Bacon’s efforts in Colorado and on additional properties in New York and North Carolina earned him the prestigious Audubon Medal in January, when he was feted at a party featuring five women dressed in only bras and undies and painted and feathered to look like birds, according to a Bloomberg News account of the New York City soiree.
Another billionaire hedge-fund manager, Paul Tudor Jones, of Greenwich, Connecticut, has purchased at least three plots of land around the country, including the 25,000-acre Blue Valley Ranch in Colorado, where he’s restored a section of a river known among anglers as a prime trout-fishing habitat.
Media mogul Ted Turner’s 2 million acres in 12 states (and Argentina) make him the second-largest individual landowner in the U.S. -- after media baron John Malone, who owns 2.2 million acres in six states.
Forest Land
And in addition to his efforts on behalf of the Prairie Reserve, Wyss, who sold his Synthes Inc. in 2011 for $21.3 billion to Johnson & Johnson, gave $35 million toward a $490 million joint initiative by the Nature Conservancy and the Trust for Public Land to buy 310,586 acres of forest land from Plum Creek Timber Co. in northwestern Montana.
Few land buyers can equal the ambition -- and controversy - - of the Prairie Reserve, which is taking advantage of ample adjoining federal land to stitch together its goal of a massive prairie park.
When the Prairie Reserve acquired the 18,177-acre South Ranch on the northern border of the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge in August, for instance, the tract came with state and federal leases on an additional 131,711 acres, doubling the reserve’s footprint overnight to 274,000-plus acres.
Labeling Program
Gerrity says he and his colleagues are trying their best to be good neighbors. They buy supplies in Malta and let the ranchers continue to raise cattle for a period after the Prairie Reserve has bought their land. In the works is a wildlife- friendly labeling program for local cattlemen who agree not to shoot prairie dogs or coyotes.
In theory, APR beef -- like dolphin-free tuna before it -- would command a higher price from ecoconscious consumers in New York and San Francisco. “Small steps to a better world,” Geddes says during an extended drive through the property.