Editor @LandReport
The Lone Star State
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MEET FARMER BILL. Uncovering the story of America's leading farmland owner was definitely an adventure. Fortunately, I had a little help from one of my favorite Clint Eastwood characters. tinyurl.com/y54scrcc #BillGates #farmland #agriculture #investing
HE TOOK HIS COMPANY PUBLIC. THEN HE BOUGHT THE WORST RANCH HE COULD FIND.
After Church’s Fried Chicken IPOed in 1969, J. David Bamberger decided to buy his own Shangri-La. Not just any property. But “the worst land in Blanco County.” (His words.)
When the news got out that Church’s CEO had bought 3,000 overgrazed acres in the Texas Hill Country, everyone in Johnson City thought he’d lost his mind.
He confirmed their claims when he began building a bat cave on his land. Not a Bruce Wayne-style Batcave, but the first man-made roost for the only mammal capable of true flight.
The guy had a screw loose, right? Actually, the guy had a plan.
J. David was an Ohio farm boy who grew up in a house without running water or electricity. But it was a home, one full of big ideas. Thanks to the copy of Pleasant Valley that Hester Bamberger gave her son, an intriguing idea took root.
Louis Bromfield’s story about nurturing an Ohio farm back to health stayed with J. David through his college career at Kent State. It stayed in his mind’s eye as he peddled vacuum cleaners door to door. It may have taken decades to bloom, but it finally did more than a thousand miles from Ohio in the Texas Hill Country.
J. David passed away at 97 earlier this year.
The worst land in Blanco County? It’s now a vibrant nonprofit that celebrates the wonders of nature with thousands of schoolkids each year. The preserve’s biologists welcome landowners interested in bettering their properties.
And the most amazing part?
More than half a million Mexican free-tailed bats roost at the preserve’s “chiroptorium,” the term J. David coined to describe the bat cave he created.
From no running water to the world’s first man-made bat cave.
Hats off to J. David Bamberger.
Photo credit © Selah • Bamberger Ranch Preserve
bambergerranch.org
THE REAGAN RANCH KEPT OUR 40TH PRESIDENT GROUNDED. LITERALLY.
Rancho del Cielo was no gilded cage. The Reagans bought the 688-acre property in 1974. Then they renovated its 1,500-square-foot adobe headquarters.
Think about that.
1,500 square feet is a starter home. A large apartment. A supersized garage.
Yet this is where the Reagans welcomed Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip.
Mornings were spent on horseback and afternoons in the field.
Thanks to the president’s superior horsemanship, the Secret Service set up a riding school for his protective detail. Behind them would be a Humvee carrying more Secret Service agents, a White House physician, and a military aide with the nuclear football.
After lunch, Reagan, Barney Barnett, and Dennis LeBlanc (former state police bodyguards) fixed fences, chopped firewood, and cleared brush.
Dinner was no picnic. According to Max Boot in Reagan: His Life and Legend, “… the men would get up almost as hungry as when they sat down, but the unassuming president never complained or asked for seconds.”
It was the exact opposite of the grand soirees the Reagans enjoyed at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, according to Jennifer Pickens in Entertaining at the White House.
Then the group would watch Murder, She Wrote. Without fail, the president and one or both of his sidekicks would be snoozing before the end of the hour-long episode.
Reagan’s daily routine at the Western White House gave him clarity. It recharged his battery. And it countered suggestions that the 70-year-old was losing a step.
Still, some thought the former actor was up to his old tricks.
“When asked by a journalist what he ‘really’ thought about while ‘chopping all that wood,’ Reagan replied with a two-word answer worthy of the famously taciturn Calvin Coolidge: ‘the wood,’” wrote Boot.
The American people got the picture.
“It was the version of Reagan revealed at the ranch — affable, modest, unaffected, down to earth, hard-working — that lay at the core of his political appeal.”
Photo credit © National Archives
WASHINGTON SURVEYED IT. JEFFERSON OWNED IT.
THE SON OF ITALIAN IMMIGRANTS SAVED IT.
The Monacan Indians called the Natural Bridge of Virginia “the Bridge of God.” Naturalists labeled it “one of the Seven Wonders of the New World.” In 1750, a teenager named George Washington surveyed it.
More than two decades later, Thomas Jefferson purchased it from King George III for 20 shillings. This was in 1774, two years before the Sage of Monticello wrote the Declaration of Independence. TJ and G3 were still on speaking terms.
