WILD HORSE DESERT. You will not find this place on a map, at least not a recent map. I left for it yesterday, swinging onto Interstate 37 from 410, the outermost circumferential highway that surrounds San Antonio. Almost immediately miles of luscious clear highway replaced the dense city traffic. Speed candy. Ninety horses, squeezed into the bikes’ two cylinders, begged to run free. A few miles before Corpus Christi, it was time to turn south on Route 77. I wanted to make Kingsville, the town within the famed King Ranch, before dark.
Here, as local lore has it, a number of merchant alchemists made fortunes during the Civil War, magically transmuting Confederate cotton into Mexican cotton in the now vanished city of Baghdad. The cotton was transmuted, once more, into arms and supplies to sustain the war for the South and into large quantities of cash for the alchemists. Captain Richard King built the King Ranch, introduced windmills and surface water to the Wild Horse Desert, and started grazing cattle. The cattle, brought north from Mexico, are believed to have carried mesquite seeds in their bowels and introduced the trees, well fertilized, to the area. Today the rangeland resembles the African veldt.
One of those alchemists was named Don Francisco. The founder of the first bank in Brownsville, he also assembled an 150,000-acre ranch adjacent to the King Ranch. Now owned by two descendent families, the Yturrias and Garcias, the property is divided in half at the railroad that parallels highway 77. On the Yturria side of the road, the property is held in corporate form. On the Garcia side, the property has been subdivided with each generation.
Decisions being made about this land, if repeated by other ranchers, may soon have us asking a strangely familiar question:
Where’s the beef?
It won’t, however, be inspired by a funny television commercial about small hamburgers. It will be about the displacement of cattle from American rangeland.
I learned this after going through the guarded gate to the Yturria Land and Cattle Company and driving down a long road to a hunting camp with a yard full of wild turkeys and a single meandering armadillo. On the way, I saw cattle, deer, antelope, and javalinas. I met Danny and Richard Butler, the brothers who run the ranch, along with help from Richards’ two daughters, Quita and Tina.
“We commercial cattle people won’t be able to compete with Mexican beef. The cow eats the same grass on both sides of the river. There are no costs like Workmen’s Comp on the other side. You could see the impact (of NAFTA) right away on the vegetable growers. The land lease rates fell. Land by the river that once rented for $40 an acre was re-leased for $17 an acre. Now it isn’t under lease. It’s earning nothing. That’s what’s coming for cattle.” Richard said.
“It would still be difficult if there was no NAFTA,” Danny Butler added. “You could be making the finest buggy whips in the country but when Henry Ford started making cars it didn’t matter. Food is being globalized.”
“This land has been in our family for 142 years. We’ve got an asset here and it has to produce money. So we’re trying different things.” Richard said.
“It’s all prices. We still get the price (for cattle) that we got in 1973, plus or minus five cents. Compare that to other prices. We’ve cleared more land. We’ve rotated our pastures. But we’re maxed out. We can’t work harder, stronger, or longer.” Danny said. “Our accountant says it doesn’t work. We know we’re not alone.”
Although the brothers speak with a passion and urgency that would make you feel a crisis was imminent, one isn’t. They tell me that they are living under an umbrella of oil and gas royalties from the same land. They know the oil and gas income won’t last forever. They need to put the land to a use that generates more money than cattle do, and they’ve got to get it done while the oil and gas income is still flowing. Otherwise, Richard and Danny will be the last generation on the land. They want to see it go to Quita and Tina.
I ask if there are any other alternatives.
“Sure. It’s the one we don’t want. The other transition is that someone who made money somewhere else will own the ranch. They won’t be buying to make a sound investment. They’ll be buying the bragging rights.” Danny said.
So the brothers are trying another solution: they are letting the cattle herd dwindle while growing a new “crop” of exotic wild game. In addition to a base of one-year deer leases, they are also allowing guided hunts on the property. The economics compare favorably with raising cattle.
“In 1970 it was $650 for four trophy deer. Today it’s one trophy deer for $4,500 and we’ve got people waiting in line. We’re booked for next year. Now we look at deer like a herd of cattle. Just compare the prices (of cattle and deer). We don’t hunt anymore because they’re all assets.”
The comparison is dramatic. Cattle are bought, raised for a year, and then sold. The rancher makes his profit, if any, on the slender difference. Exotic game, on the other hand, can be a renewable crop that requires less time and effort but yields a far higher price.
