This is a different model of ranching. It would not work on an island. It has worked very well for the wide open spaces in the USA. Much of this land is federal besides, it was never meant to be fenced in.

 

It has to do with amount of land. There are ranches in the USA it takes over a day to drive across. These are vast open spaces.

They must be driving very slow while crossing.

There is no state in the US that is so large that it can't be driven across in a single day.

Texas is ~ 790 miles wide and California is ~800 miles long. Both easily doable in a modern vehicle.

Walking I could see it but not driving anything faster than a riding lawn mower.

Here's the biggest contiguous privately owned piece of land in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waggoner_Ranch 510,527 acres.

And a map to show its size.

http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/lo...ch-is-bigger-than-a-lot-of-cities-6591510.php

 

You are assuming the existence of roads.

 

Good roads at that. This place us big.

Fences is an absurd idea for much of everything west of the Mississsipi.

 

He was just acting naturally. Fences have a lot of good uses. One of them is trapping prey. It can only help a predator.

I've never seen a fence that can even slow down a wild herd of anything. They would have to be over 20 ft. high and very strong. I've seen dairy cows jump over a five ft. fence.

I saw a three legged buck and his ladies jump a 8 ft. fence every morning for near a month. No problem.

Why don't they bring those wolves back here in the east? We have been over populated with deer for decades.

If any farmer or rancher loses money from a predatory kill, then he is a bad business man. There are so many compensation programs, it would make you sick. Not not mention write offs. The amount of compensation is but a drop to just one study of these programs.

I was in Idaho decades ago when this was proposed. Believe me, is was a hot issue.

 

Why don't they bring those wolves back here in the east? We have been over populated with deer for decades.

Because all the mothers who don't let their kids play outside would go berserk. Have you been to a New Jersey town hall meeting about black bears? They have never been scene on an overly manicured youth soccer field but that is the only bit of nature most of these kids see. What's the big deal, oh, in case they want to walk out into their back yards.

 

The old XIT ranch was a mere 3 million acres back in the day ... (long before my time).

 

Why don't they bring those wolves back here in the east? We have been over populated with deer for decades.

some states hire hunters to thin the herd out of season. One can only hope they give the meat to help stock the food banks.

 

This is a different model of ranching. It would not work on an island. It has worked very well for the wide open spaces in the USA. Much of this land is federal besides, it was never meant to be fenced in.

Hi Wendy, could you please have a look at my recent post: Induction pulse. I need some help with getting this thing going please?

 

You are assuming the existence of roads.

Not really. Good road infrastructure is a key thing in modern farming and ranching practices. Private land or not they would have a good set of roads in place.

Besides looking at the maps the furthest distance between two points on their property I can reason out is about 60 miles give or take and being they are part of the US they would have been part of one or more the US rural infrastructure road building works done sometime during the 1930's - 1960's meaning that at minimal even basic dirt roads would have been put in place with most of them being maintained to at least minimal navigable capacity to this day.

That and Google earth view shows a pretty well-established set of dirt roads on the ranch.

Making ~60 miles still easily travelable in several hours at worst.

 

I finished growing up in the country. The country roads to homes are gravel and dirt. When you go to private property the gravel is gone, just dirt and ruts. I think you are assuming everywhere is like where you know.

The typical way to make a dirt road is to scrape it smooth. It might work, usually with dirt it does not last.

 

Google Earth it yourself and see. That what I did. It looks to be mostly rolling Texas prairie/dessert which is much like ours.

As long as it's dry it's pretty easy to establish and maintain a good dirt road, looks like they have many covering everywhere, with nothing more than a basic road maintainer or tractor mounted rear blade system which are standard farm and ranching equipment here of which when a someone owns close to 800 square miles of land likely has several on hand along with their own gravel pits and related earth moving equipment.

You don't get to that size and stay that size in modern times without a substantial amount of personal resources and equipment.

I grew up in rural farming and ranching USA so I am quite familiar with how things are set up and operated here and maintaining your own roads is not that big of a deal these days. In fact, if an operation is of any size it's a necessity.

To be honest my family property is roughly 300 acres (barely 1 mile corner to corner) and we have a dozer, backhoe , multiple loader tractors, two 3 point blade units, multiple field mowers, and our own gravel pit which leaves me to believe that a half a million acre operation probably has substantially more equipment than we do to maintain their property.

 

How big is your rockpile?

 

We don't have one. Every movable rock we have that was in the way has been put along our stream channel to cut down on erosion.

Dad and I were just talking the other day that now that we have a backhoe and dozer about going out in the hills and digging up some of the off the main path stuff to fill in around a washout.

 

They must be driving very slow while crossing.

There is no state in the US that is so large that it can't be driven across in a single day.

Texas is ~ 790 miles wide and California is ~800 miles long. Both easily doable in a modern vehicle.

Walking I could see it but not driving anything faster than a riding lawn mower.

Here's the biggest contiguous privately owned piece of land in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waggoner_Ranch 510,527 acres.


And a map to show its size.

http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/lo...ch-is-bigger-than-a-lot-of-cities-6591510.php

Admittedly, Waggoner is a huge ranch, but it covers only 3/10 of 1% of a big state like Texas (167,624,960 acres.) In fact, it is even considerably smaller than Rhode Island (776,957 acres.)

 

http://www.king-ranch.com/visit/maps/

 

http://www.king-ranch.com/visit/maps/

Interesting, although the King Ranch comprises separate parcels as opposed to the Waggoner Ranch, which is one contiguous acreage.