The Next Frontier: Podcast 
Being There: The King Ranch 
The Next Frontier
The state’s (and maybe the world’s) most famous 825,000 acres would seem to be on a collision course with the twenty-first century, when giant spreads are routinely chopped up, there’s no money to be made in cattle, and the younger generation frequently bolts the family business. But the heirs of Captain Richard King are smarter than that. They have skillfully avoided ruin and preserved their history by embracing the future.
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What is most interesting about the lease is not its grandeur, however, but its unusual partnership with the ranch. The lessee, for example, is responsible for upholding the ranch’s extremely strict and finely calibrated hunting limits. There are forty full-time wildlife biologists on the King Ranch, all paid for by lessees. The Holt Cat biologist, Nathan Ballard, takes part in annual surveys of his lease’s acres. Each hunt is closely guided: Guests are allowed to shoot only certain kinds of deer and certain sexes and ages of various animals. Every week, data on all hunts and kills, with descriptions of the animals taken, is fed back into the King Ranch database. Holt Cat is expected to harvest 50 bucks and 100 does this year, while the number of deer taken on the entire ranch will be between 2,500 and 3,000. “A few other ranches in South Texas have programs like this,” said Mickey Hellickson, the King Ranch’s chief wildlife biologist, “but no one does it on this scale combined with this intensity.”
The partnership does not end there. Roughly one third of the lessees are also responsible for helping to maintain a strict grasslands-to-brushlands ratio, which means chaining, root plowing, and burning mesquite brush and then disk-plowing hundreds of miles of fifteen-foot-wide lanes. This is a battle that has been going on since brush began encroaching on Captain King’s oceanic expanses of grass in the late 1800’s (horses and cattle eat the mesquite pods, then scatter the seeds in dung over wide distances). The goal is to achieve a balance, roughly 65 percent grass and 35 percent brush. All this supplemental responsibility costs money too, somewhere between an additional $1 and $3 per acre. It is interesting to note that, though the number of cowboys on the ranch has declined considerably, the number of biologists, hunting and fishing guides, and dog handlers has more than compensated for it—an employment shift that tells you a good deal about the changes in the business and economy of Kingsville.
All four divisions of the ranch are subjected to constant and careful scrutiny, from management of turkey and feral hog populations to selective plantings of native grasses. In addition to this, there is the ongoing work of two other King Ranch offshoots, the Caesar Kleberg Wildlife Research Institute and the King Ranch Institute for Ranch Management at Texas A&M’s Kingsville campus. Both conduct extensive studies of the ranch and its balance of cattle and wildlife, including studies of individual species. The Caesar Kleberg Institute, for example, has recently done work on bobwhite quail, white-tailed deer, wild turkeys, nilgai antelope, and rare ferruginous pygmy owls (most of which live on or near the ranch). The result of all this—and the presence of dozens of wildlife biologists feeding weekly data into ranch headquarters—is that the King Ranch acres constitute perhaps the most closely monitored large piece of land in the country.
Which may account for the battle now being waged by the ranch over a proposal by the trusts and foundations that own the adjacent Kenedy Ranch for two waves of construction that would put up more than 400 windmills on its coastal sections in the coming years. The King Ranch has long been famous for fighting what it considers incursions on its land: It fought the location of U.S. 77, the building of a naval bombing range, the dredging of the Laguna Madre to make the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway (it won the bombing range battle and succeeded in preventing the dumping of dredge spoil on the King Ranch land but lost the highway fight). The family’s new cause célèbre is the windmill proposal, which the state of Texas and the Kenedy trusts view as environmentally responsible and the King-Kleberg heirs view as something close to an assault on the land. “In the biggest sense it is just a massive change in land use,” said Jack Hunt, who, along with Jamey Clement, has been an outspoken opponent of the wind farms. “The land will never be the same. Everywhere there is going to be a turbine, there are going to be thousands of tons of concrete and steel in the ground. The problem is that there is no permit required to build these things, no environmental studies, no requirements to remove them later on. The fact is that nobody really knows what they do or what effect they have on birds or other wildlife.” The King Ranch, therefore, wants laws that will make builders of wind turbines get permits, but it is facing enormous resistance from all quarters. As Texas land commissioner Jerry Patterson recently told the Austin American-Statesman: “This is the King Ranch versus the rest of Texas.”
