch.

Turner details his love of land in "Call Me Ted"

“Give Me Land, Lots of Land” from Call Me Ted:

After buying the Bar None Ranch and spending increasing amounts of time in Montana, I fell even more in love with the area. When I enjoy something, I have a tendency to overdo it, and when I was told that a larger ranch was coming on the market, I was interested. Jane and I were still getting used to the scale of the Bar None when I told her that now I was going to look into a property that was many times larger.

The Flying D Ranch is more than 119,000 acres, situated between the Gallatin and Madison Rivers. It’s a beautiful property with good trout streams and it had a lot of pasture that would be perfect for a large bison herd. Jane thought I was crazy but for $21 million (or about $200 an acre) it seemed like it would not only be a great place, but also a terrific investment. I bought it in 1989.

Like most large ranches, the Flying D contained a lot of signs of human impact, like power lines and poles and barbwire fences. One of the first things I wanted to do was get rid of all this junk and barbed wire. My goal was to restore the property to what it would have looked like 150 years earlier, before the white man came. It was a lot of work, but we removed just about every sign of human disturbance, save the dirt and gravel roads.

Part of my desire to own this land was to make sure that it was never developed. Conserving this property for future generations seemed like the right thing to do, especially with so much development happening in that part of the country. I worked out a conservation easement with the Nature Conservancy that guarantees to repopulate the property with bison, an animal that I’d been fascinated by for two years. I purchased my first bison back in the 1970s – a bull and two cows – and kept them at Hope Plantation (where I also had been raising and breeding bears, cougars, and other animals that had been native to that area in earlier days).

I knew that the bison population had once numbered in the tens of millions before dropping to below a thousand, and for the Flying D to look like it looked hundreds of years before, we needed a large her.

During my early years of ranch ownership, my enthusiasm did lead me to make some mistakes. For example, the Flying D had hundreds of miles of barbed wire fencing and I had every bit of it removed, thinking this would allow the bison to roam free on about eighty thousand acres. I learned that when you do this, the animals tend to overgraze certain areas and undergraze others, and we had to bring back some limited fencing — not barbwire, I might add.

The Bar None and the Flying D gave me so much pleasure that I decided to buy as many large properties as I could reasonably afford. By the end of the 1990s, I had purchased two more ranches in Montana, three in Nebraska, one in Kansas, and one in South Dakota (they’re used primarily for bison ranching).

Then between 1992 and 1996, I bought three large ranches in New Mexico. The biggest, Vermejo Park, is nearly 600,000 acres, and together these three ranches cover more than one million acres. They are also used for bison ranching, as well as hunting and fishing, and Vermejo sits on top of valuable natural gas that is being extracted by an energy company that has the rights. They do this work very carefully, extracting the gas while protecting the ranch’s beauty and wildlife.

I’ve also enjoyed working on the return and protection of threatened and endangered species. In addition to bison (of which we now have about 45,000 head), we’ve worked to reintroduce about twenty other species. These include gray wolves, red-cockaded woodpeckers, and black-footed ferrets. These were all challenging projects so I looked for the best people I could to help manage the properties.

I hired Russ Miller in 1989 and he’s been with me ever since, doing a terrific job as general manager of the ranches. In 1997 I created the Turner Endangered Species Fund, recruiting Mike Phillips (who led the effort to bring back the gray wolf to Yellowstone) to run the organization, along with my son Beau, who studied wildlife management at Montana State University after graduating from The Citadel.

In Montana, I learned to love fly-fishing. It’s one of the few things I do that’s not only interesting and challenging but also relaxing. Unfortunately, it’s not a sport you can enjoy during a Montana winter (except on rare occasions), but I learned that there are rivers and areas in the Patagonia region of Argentina that are similar to Montana. Since South America is counterseasonal to the United States, I could fish there during the North American winter. In ’97, I purchased a nine-thousand-acre ranch in Patagonia named La Primavera, and in 2000, a 93,000-acre property named Collon Cura. I also bought a 24,000-acre ranch and fishing lodge on the island of Tierra del Fuego. These three properties all feature great fly-fishing.

Subsequently, I acquired two more ranches on the Great Plains of Nebraska and one in Oklahoma, primarily for raising bison. Today, with over 2 million acres, I’m the largest individual landowner in the United States. We operate our ranches responsibly from an environmental viewpoint and also have an outfitting business that allows hunters and fishermen to use our properties on a limited basis. With revenues from bison sales, some controlled forestry, energy leases, and private hunting and fishing, the ranches turn a small profit.

