100 CORN RANCH Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin has been testing the New Shepard rocket on his Far West Texas ranch since 2012. e Land Report 19 / Stimson Family 552,000 ACRES In 1850, a Michigander named Thomas Douglas “T.D.” Stimson (1827–1898) began a tradition that has continued for six generations. The family now owns one of America’s oldest continuously operating integrated wood products companies. In the 1880s, Stimson sold his Great Lakes landholdings and relocated to a much different venue: the Pacific Northwest. Today, STIMSON LUMBER COMPANY operates seven mills in Oregon and Idaho and owns significant fir, pine, and cedar operations in Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. All of the company’s land-and log-procurement programs undergo stringent third-party audits to ensure compliance with Sustainable Forestry Initiative program standards. years later, he made his first major timberland purchase, a 6,500-acre tract known as the Black Lake timber block. Black Lake became the foundation of a forestry asset that has subsequently increased in size almost a hundredfold. Today, ROYOMARTIN owns and operates more than 550,000 acres of Forest Stewardship Council-certified timberland and three of the largest wood-panel plants in North America. Roy O. Martin III serves as the chairman, CEO, and CFO of the family-owned company. 22 / Simplot Family 23 / Fisher 443,000 ACRES Family 24 / Je Bezos 420,000 ACRES 440,000 ACRES 21 / Don Horton 508,410 ACRES 20 / Martin Family 550,000 ACRES Forests blanket 48 percent of the Pelican State, which is one of the many reasons family patriarch Roy O. Martin Sr. paid $32,000 in 1923 for a small-town sawmill in Alexandria, Louisiana. Six Founded in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1978, D.R. Horton ranks as one of the nation’s leading homebuilders and has constructed 950,000 homes from coast to coast. Thanks to its success, the company’s founder and chairman has assembled a considerable portfolio of ranches in West Texas and across New Mexico. His GREAT WESTERN RANCH in Western New Mexico encompasses 457 square miles, including 176,805 deeded acres and 115,974 leased acres. Although he only got as far as eighth grade, JACK SIMPLOT (1909–2008) created a multibillion-dollar agricultural empire. Faced with a fertilizer shortage in the 1940s, Simplot built his own plant. During World War II, the Simplot Company was the largest shipper of fresh potatoes nationwide. His big idea? The frozen french fry. In the late 1940s, his company created and marketed the first commercially viable frozen french fries. After Ray Kroc bought McDonald’s, Simplot Company became the exclusive supplier of fries to the Golden Arches. Still family owned, its interests range from cattle ranching to food processing, phosphate mining, fertilizers, seeds, and more. Simplot Company grows hay, wheat, corn, sweet corn, barley, and potatoes. The founders of the clothing retailer The Gap, the Fishers created MENDOCINO REDWOOD COMPANY in 1998 and HUMBOLDT REDWOOD COMPANY in 2008 to manage their coast redwood and Douglas fir timberlands in Northern California’s Sonoma, Mendocino, and Humboldt Counties. Immediately following both acquisitions, the family converted the Timber Harvesting Plan units that were previously approved as clearcuts to selection harvest. The Fishers insist that it is possible to manage a large block of industrial timberland with high standards of environmental stewardship while operating a successful business. All of the family’s forest management practices are subject to Forest Stewardship Council standards for certification. In 2004, Amazon.com’s founder purchased Far West Texas’s 165,000-acre CORN RANCH , a desolate stretch of arid rangeland north of Van Horn in Culberson County. Since then, Bezos has made a series of acquisitions that has resulted in the assemblage of a block of 420,000 acres that the world has come to know as the launching pad for Blue Origin, Bezos’s suborbital spaceflight-services company (above). Since 2012, the New Shepard rocket has had 22 successful consecutive missions. Three of those missions included successful escape tests. In addition to Bezos and his brother, passengers have included Star Trek icon William Shatner and Good Morning America anchor Michael Strahan. 140 e LandReport | WINTER 2022 LANDREPORT.COM
The Land Report 2022.4: Page 140