Yet it was the son of Italian immigrants who sealed its destiny. Angelo Puglisi’s parents emigrated from Sicily. He made a name for himself as a real estate developer in Washington, D.C. Given his penchant for property, it’s no surprise that a friend talked him into buying the Natural Bridge in 1988.
Turns out that was the easy part. Deciding what to do with it? That was the hard part. Or was it?
Angelo shared three thoughts with The Land Report.
The first: “The Bridge and its history are as precious as the Liberty Bell.”
The second: “When I finally saw this natural wonder and started learning its history and its connection to our Founding Fathers — the men who made my father’s dream and the dreams of millions of other immigrants possible — I knew it had to be protected for future generations.”
The clincher: “I didn’t want a zipline running off it.”
Natural Bridge State Park was dedicated on September 24, 2016.
tinyurl.com/yp895hek
JOHN MALONE PAID $78 MILLION TO KEEP COLORADO FROM DISAPPEARING.
In 2000, John and Leslie Malone paid $55 million to buy Greenland Ranch: the last best 17,700 acres between Denver and Colorado Springs. They contributed another $23 million for conservation easements.
To developers, the historic ranch offered badly needed room to build. To the Malones, it was the last open stretch between the two fastest growing cities on Colorado’s Front Range: 12 miles where you can see all the way to the top of Pikes Peak without a single strip center or a sea of rooftops in the way.
They left it as-is. Permanently.
“You can’t appreciate what a precious commodity open land is until you see it vanish over time,” Malone wrote in his memoir, Born to Be Wired. “And then one day you look, and it’s gone. Forever.”
That sounds simple. It is not.
You can always build another warehouse or widen a highway. But once a ranch is divided, no amount of landscaping can put it back together.
That’s what makes Greenland Ranch so critical. It’s a gift to anyone who believes Colorado actually ought to look like the Colorado pictured in postcards.
Malone came West during Denver’s cable-cowboy era. His contemporaries included Bob Magness, John Sie, Barry Diller, Rupert Murdoch, and Ted Turner. As Malone put it, the founder of CNN would see a path forward and then figure out how to make it work. Malone, on the other hand, figured out how to make things work, then moved forward.
Greenland Ranch has this methodical stamp. It was not a spontaneous purchase. It was a carefully considered decision to preserve a one-of-a-kind property that could never be replicated. Working with The @ConservationFnd and Douglas County, the Malones left an indelible mark that is no mark at all.
Others saw a valuable development opportunity. John and Leslie Malone saw the bigger picture.
The best land stories aren’t always about what someone builds.
Sometimes, they are about what someone has the vision not to build.
Photo credit @ John Fielder
THE POWER OF LAND.
Zane Kiehne couldn’t even qualify to bid on his first cattle ranch. Twenty-four years later, he paid $200 million cash for America’s Greatest Ranch.
In 1994, Texas A&M put the Kyle Ranch on the market. It didn’t want much — just $40 an acre — but there was a catch. It was a cash-only sale. There was no tote the note on this one.
The bad news was Kiehne couldn’t pay $632,000. The good news was no one else wanted to pay $632,000.
Kiehne saw his opening.
He went back to Texas A&M with a full-boat offer — $632,000 — only he and his cousin Oliver would finance it with $170,000 down.
The ranch was theirs. The Kyle was sparse cattle country. Turns out it sat atop the Delaware Basin.
Kiehne understood that land is more than grass and fences. It is a bundle of rights and possibilities. He didn’t own the oil and gas — Texas A&M kept those rights — but his surface rights meant he could mine caliche and gravel, and sell easements for power lines, pipelines, cell towers, and boreholes. When fracking came to West Texas, water became liquid gold.
Zane Kiehne didn’t just buy ground. He made it work.
In 2018, he sold his water rights for more than half a billion dollars. Then he set his sights on the ranch he always wanted: New Mexico’s UU Bar Ranch. Turns out it wasn’t for sale. But Kiehne had a knack for making the impossible possible. He offered Bob Funk $200 million. Just as importantly, he offered Funk a six-year leaseback to wrap up his affairs.
That’s playing the long game: understanding what the other side needs, then structuring a deal that works for both the buyer and seller.
Kiehne and his wife, Tanya, have expanded the UU Bar. They’ve improved the roads, the fences, the waters, the cattle, and the world-class wildlife habitat.
Zane Kiehne couldn’t bid on his first ranch. But he learned the power of land.
Twenty-four years later, he paid cash for the one he wanted all along — and it wasn’t for sale.