Danny Butler and I spend the afternoon driving around the ranch in his Suburban. In half a day I saw more deer than I have seen in my entire life. I see a wandering herd of javalina parading around the family ranch house. I see Nilgai, which I have never seen before, several other types of antelope, geese, ducks, and sable. What the Butlers are building is a private nature reserve, one where the excitement of seeing animals is virtually constant.
Will the economics work?
They don’t know. Listening to them, I realize there is a fundamental disconnect between the modern economy and the economy that grows our food. If ranch land is worth, say, $1,000 an acre and must produce a 10 percent annual return to be competitive with other investments, it has to generate a net income of $100 an acre. Nothing they are talking about comes close. Start thinking about Internet investments and ranching looks a little, well, quaint.
Nilgai and deer may change that.
As we’re leaving the ranch, Danny suddenly gestures with excitement. He has done this all day.
“Look! A javalina!”
Suddenly, I realize what this is all about. Danny and Richard Butler are joining the Experience Economy. That’s not the same as producing hamburger.
On the other side of the road:
Refining the Experience Economy
“If you had said in 1970 that the Rio Grande Valley was going to become a bird watching hot spot, people would have laughed at you. But we’ve got five very distinct habitats and they are all within an hour,” Ray Burdette says.
Ray is not a birder. Ray is a retired Army lieutenant colonel from West Virginia. He has enjoyed hunting all his life and now he’s doing it for a living. He’s married to Monica Burdette and she is a Garcia, a member of the family that owns the ranch on the other side of the road from the Yterria Land and Cattle Company. Together, Ray and Monica are running a bed and breakfast called the El Canalo Inn, located some 5.5-miles from the highway.
They are the next step in the Experience Economy.
“We’ve got Ferruginous Pigmy Owls in our backyard here. Birders come from all over to see them because they are so rare and their habitat is so concentrated”, Monica tells me.
I ask Monica, in light of the 5-mile drive through her front yard, just how big her back yard is.
“I mean the real back yard, inside the fences. You can see them from this window.”
Ray and Monica lease the land and house from Monica’s mother. They don’t participate in the oil and gas income the property generates. That means, Ray says, that their task is to find a combination of activities that will generate enough income to support them as well as pay the overhead and lease costs. They do this by capitalizing on hunting, birding, and gourmet get-a-ways. Monica runs the Bed and Breakfast side of the ranch, cooking gourmet meals and keeping the place stocked with good wine. She also tends the visiting birders. Ray does guided hunts on several properties, including the Yturria Ranch across the highway.
“My goal is to entertain them every minute they are here. We try to make people feel like they’re the first people to come here,” Ray says. While you can stay at the Inn for $125 per person, per day including all three meals, it is the guided hunts that change the economics of the ranch. A five-day/four night hunt for Whitetail Buck is priced at $3,500 per hunter and allows the hunter to take one trophy buck, one doe, one hog, one javelina, and “unlimited coyotes.” Take a single extra buck, measuring 10 points or more, and it will cost an additional $2,250. Other guided hunts, including quail, duck, and dove or a combination of wing shooting and fly fishing are priced as low as $300 a night, everything included. If the hunt is on another property— such as Danny and Richard Butler’s ranch “across the street,” a portion of the fees is paid to the other property.
Either way, it beats raising cattle so Ray is thinking of shrinking their herd of certified cattle.
Speaking about some of his corporate groups— often people who are tightly wound and in need of a real escape— Ray smiles and tells me his solution for the inescapable cell phone.
“I tell them the cell phone ringing attracts rattlesnakes.”
Next: Brownsville: Lifeguard on the Rio Grande
Borderland
Starting the journey: Riding into Laredo
A statistical picture of life along the border
Austin: The incredible disappearing Slacker
San Antonio: High Times and Low Water
Yturria Land and Cattle and El Canelo Ranch: Where’s the Beef?
Brownsville: Lifeguard on the Rio Grande
McAllen: Fields of dreams
All roads lead to Crystal City
Big Bend and the bridge at Presidio
Marfa: Herds of tomatoes, as far as the eye can see
Tucson: Containing growth
Tucson: Born to be wild?
Yuma and the dusty road to Mexicare
San Diego: The Ultimate Crop
Notes, mile marks and pictures
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Economic statistics about the border
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(c) A. M. Universal, 2000