In June the family gathered at the ranch for its annual “summer camp” and shareholders’ meeting. The activities take place over the course of a week and are the spiritual pivot of the ranch. They convey the notion of ownership of a large, iconic American ranch in a palpably real way. Almost all the owners and families come. Family members and employees compete in a rodeo; kids participate in calf riding and goat roping. There are nature tours and hunting and fishing excursions and historical seminars and splendid meals in the Main House dining room or in the pool house. This year the kids went out on photographic expeditions and assembled a natural science museum of sorts with cow skulls and other artifacts. In the midst of all the fun is business: the annual shareholders’ meeting where family members can air their views on the business of running the ranch. Outsiders are not allowed near the place. I asked.
Who exactly are these folks? While there are far too many to profile, they seem to share, as a group, certain attributes. They are, without exception, wealthy. They are highly educated and value both professional and advanced degrees, and they seem to prefer work to leisure, even though many are financially independent. “The majority of us work,” said Chris Kleberg, Tio’s son. “That is part of our legacy and heritage. Captain King was a hardworking man. The subsequent owners had the same mentality and work ethic.” Said Janell Kleberg: “There is a sense that you need to be out there doing something. Look at Tio’s first cousin [Rich Sugden, the largest single shareholder]. He is a good example of somebody who did not have to do anything. He is a family-practice doctor in a town in Wyoming and has delivered several thousand babies.” If there is one pursuit that is common to the majority of the heirs, it would seem to be horses, from basic show riding to Thoroughbred and cutting horse breeding—perhaps as a way of keeping in touch with the old days in Kingsville they never experienced.
This year the news is mostly good: Profits are strong, cattle prices are up, the acquisitions in the past few years of Young Pecan, Consolidated Citrus, and several sod farms are working out well. There is the inevitable talk about what the ranch will do next (possibly buy some pecan groves, maybe increase sod production), considerable anger over the Kenedy Ranch’s wind farm plan, and some worry over the bacterial disease called greening that is spreading in the Florida orange groves.
But another concern lurks in the conversations too. The King Ranch’s success in re-inventing itself since Mr. Bob’s death 33 years ago has come with a caveat: There is no guarantee that the next generation will want what its forebears have built. The big, transformative changes were made by the fourth and fifth generations, who continue to hold the majority of the voting shares of stock. (The King Ranch has two classes of stock, voting and nonvoting. The parents tend to hold most of the voting stock until they die.) The sixth generation, whose members range in age from about fifteen to forty, will come to power in the next quarter century. There are fifty or sixty of them—not a single rancher among them. Unlike the members of the fifth generation, they don’t even have parents who spent their childhoods on the ranch (Tio’s three children are the exception to this). Chairman Jamey Clement is so concerned with strengthening their ties to the ranch that he has been organizing field trips. “We have been trying to think of ways to engage them with the idea of what the ranch is and what it does,” he said, “so we pick a weekend in the fall and try to educate them about different things.” There have been trips to the ranch and trips to Florida to see the orange groves and the cane and sod farms.
It is far too early to tell if Clement’s plan will work. A few years ago the ranch started to offer summer “internships” for younger family members—the opportunity to go down to the ranch and learn how to ride and rope and do other useful work around cattle and horses. Aside from Tio’s kids, the five or six boys and girls, ranging in ages from 12 to 22, who have taken part in the internship are the first family members in that age range to have worked on the ranch in twenty years or more. These are encouraging signs, though it is interesting to consider what Captain King might have thought of a ranch internship.
“The pendulum has swung,” said Clement. “We were a family-owned and -operated business. We went to a family-owned and professionally managed business. But that doesn’t mean we can’t have family participation.” For the family company that has remade itself from top to bottom, this may suggest the most radical possibility of all: that one day, maybe, a lineal descendant of Richard King could once again rule the empire.
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