Photo Credit: @gustavfoto
JAKE PAUL DIDN’T BUY A GETAWAY.
He bought a sanctuary.
@jakepaul moves quickly. Fights. Promotions. New ventures. New platforms. When he sees an opening, he takes it. So the moment he set eyes on Southlands — a 5,746-acre sporting property on Lake Seminole in Southwest Georgia — he did what pathbreakers do.
He moved.
The property, which he has since renamed Paul Reserve, is anything but ordinary. No public roads. No power lines. No easements. Privacy is often advertised but rarely delivered on a scale like this.
But its real value goes back more than a century.
Renowned conservationist Herbert Stoddard assembled Southlands in the 1920s and 1930s. International Paper (IP) then established it as the flagship property of the company’s 12-million-acre empire. Financier Jim Dahl bought more than 140,000 acres from IP just to acquire this jewel in the crown.
That kind of history ought to make the next owner pay attention.
It’s clear to me that Jake Paul understands that.
Paul Reserve is not some new playground. Working with his father, Greg, he is continuing the longleaf-pine work already underway, adding livestock, and improving the wildlife habitat. He even kicked in $50,000 to combat invasive species in Lake Seminole.
Its next chapter will feature a cutting-edge entrepreneur with a global audience connecting with friends and family, exploring timber stands and wide-open waterways, and finding room to breathe.
If even a small part of his audience starts looking at land with more curiosity — and more respect — this could be a game changer.
Social media gave Jake Paul a platform.
Paul Reserve gives him a one-of-a-kind piece of ground, and the responsibility to carry it forward.
Enjoy this quick clip of Jake sharing his story with The @landreport :
youtube.com/shorts/cre0-vYG0…
Photo Credit: @gustavfoto
An inspiring story well told by Cary Estes.
Jim Kennedy and his family have placed the remaining 4,400 acres of Clarendon Farms in South Carolina under a conservation easement with @DucksUnlimited, permanently protecting a remarkable Lowcountry landscape.
landreport.com/jim-kennedy-c…
PHOTO CREDIT: Cox Enterprises
99% OF US WOULDN’T TURN DOWN $15 MILLION. MERVIN RAUDABAUGH IS THE 1%.
Mervin Raudabaugh Jr. is 86 years old. He farms 261 acres in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
He was offered $15 million for his place. The prospective buyer wanted to build a data center.
I have never met Mr. Raudabaugh. But I have met enough landowners to know that such a decision is never just about the zeros on the check. Which is why Mr. Raudabaugh said no.
Instead, he accepted a $2 million conservation-easement agreement with Lancaster Farmland Trust that will keep his family farm in farming forever. That’s a $13 million haircut.
But once the servers, substations, access roads, and parking lots move in, you can never bring that farm back.
This is not an argument against data centers. They power a growing part of modern life. And if someone offers you $15 million for your land, there is no shame in taking it. There are plenty of landowners who would say, “Take the money and go buy more dirt.”
Still, data centers don’t stop at the fence line. Your neighbors now dodge the truck traffic. They stare down a massive construction project. And talk about a view.
There’s the rub: One landowner’s right to sell versus the adjacent landowners’ hobbled existence. Mr. Raudabaugh made a different calculation. He chose open ground, food production, family legacy, and the opportunity for future generations to work that same soil down the road.
Lancaster County understands the value of that choice. More than 99% of its 5,100 farms are family-owned. The average farm? It’s just 75 acres. Jeff Swinehart of Lancaster Farmland Trust described it perfectly: “The properties are more than just monetary gain to him. They’re his legacy.”
Legacy gets tossed around too loosely these days. In Lancaster County, it is simply the truth.
Mr. Raudabaugh could have turned his 261 acres into a very different kind of asset.
He chose to keep his farm in farming.
Read the full story here: landreport.com/pennsylvania-…
“OTHER PEOPLE HAVE ANALYSIS. I HAVE UTAH.”
In this single sentence, Robert Redford summed up the power of land.
Long before Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid made the Santa Monica native a household name, Redford had fallen under the spell of a European-like valley high in Utah’s Wasatch Mountains.
He found it while driving home from college at CU Boulder. He had taken a meandering route through Ogden and Heber City. Then he turned west onto the Alpine Loop in the north fork draw of Provo Canyon and came to a complete stop.
Mount Timpanogos, he said, was like Everest.
Redford paid $500 for his first two acres in the early 1960s. And that was just the beginning.
