Doesn’t the soviet union and China do coop type of farming where the state owned all the land and made all the decisions about what to plant and what farmer did what?
There’s these large sort of colony type of farms nearby operated by Hutterites. No one person owns them but they operate as a corporation. They do ok but the younger people tend to drift away. Nobody owns a thing.
Turner owns a large piece of central South Dakota. He manages it kind of like a private, native park. He doesn’t allow any type of pesticide control or poisoning of prairie dogs like many of the farmers\ranchers have in the past from what I’ve been told. He does raise buffalo on it for slaughter that he uses in his Ted’s Montana Grill restaurant chain. And, he also owns large ranches in 6 or 8 other western states such as Montana, New Mexico, Wyoming, Nebraska, Utah, etc.. that I’m aware of.
He just recently bought the Houck ranch which was the largest Buffalo ranch in the US for decades until the early 90’s or so I believe. It’s where Costner filmed Dances with Wolves and is about 10 miles from my front door as the crow flies.
One thing everybody around here is wondering is what will happen to it when he dies. It’s private land and not part of any of the 4 Indian reservations in the state. If he gives it to the tribes it comes off the board as taxable land. They typically use it as a revenue base the same way that most private land is used. There has been some talk about a trust or even some sort of park system.
It’s his land – he paid more than market value for most of it. It was pretty much uninhabited prairie which was some farming but primarily pasture or just wild land in the middle of nowhere.
From age 21 to 29 I worked for the C&NW railroad which passed through a lot of this land. I spent many days driving around and through it to get to the tracks. It’s really pretty much wild, undeveloped land and it’s becoming more rural all the time as the small communities that are near slowly dwindle to almost nothing. I love to drive through it once in a while – it’s like dropping off the edge of the civilized world.
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