Owning the properties has given me tremendous pleasure. My connection to nature goes back to my early childhood when I spent hours outdoors either alone or with Jimmy Brown. I’d fish, gig for frogs, or just observe the wildlife around me and these times helped me through a lot of loneliness and gave me great peace of mind. Being outdoors is my chance to unwind, clear my head, and think. The time I spend in nature refreshes and recharges me and reminds me how much raw beauty exists in the world — and how careful we should be to preserve it. The ranches are also great places for me to spend time with friends.

On nearly every trip I make in the United States or Argentina, I invite friends and family. I’ve also hosted business colleagues and world leaders. (I’m proud to say that three Nobel Peace Prize winners have been among my houseguests — Mikhail Gorbachev, Jimmy Carter, and former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan.) I also enjoy observing and interacting with nature and it’s a special feeling to be part of the natural environment.

One of my favorite experiences involves a bird I befriended several years ago at my Snow Crest Ranch in Montana. It was a baby magpie that had fallen out of its nest and was lying on the ground. My house staff and I pulled together a box, some paper towels, and an eyedropper, and gave it food and water. The little magpie responded and we pulled him through.

In the process we bonded, and I named him Harry. We bought a traveling cage for him and took him with us when we moved from one ranch to another. He learned to talk and would up providing great entertainment. We would let him out of the cage during the day and he’d follow me around.

When I’m at a ranch I get a FedEx package from my office of the previous day’s mail. With Harry, I’d sit on my couch reading my mail and once I was through, I’d crush the pages into a ball and throw them on the ground for Harry to play with. He charmed everyone (including Gorbachev — he sat next to his coffee cup one morning at breakfast and gave him a couple of light pecks on his famous forehead). Harry became a little too feisty and ran into trouble when he started dive-bombing people and we were concerned that he might put someone’s eye out. We decided we had to take Harry to the Beartooth Nature Center in Red Lodge, Montana. He still lives there, and to this day, whenever I see magpies flying overhead, I think of my old pal Harry.

I’m proud of the work we’ve done to preserve and protect the properties and I’ve tried to do everything I can to make sure that they’re maintained after I’m gone. With my passing the properties will be protected by conservation easements. In certain parts of the country, my rancher neighbors have grown suspicious of me and created theories about ulterior motives I might have, going so far as to speculate that I might be trying to tie up and control water rights for entire regions. None of this is true. As long as the conservation laws of the United States remain in place, the land will be protected from development in perpetuity (and we’ve taken similar measure with the Argentine properties).

I’m often reminded of Scarlett O’Hara’s father in Gone With the Wind, who told her, “Why, land’s the only thing in the world worth working for, worth fighting for, worth dying for, because it’s the only thing that lasts.” I’ve realize this to be true, and I’m proud to know that I’ve done what I can to make sure that my land is protected.

You can purchase a copy of Call Me Ted by visiting Amazon.com

Sold! Osborne Cattle Company in the Nebraska Sandhills

Eric OKeefe — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 19:00:43 +0000

Hall & Hall’s Denver office just closed on Nebraska’s Osborne Cattle Company. Located outside of Paxton in Keith and Lincoln Counties, the 20,452± deeded acres feature 2½ miles of North Platte River frontage and can run 2,000 mother cows. The ranch had been on the market for approximately 10 months with the price reduced to $11.5 million ($562 per acre). The brokerage would not confirm final sales numbers, but according to Tom Metzger at Hall & Hall, the cow/calf operation was sold to an in-state cattle operator. “Good Sandhills ranches are always in demand,” Metzger said.

Native Americans Harvest the Wind

Eric OKeefe — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 18:59:26 +0000

Each Friday I scan the Escapes section of The New York Times for an urban take on life in the hinterland. But the keeper in today’s Times was not in the Escapes section but in National: Felicity Barringer’s report on how the 29,000 Rosebud Sioux are turning to wind power for economic sustenance.

Located in the heart of the Wind Belt, the Owl Feather War Bonnet wind farm is slated to be a 30 MW project that will power roughly 12,000 homes when it comes on line. (No date was given for completion.) The estimated cost, which will be carried exclusively by the developer of the wind farm, Distributed Generation Systems, was listed as $58.6 million with payments to the tribe totaling $5 million of that amount.

One point worth considering in this equation is that Rosebud Sioux tribal lands cover almost 1 million acres of South Dakota. According to the tribe’s website, more than 800,000 acres are used primarily for grazing, an ideal site for future development.