As his career took off, he acquired more and more land in that isolated valley. The jewel was a mom-and-pop ski resort that was slated for development. Redford bought Timp Haven and turned it into Sundance Mountain Resort. Around it, he built the Sundance Institute, Sundance Living, and the Sundance Film Festival.
Yet Sundance never felt like a monument to Robert Redford.
I know because I’ve stayed there. In fact, I made numerous requests to interview the Academy Award winner. But our schedules never aligned. Then, one autumn morning at brunch, I heard a voice at the next table. Not just any voice but the voice — the one we all know from The Sting, The Natural, and other screen gems. Sundance’s founder, his family, and friends were sharing a memorable meal: good food and loads of laughs. Our host was enjoying the best of times in the place he loved most.
I actually got Bob’s story — on his terms, not mine. It was a perfect fit for The Land Report (@landreport).
By that time, Bob’s mountain getaway encompassed well over 2,000 acres. When he announced its sale in 2020, most of it had been protected through conservation easements and protective covenants.
A lot of people can recognize beautiful country. But few have the patience, resources, and resolve to keep its best qualities intact when development comes calling.
Other people have analysis. Robert Redford had Utah.
@SundanceResort Photo credit © Pictorial Press / Alamy Stock Photo
THE MAN WHO CAN SEE AROUND CORNERS
Joe Ricketts (@MrJoeRicketts) has spent a lifetime spotting what the rest of us can’t see.
In 1975, the founder of TD Ameritrade came up with an idea that made insiders guffaw: to charge investors a flat fee to trade stocks. Back then, fixed commissions were gospel, and New York was the center of the financial universe. Omaha? Not so much.
But Ricketts saw something others didn’t, and he launched First Omaha Securities, cut fees, advertised an 800 number, and built a loyal following.
A decade later, he asked his clients if they wanted to trade by phone. Their answer? NO! Didn’t matter. Ricketts saw what others didn’t. In 1988, he revolutionized stock trading with Accutrade, the first touch-tone telephone trading system.
In 2020, Charles Schwab acquired TD Ameritrade for $26 billion. Ricketts was its largest shareholder. You know what a visionary does after he’s made his mark? He shifts into high gear.
Today, Ricketts is looking around the biggest corner of all: the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. His Jackson Fork Ranch sits in Wyoming's Hoback Valley at the heart of the cradle of conservation, where elk, deer, pronghorn, and moose migrate as they have for millennia.
These wildlife corridors aren’t abstractions on a map. A single subdivision can turn an ancient passageway into a dead end. Consider Deer 255, a mule deer who migrated more than 200 miles twice a year between Wyoming’s Red Desert and summer range near the Tetons through brutal weather, past wily predators, and over barbed wire.
Ricketts doesn’t lecture landowners. He invites them to see what he sees. At the Saving Yellowstone Summit last month, he convened landowners, scientists, and conservationists to discuss voluntary, science-based solutions that ensure landscapes stay connected, create economic drivers for stewardship, and keep private landowners central to Greater Yellowstone’s future.
Joe Ricketts built his career on seeing opportunities before everyone else did. In the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, he’s betting landowners will do the same with him.
Saving Yellowstone Foundation: savingyellowstone.org/
Get the full story from @landreport
landreport.com/joe-ricketts-…
Bison Photo Credit: David Stubbs
EVERYONE KNOWS HIM AS A CANNON-ARMED QUARTERBACK.
But do you know @DrewBledsoe the vintner? Drew shared his story with me at the 2024 @LandExpo
Drew and his New England Patriots teammates used to do blind tastings over dinner. Put ‘em in paper bags, line ‘em up, taste ‘em, and vote for your favorite. Without fail, Drew’s wines from his hometown of Walla Walla took the blue ribbon. “I thought, ‘Maybe when I'm done with this football thing, we could go back to Washington and get involved in the wine biz.’”
Today, with three wineries, 60 employees, and a flagship Doubleback Cabernet that Wine Spectator named a Top 100 Wine of the world on its very first vintage, it’s safe to say he called the right audible.
Drew attributes this success to football royalty. Before he planted a single vine, he asked Robert Kraft what separated the Patriots from every other franchise. RKK’s answer? "Everything. We try to be the best at concessions. The best at parking. The best at salary cap management. The best at everything."
