Remodeling a Ranch

By Dee Ann Cameron, Public Affairs Specialist

“We bought a ranch in Texas and then realized we didn’t know anything about the land or ranching,” Richard Taylor told over 75 ranchers from the central Hill Country that recently gathered at his Blue Mountain Peak Ranch near Mason, Texas, for a range field day.

Richard and his wife, Sally, purchased the ranch in 2001 with the goal of developing a wildlife management operation. The Taylors had been living on the west coast in Big Sur, California, and were new to the ranching and wildlife business.

They knew they needed to meet people that could help them, so they became members of the Texas Wildlife Association (TWA). They attended TWA wildlife and land management workshops and conferences in an effort to learn more about improving the habitat on their ranch.

As they continued their quest for good resource management skills, they met Keith Blair, owner of Red Buffalo Land Management Services by taking one of his courses on prescribed burns. Blair is a Texas certified prescribed burn instructor and his course helped the Taylors learn more about their flora, Mother Nature’s past management and its historical uses and purposes. Blair also helped the Taylors conduct several prescribed burns on their ranch, with plans for more.

Blair and the TWA recommended the Taylors contact the USDA-Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) to get additional resource management help and apply for Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) cost-share assistance to help them with some of the expenses. They also suggested Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD) as a resource for developing a wildlife management plan to apply for tax emption and as a source of information on restoring the land.

But the Taylors were hesitant to get help from the government, based on previous experiences in California and Massachusetts.

“We spent eight-and-a-half years trying to get a permit just to build our house in Big Sur, California,” Richard states. “It took 14 government agencies to finally sign all the paperwork needed to get a permit.”

Unfortunately for the Taylors, the rules and regulations didn’t stop there. One day Richard was out walking on the 16-acres of land around his house when a Monterey County inspector told him that he couldn’t walk on his own land.

“I was actually given a ticket for walking across my own land,” Richard says in amazement. “There was an environmental regulation that said a foot path, which would be created by walking on your land, constituted development and needed the same permits required to build a home.”

“On our own land!” he adds.

The Taylors then had to go through a five-year process to get permits and gain clearance to build a system of footpaths so they could walk across their property. The Taylors felt their private property rights were being infringed upon in California, which is why Texas appealed to them so much.

“Ninety-five percent of Texas is private property,” Richard states. “That means Texans are pretty adamant about private property rights. We like that.”

Even though they found the land they wanted and state laws they could live with, the idea of working with government agencies again did not appeal to the Taylors. However, the TWA and Blair kept bringing up NRCS and TPWD as good resources.
“When they told us to go talk to the government about help with our land, I was like, ‘Yeah, right!’” Richard says.

With encouragement, the Taylors finally went to a local NRCS meeting held in Mason County.

“When we first started going to those meetings,” Richard says, “We didn’t want to sign in because we didn’t know yet if we wanted anybody to know we were there. We were very leery of any government agency.”

But the Taylors wanted to learn more about land management practices, so they kept coming to the meetings. They met with Matt Kast, district conservationist for USDA-NRCS in the Mason field office.

Through their work with Kast, they developed a positive relationship to help them with their overall management plan for the ranch and got great advice. The Taylors were awarded an EQIP contract based on the ranch’s long-term goals and objectives that are compatible with NRCS goals and programs.

“As I’ve said before, I don’t like government, but I have just been blown away by the NRCS,” Richard says. “I think they reflect the culture and values of the people of Texas. Matt has just been wonderful to work with and he gets as excited about the progress on our land as we do.

“In California, we were used to people who have had a lot of power but no real knowledge,” he continues. “But everyone we’ve worked with in the NRCS really knows what they are talking about. They have all been very technically competent people. It’s really been a wonderful experience.”

“When they first bought the property, it was a cedar thicket,” says Kast. “They have only owned it five years, but have already made a lot of improvements. They have really opened the land up and it is going to make a good recovery.”

“People told us to take before and after pictures of our work here,” Richard says, laughing. “But that really wouldn’t have done any good. A before picture would have just been a close up of a cedar tree because that’s all you could see.”

The Taylors call their work at Blue Mountain Peak Ranch a “heart and soul project.”
They have done a lot of prescribed burning, some hand cutting and tree shearing, to clear the brush away. They have done most of the work themselves. They have also put in a pipeline for livestock water.

The land is currently deferred from grazing to allow for some recovery, but they intend to put cattle on it in the future. However, there is one Angus steer and one longhorn steer, “Old Tex” that roam the ranch, mostly for entertainment purposes. They have built a hunting cabin, with plans for additional lodging. Their goal is to be a diversified, livestock, hunting and ecotourism enterprise that is self-sustaining. They have already hosted many photographers that flock to their property to snap pictures of the many bird species that nest in the area. Texas Parks and Wildlife has provided them a cowbird trap to further improve the songbird population.

TPWD also helped the Taylors write a wildlife management plan to qualify them for the same tax rate as agricultural land.

The Taylors are very willing to host visitors at the ranch, such as the NRCS range field day, to showcase their conservation efforts and share management solutions they have found to problems common in the hill country, such as Ashe juniper (cedar).

“The interesting aspect of the Taylor’s management style is that they didn’t come in here to see what the land could do for them,” says Kast. “But rather they wanted to see what they could do to help the land. It’s been kind of a ranch remodeling project, from the ground up, and the results have been very impressive.”

“The government working in partnership with private property owners is the best solution for taking care of these ecosystems,” Richard says. “You have to be in partnership with the government to influence them and to use their programs and expertise to help you accomplish your personal goals.”

To find out more about the Taylor’s ranching operation, visit their website at www.BlueMountainPeakRanch.com.

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