Ted Turner's Legacy as a Landowner and Conservationist

Ted Turner, the media mogul who died Wednesday at 87, was one of the country’s largest private landowners, amassing roughly 2 million acres across the United States, and established himself as an unlikely pioneer of land conservation.

Turner bought his first bison in 1976 and his first ranch 11 years later in Montana. He remained an active buyer of land well into the 2020s. At the time of his death, he owned 13 ranches spread across six states, according to Turner Enterprises. At more than 500,000 acres, his Vermejo Park Ranch, in northern New Mexico extending into southern Colorado, is one of the two largest pieces of private contiguous land in the country.

In the decades since Turner made his first purchase, ranch land values have soared, as billionaires set their sights on the West in search of safe investments and isolated, visually stunning retreats. Sports mogul Stan Kroenke became America’s largest private landowner late last year, after buying 937,000 acres in New Mexico. Bill Gates is the largest private owner of farmland. And Jeff Bezos is among the country’s largest landowners, with vast holdings in West Texas.

When Turner began acquiring land in the late 1980s, he was an anomaly, the creator of CNN whose father owned a billboard advertising company. At that time, the country’s largest landowners typically made their fortunes in ranching, farming, timber and oil. Turner, an avid yachtsman who donated $1 billion to the United Nations, was a new kind of rancher.

“No one had seen anyone do that before, not in modern history,” said Matt Rand, senior director of marketing at Land.com, an online marketplace for land sales. “No one was fathoming land purchases that large by someone who was not already in land, already a rancher or already in oil.”

Among his largest holdings is Vermejo Park Ranch, a swath of land about the size of Canyonlands National Park, Zion National Park and the Redwood National Park combined. When Turner acquired the ranch in 1996, it was an overgrazed, degraded landscape. Over three decades, he transformed it into an ecosystem that is both ecologically and economically sustainable, with 1,200 Castle Rock bison raised for grazing and meat. A 60-mile stream restoration brought back the native Rio Grande cutthroat trout, the largest inland trout restoration project in North America, according to “Preserved,” a 2025 documentary about Vermejo.

Visitors to Vermejo can fish, hike, rock climb or horseback ride, staying at a Ted Turner Reserves all-inclusive resort with accommodations starting around $1,500 a night for a guest room with twin beds and up to around $15,000 a night for an eight-room lodge that includes a private chef.

“The whole point of creating a sustainable model out there was that it would be self-sustaining,” said Ben Clark, the director of “Preserved.” “They’d be able to drive enough revenue and balance the ecological benefits at the same time as pushing science” forward and making ecological advancements. Clark pointed out that beavers, a keystone species, have returned to the area. “Suddenly you get the architect of the entire ecosystem in there,” he said of them.

Turner purchased nearly 600,000 acres from Pennzoil in 1996 for $80 million, or around $138 an acre. A ranch that sold in northern New Mexico in November was listed for $700 an acre, and another that listed for $1,918 an acre sold in December, according to Land.com. “That’s a major hockey stick upward in land value in a pretty short amount of time,” Rand said.

Turner’s passion was bison conservation.

Tens of millions of bison once roamed the American West before they were slaughtered to the brink of extinction by the early 1900s. Today there are around 400,000 bison in North America, with almost 200,000 of them residing on private farms and ranches in the United States. Around 45,000 of those bison are on Turner’s land, the largest private herd in North America.

“He was a warrior for bison,” said John Calvelli, an executive vice president at the Wildlife Conservation Society. A fragile coalition of ranchers, meat producers, Native American groups and scientists have worked to grow bison herds and restore some of the grassland they now call home, with Turner often at the center of those activities.

“He is one of these people that understood that if bison thrive, grasslands thrive, and communities thrive,” Calvelli said. “He was singular in that.”

In 2021, Turner created the Turner Institute of Ecoagriculture, a nonprofit, donating to it the 80,000-acre McGinley Ranch on the Nebraska-South Dakota border. The Institute works with South Dakota State University’s Center of Excellence for Bison Studies to conduct research on bison and related issues.

On announcing the institute, Turner noted it “could potentially qualify” for a property tax exemption but would not do so, saying he believed local property taxes provided “essential support for services on which our ranches and communities depend.”

Turner’s death raises questions about the future of his land holdings, considering his vast estate, heirs and various entities. However, a statement on Turner’s website said, “Turner ensured that upon his passing, his lands will continue to be protected, limiting future development and parcellation.”

Some longtime ranching families resented the arrival of moguls like Turner, who stormed across the Plains and Mountain West with nearly unlimited money, acquiring old family ranches and sending land prices soaring. Since the pandemic, the attraction has only intensified, fueled in part by shows like “Yellowstone” that have glorified an idealized version of the West, available to those with deep pockets.

Cindy Heller, who lives about 10 miles from Turner’s Spikebox Ranch in the Sandhills of Nebraska, said his impact on the land had been “a mixed bag.” She had no complaints about Turner’s bison herds or his stewardship of his roughly 500,000 acres in Nebraska, but she said he had made it harder for families like hers to keep a grip on their land.

“When people like that come into the area, it raises the price of land,” she said. “Your average rancher doesn’t have access to that kind of money. You can’t do it.”

Heller said she was worried about what would happen to Turner’s holdings in her corner of Cherry County, Nebraska, and whether the land might become a conservancy or preserve, potentially depriving the county of a huge source of property tax revenue.

“What’s going to happen to that land?” she wondered Wednesday. “Who’s going to manage it, and how is it going to affect the taxes?”

But other ranchers have taken a softer view of Turner’s investments. Matt Skoglund, who raises grass-fed bison near Bozeman, Montana, praised Turner for protecting huge swaths of the West and for helping to revive American bison. When Skoglund was getting his operation off the ground several years ago, he said he toured Turner’s Snowcrest Ranch to learn about bison management and the best fences to build.

He was glad that Turner had been the steward of so many acres of rangeland, rivers and mountains across the West, rather than a developer with dreams of building mansions or a luxury golf retreat.

“Someone else could’ve bought it and developed it,” Skoglund said. “Ted protected this land.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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