Drew hardwired that mindset into his team from day one. "This was never going to be a hobby winery," he told me in Des Moines. Drew drafted Chris Figgins, son of Walla Walla’s pioneering winemaker, to be his first winemaker. Chris brought along his protégé, Josh McDaniels. Josh is now CEO and director of winemaking at @bledsoemcdaniel
Drew’s investment strategy is also worth noting for anyone following the smart money in American agriculture: Walla Walla produces fruit on par with Napa Valley, yet land costs are 10 percent of comparable California ground.
"This is my briar patch," Drew says. "I know which land produces great fruit. And if it's producing great fruit, the underlying asset value is always going to be strong."
Fourteen years in the NFL. One lesson from Robert Kraft. The result? An award-winning portfolio.
Not a bad second act for the hometown favorite.
Photo Credit: Mark VanDonge
THE BEST TOOLS ARE BUILT TO LAST.
I was totally window shopping when I strolled into a hardware store in Italy’s Aosta Valley. The ferramenta was chockablock with hand-forged knives, tools I had never seen (and definitely could not pronounce), and a selection of door hinges fit for a medieval fortress.
What did I spy next to the 16-inch saber for uncorking a bottle of Champagne? A Lodge cast iron kettle. Forged in Tennessee. Prized in Italy.
For those of you who don’t know Lodge cast iron, it's rock-solid. It holds heat. And it’s built to last. Since 1896, Lodge has been shaming flash-in-the-pan kitchen gizmos that dazzle and amaze such as the Veg-o-Matic and the Kitchen Magician. (“But wait. There’s more.”)
At roundup, nobody needs a lecture on the virtues of a cast iron skillet. Biscuits are rising and bacon is sizzling well before daybreak. Come suppertime, the line for cobbler forms long before the lid is pried off a Dutch oven covered in coals.
Useful, yes. But communal, too. If that sounds sentimental, so be it.
Authentic. American. Lodge holds its own without saying a word. Even in Italy.
@LodgeCastIron
THE VALUE OF PUTTING IT BACK TOGETHER.
In Far West Texas, the land has a way of making a point without raising its voice.
Drive long enough through Brewster County, and you understand why.
The distances are serious. The horizons are serious. The country is so vast that 10,000 acres ranks as a tidy little place.
But it certainly isn’t.
That’s why the Texas General Land Office’s acquisition of Brewster Ranch deserves more than a quick headline. On October 24, 2024, the GLO acquired 353,785 acres from Brad Kelley, for $164.6 million, or about $465 an acre.
Brewster Ranch wasn’t handed down intact by some 19th-century cattle king. It was assembled. Patiently. Over more than two decades. Kelley acquired 78 separate deeds and pieced together portions of historic ranches across a hard, beautiful corner of the Greater Big Bend Ecosystem. By 2023, Brewster Ranch peaked at more than 422,000 acres.
That’s aggregation. And it’s one of the least appreciated creators of value in American land.
A one-carat industrial diamond is worth a thousand dollars. Put 50 or 100 carats together in a single exceptional stone, and the math changes in a hurry. There is a tipping point where it is no longer a simple commodity calculation. It’s something rarer. More useful. And far more valuable.
Land works the same way. A small outparcel may have a gate, a well, some wildlife, and a tax bill. Put enough of the right pieces together — contiguous country, water, access, habitat, operating scale, mineral potential — and you create something that is impossible to replicate.
That matters all the more in the Big Bend Country of Far West Texas.
Kelley understood this. He bought land patiently. He merged properties together. He let the country be country. The GLO’s purchase was smaller than the full assemblage, but at 353,785 acres it remains the largest single transaction in the Greater Big Bend Ecosystem since 1943.
The purchase was made on behalf of Texas’s Permanent School Fund. The GLO has identified potential revenue opportunities in agriculture, hunting, groundwater, minerals, carbon sequestration, and other uses compatible with the property’s natural resources.
That’s a long way from locking a gate and hoping the next buyer pays more.
Stewardship and economics are not enemies. On a property of this scale, the assignment is to understand the whole board: wildlife, water, grazing, recreation, access, neighboring lands, and the options that should still be available a generation from now.
There will always be a market for chopping up land. Sometimes that is the right answer.
But there’s another story worth telling.
It’s the story of people with the patience to assemble, improve, and protect country until it becomes more than the sum of its parcels.
Brad Kelley built Brewster Ranch one deed at a time.
The Texas General Land Office now has the opportunity to steward it with the same long view.
That’s not just a Texas story. It’s a lesson in what land can become when somebody has the vision to put the pieces back together.
Photo Credit:
@gustavfoto
Learn more here:
landreport.com/texas-glo-bre…
