Australia, South America, North America, and Africa are some of the more prolific continents that depend on ranching and ranchers to raise necessary livestock. Ranching is the practice of raising livestock and wildlife to provide meat, dairy, products, and raw materials for fabrics. Ranching, on a large scale, can improve rangeland and plant biodiversity. In another light, some ranches, most often named dude ranches , offer tourist facilities.
Dude ranches allow guests to help out in real ranching activities, while others focus on horseback riding, trail rides, and even hunting. These two seem to have a friendly competition on who can own more acres! Other notable figures and conservationists have adopted ranches in other regions throughout the world.
Public lands also dominate the landscape of the rural West in the United States. In some areas, federal land exceeds 80 percent of the total land in the state. This means that ranching frequently requires the leasing of public land. What are some of the largest ranches in the world, though? As one of the biggest ranches in the world, Vermejo Park Ranch covers , acres. This amazing ranch is open to the public and even offers exclusive accommodations with its many cottages, eco-friendly mountaintop lodges, and mansions.
This property is known for hosting workshops, tours, and even seasonal festivals such as the October Harvest Festival. Another massive ranch in the United States unsurprisingly sits in Texas. This one got its start back in , and over time it grew to about , acres.
The W. Waggoner Estate stretches into six counties, with headquarters in Vernon, Texas. The main purpose of Waggoner Ranch is ranching, oil, and approximately 26, acres of cultivation.
The ranch itself employs approximately 96 people ranging from cowboys, farm hands, oil fields workers, and office staff.
Other Features: Multiple land use including ranching, farming, and thoroughbred raising. Those ranches are big, but they can get bigger. King Ranch comes in at about , acres, and this makes it the biggest ranch in Texas. The ranch is located in south Texas between Corpus Christi and Brownsville. As a more modern ranch, King Ranch has a variety of business operations including:.
King Ranch also has extensive operations in Florida. There, it is involved in sugar cane, sod, sweet corn, green bean, and specialty lettuce production and farming. In all, King Ranch is often considered the birthplace of ranching in North American and operates, today, in ranching, farming, retail, and more. Australians use a different vocabulary word to describe a ranch. The company represents a colorful part of Texas history.
From its beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century as a family cattle ranch, the company has evolved into a major multinational operation active in a variety of agricultural and energy-related activities.
While it is perhaps most famous for its agribusiness segment cattle breeding; horse breeding; farming; commodity marketing and processing; commercial hunting leases , King Ranch also explores and develops oil and gas properties through its King Ranch Oil and Gas, Inc. Other businesses in which King Ranch is involved include residential real estate and a smattering of retail and commercial ventures near its Texas home turf. A private company, King Ranch is owned by 60 or so descendants of company founder Captain Richard King, a legendary figure in the history of cattle ranching in the United States.
Captain King started up his ranch in in an area known at the time as the Wild Horse Desert or the Nueces Strip, bounded by the Nueces River on the north and the Rio Grande on the south. A steamboat pilot by trade, King had arrived in southern Texas about eight years earlier to run a shipping operation on the Rio Grande with partner Mifflin Kenedy. King purchased the land and he and Lewis launched the livestock operation that would eventually grow into the King Ranch.
In order to expand the ranch during its early years, King hired a lawyer to seek out the owners of the old land grants throughout the area. He then bought the parcels and annexed them to the ranch. King also began to buy and sell cattle in huge numbers. His buying trips frequently took him into Mexico. In King brought north not only all of the cattle from one particular Mexican village suffering through a drought, but all of the village's humans as well. These transplanted villagers went to work on the ranch.
The ranch managed to survive its early years in spite of a hostile environment created by the presence of bandits, unhappy Indians, and the usual assortment of rustlers, raiders, and ruffians associated with the Wild West.
King split his time between his two businesses, steamboating and ranching, during this period. In King built the first ranch house at the Santa Gertrudis site on a spot suggested by his friend Robert E. Lee, a young Lieutenant Colonel at the time. During the Civil War, the ranch served as a depot for the export of southern cotton through Mexico, sidestepping the Union naval blockade.
King and Kenedy also used their shipping enterprise to supply the Confederate army. By the end of the Civil War, thousands of head of cattle were roaming the ranch, which had grown to nearly , acres in size. In King began using the Running W brand to mark his cattle. The Running W eventually became one of the most widely recognized marks in the history of the cattle industry. By the end of the s, King Ranch longhorns were being sold in northern markets.
In order for this to happen, the cattle had to be driven thousands of miles to railroad points as far away as St. Louis, and later, Abilene, Kansas. Between and , over , head of cattle from King Ranch made the trip. Much of the livestock ended up in the Chicago stockyards; other destinations included new ranches springing up in Oklahoma, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana, as the cattle industry of the West began to mature.
In a young lawyer named Robert Kleberg began handling the legal affairs of King Ranch. Kleberg quickly became an indispensable part of the ranch's operation. When King died in , he left his entire estate to his wife, Henrietta. The ranch covered more than , acres by this time.
King, who outlived her husband by 40 years, made Kleberg the full-time manager of the ranch. Kleberg married King's daughter Alice the following year. Under Kleberg's management, operations at the ranch were streamlined and made more efficient. Kleberg built fences to divide the sprawling ranch into more manageable units. He also began to cross his cowherd with Shorthorn and Hereford bulls, since the expansion of the railroad made the Longhorn's ability to walk long distances irrelevant.
At that time all titles were put under the business name R. King and Company. King and Kenedy dissolved their partnership in , and King retained Santa Gertrudis. That same year King fenced in a tract of his ranch that surrounded the Santa Gertrudis headquarters. During the rest of his life, King would purchase sixty additional pieces of land and amass vast land holdings throughout South Texas.
During the early days of the Ranch, King tried a variety of grazing animals including cattle, horses, sheep, and goats.
His first officially recorded brand was the HK, in The now-famous Running W appeared in the s and was registered on February 9, , as the official brand for King Ranch—a mark that is still used today. To aid in the running of the Ranch, King brought approximately men, women, and children he encountered on a cattle buying trip in Mexico to help tend his herds.
The foundation stock of King Ranch was the Longhorn ; many head were bought in Mexico. In King bought several Brahman bulls. In the s Shorthorns and Herefords were brought to the Ranch. Brahmans, which were especially adapted to the South Texas climate, were crossbred with the Shorthorns to produce the famous Santa Gertrudis cattle , officially recognized as a breed by the U. Department of Agriculture in During the first part of the twentieth century, King Ranch became a diversified enterprise.
While continuing to develop its cattle activities, centered on the Santa Gertrudis breed, the Ranch began to both breed and race quarter horses and thoroughbreds and began oil and gas production.
The Ranch also expanded its cattle operation for a time to include property in four U. During the early twentieth century, King Ranch developed many environmental stewardship practices and a strong commitment to wildlife conservation and habitat maintenance.
Some sections of the Ranch became wildlife preserves for deer, quail, ducks, wild turkeys, and Nilgai antelope. The Ranch employed Valgene W. Lehmann as a conservationist in and placed strict game restrictions on its properties. The lease expired in , and throughout the s, the Ranch and Humble negotiated for oil-drilling and mineral-recovery rights on the property.
0コメント