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Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

reminder that most ranches are owned by billionaires and have very little to do with actual cattle farming. Michael Bloomberg, Arthur Bank, Ted Turner, Reed Hastings, and Charles Koch all own ranches. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimdobson/2020/09/15/billionair...

most of your cattle do not come from ranches. They come from high intensity factory farms in places like stockton california and amarillo texas.

That a ranch produces any saleable livestock at all is a side-effect. most ranches are owned as vacation property.

the reason this reintroduction is opposed is the same reason you cant plant or remove any trees in Beverly Hills without a dozen lawsuits and a 3 year study to determine the effect. Stratospherically wealthy people revile change at any level and will intentionally manufacture controversy and complexity around the proposal as a defensive mechanism.

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It's fun to look through the real estate listings for those "ranch" properties in Colorado and Wyoming, because it feels so far from normal American life. Thousands of acres, tons of buildings, and workers that come with it to keep it all up. It still blows my mind that some people can just decide to buy a mountain and everything around it.

Money is a magical invention. Everyone agrees they don't have enough of it but somehow everyone also agrees only certain people should have more than enough.

They can get surprisingly cheap in some areas, mainly if it’s mostly land and not many buildings (and perhaps no workers).

I’ve seen 1600 acres and a nice big house for 1.6 million.

The idea that buying property "comes with workers" feels super gross to me

It is kind of weird, but they get to keep their job and a lot of times their housing. I wonder if they get a chance to negotiate a pay raise after a sale, not really sure how these things work.

Most of these ranches will be running cow-calf operations. A cow-calf operation is a herd that produces calves which can be sold to a feedlot or backgrounding operators.

In factory farming it’s the calf that is the factory that turn grain into beef. It takes 3 pounds of grain to produce a pound of beef so it’s cheaper to move the calf to the grain than the grain to the calf.

At the same time a cow can only produce one calf per year so it is cheaper to keep the herd of cows that produce the calf on marginal grasslands rather than on the richer farmland near the feedlots.

While these ranches aren’t directly shipping steaks to customers they are more than a vanity project for the wealthy.

Economic incentives aren’t aligned between cow-calf operations and feedlots. There may be a significant difference in feed efficiency between calves. Some may turn grain to meat at a 2:1 ratio and others at a 4:1 ratio but ranchers are paid the same for each calf. A way to cheaply identify calves that are more feed efficient or align incentives would be worth some money.

> most ranches

Those billionaires own ranches, for sure. Maybe even a lot of ranch land by area? But most ranches? Seems unlikely to me.

Yeah, this seems like a really bold claim. Land may be often held by the rich on a per acre basis, but landowners are not rich on a per capita basis. People often confuse the two even tho it is exactly what you would expect from a pareto distribution

This is true. While billionaires are the largest landowners (well, actually Farmland Reserve/Mormon church probably is) and a lot of their land is old ranches they bought up, there's 2+ million cattle in Montana, 1+ million in Wyoming, I think almost 3 million in Colorado.

There are many, many ranches in all those states. There are certainly far less than there used to be, but there are still very many functional ranches. That said, another reason the ranchers don't like wolves is because they get landowner elk tags that they can then turn around and sell private hunts with for 10s of thousands of dollars. Wolves have cut into their ability to find prize elk in recent years (as well as some harsh winters, which have probably don't more damage, but the perception is there for wolves).

People can and do buy products from smaller regenerative farms.

https://thehighlonesomeranch.com/

And I suspect that these ranches could take heavy loses (wolves have been seen killing 15+ elk in a single hunt) and I fully expect that large industrial operations -- packed to the gills with feed lots -- will have a much more minimal impact to their overall operations. And regenerative farms are much better for the environment (less carbon, less run-off). So this , at least in my eyes, is a self-inflicted wound by the government.

>Surplus killings tend to be most common in late winter and may actually represent an effort by wolves to cache food for later use

Let them. Let the animals do this. Wyoming shouldn't be feeding the herds of elk anyways.

> wolves have been seen killing 15+ elk in a single hunt

Perhaps? How is this related? There is plenty of data from areas where wolves and cattle or sheep coexist. Why not cite that instead of something tangential?

Why would wolves attack a herd of cattle protected by guard dogs which have been bred exclusively to deter wolves for 1000s of years. If ranchers can’t afford to get dogs (or use other commonly used methods) then that’s another issue, it would be perfectly reasonable to expect the government to support them with that

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