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Ranch Land Buys? What is the catch?

A/c is doable on solar. 10-20k In equipment will run damn near anything in an average small house. If you are out west with good sunlight hours it is very doable, especially if you are using the energy to run a/c during the day. Most high desert areas are hot during the day and cool to cold at night.
 
It's not hot there at night....... Its FUCKIN hot! You would not get away with no A/C at night unless your in an underground house. In the summer months at least.
 
There are 2 seasons here in Texas, hot and not hot. And it's only "not hot" a few months out of the year. I was swimming in the ocean @ the gulf coast yesterday. :smokin:
 
As said, water is big out west. Mineral rights (oil is mineral) are too. Cheap land often isn't buildable because you can't cut a road to it. If you just want someplace to camp/hunt that you own outright, there are decent deals to be had, but if you are looking to build your eventual/retirement home, examine closely before you sign on the line.
 
HillbillyDeluxe said:
Shit, I forgot I created a new sn here. Slowpoke my sn is TireFryerSS on Pirate.
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I was kinda wondering who that was chiming in that wasn't the original you. :laughing:

You need to put that name on your "junior member" line so we all know who you are. Some of the guys with new SN's and familiar writing styles are tripping me out. :rasta:
 
SLOWPOKE693 said:
Its takes about 5-7 acres of land per cow out there to keep them fed. Ranchers buy land by the square out there to cattle ranch. No crop is going to grow out there either. Basicly useless. But it is pretty though.
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5-7 acres per cow, huh? :laughing: You obviously aren't familiar with ranching in the desert. It's more like 50-70 acres/cow out there. 80-120 acres per cow in actual desert.
 
I did/am doing this. bought 40 ac out of state with plans to let it sit for a decade before i can get there. middle of BFE of sorts. Checked out a few different states and then counties before i ended up with a liability.

Check the laws, they can vary wildly. 40 ac might not be near enough to be buildable or it might be 10x the requirement. Laws around access, power all kinds of jazz. Most of those rural areas are pretty easy to get along with, so if you get halfway serious, call the county and talk to a person or two.

figure out what you want to do and how much space you need. I'd like to have a few fur babies to eat and have an excuse to visit a few different fairs during the year and kind of ended up at 40 being the bare minimum as that i could have a house/shop/garden/fruit trees on a couple acres, have 20 for grazing and have the balance for wasteland. Assuming my pension holds together and i can liquidate some other assets at a reasonable time, I should be able to get my monthly budget down low enough that i don't "need" additional income to survive and can run the 'ranch' at a profitable enough loss to keep it as a going venture.

If you aren't looking to farm, water isn't AS big of a deal as it might seem coming from the east coast or anywhere else that you never think twice about leaving a hose running all day just to water the street :homer:


if you are looking at something that will be offgrid and you think you might want an A/C unit, plan on NO A/C and building yourself a place with either 4' of earth walls or flat out underground. Seriously, the payback period to run a compressor, even a small one, at that sort of cycle is pretty absurd. I don't remember the math offhand, but it was close to $25k just in additional panels and batteries to run at 1.5kw pump near constantly.
 
'84 Bronco II said:
5-7 acres per cow, huh? :laughing: You obviously aren't familiar with ranching in the desert. It's more like 50-70 acres/cow out there. 80-120 acres per cow in actual desert.
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and this is why desert just outside of a national prarie is better than desert outside of, well, a national desert :flipoff2:
 
SLOWPOKE693 said:
Also, every time you leave the Terlingulia area you have to go through a border patrol checkpoint. It's not a big deal unless the dog makes a mistake and barks at your vehicle. Ask me how I know.... :mad3:
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Ara Beemercheif sold his place near Terlinga because it wasn't as isolated anymore ( He could see the new neighbors) and he couldn't leave without someone breaking in. Kind of funny now he lives in Alamagordo in an single wide on a very quite back street and is loving it :D

Lots of those adds are in NM off highway 47 south of Belen no fencing, dirt roads, electricity as far as I know is only near the highway, you would have to drill a well (deep around 500 ft) , put in a septic system. There are reasons there is nobody living on them alot of them are old cattle ranches being broke up, somebody meantion 5-7 acres per cow, out here it is at least 57 acres per cow calf pair, ranchers out here measure their places in sections (1 mile by 1 mile square) and generally run a 100 cows per section.
 
Well Hell, if my math is right I gots me a total of 70 ranches! :laughing:
 
bigun said:
, somebody meantion 5-7 acres per cow, out here it is at least 57 acres per cow calf pair, ranchers out here measure their places in sections (1 mile by 1 mile square) and generally run a 100 cows per section.
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100 cows per section is 6.4 acres per cow :confused: is "out here" in 2 very different places? :flipoff2:
 
Provience said:
100 cows per section is 6.4 acres per cow :confused: is "out here" in 2 very different places? :flipoff2:
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Should have read up to 100, very few places can do that most are running way less the big problem is water unless they have spent the money to move water from the well to multiple places on the place the cows tend to graze in the same area near water.

Now quit screwing me with math! :flipoff2:
 
CenCon said:
Well Hell, if my math is right I gots me a total of 70 ranches! :laughing:
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Buddys family has 7 sections some of the areas haven't ever had a white mans foot on them because they are too rugged, to get back onto excepct on foot and no good cowboy goes anywhere he can't ride
 
bigun said:
Should have read up to 100, very few places can do that most are running way less the big problem is water unless they have spent the money to move water from the well to multiple places on the place the cows tend to graze in the same area near water.

Now quit screwing me with math! :flipoff2:
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you must work for the government or johns hopkins :flipoff2: only off by a factor of 10 :rasta:


but yeah, use is a major concern. buying water by the truck to fill a tank for domestic use, yeah annoying, but beats living in NYC :rasta: buying water by the truck to keep cows alive? Yeah, zero chance of that being a long term solution unless you can buy NYC :lmao:
 
Provience said:
you must work for the government or johns hopkins :flipoff2: only off by a factor of 10 :rasta:


but yeah, use is a major concern. buying water by the truck to fill a tank for domestic use, yeah annoying, but beats living in NYC :rasta: buying water by the truck to keep cows alive? Yeah, zero chance of that being a long term solution unless you can buy NYC :lmao:
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Folks lucked out when they bought this place the city wanted a right away for a water line the guy who had the place told them they could if they dropped a water meter on the place. Water here can be found around 500 ft, and then you have a chance to get gyp water, so a lot of people buy from the city and haul it themselves. Before someone meantions rain water harvesting you have to have rain our average is supposed to be about 14 inches, while there are someplaces that do get it most of the time the wind just blows the clouds right over us
 
bigun said:
Folks lucked out when they bought this place the city wanted a right away for a water line the guy who had the place told them they could if they dropped a water meter on the place. Water here can be found around 500 ft, and then you have a chance to get gyp water, so a lot of people buy from the city and haul it themselves. Before someone meantions rain water harvesting you have to have rain our average is supposed to be about 14 inches, while there are someplaces that do get it most of the time the wind just blows the clouds right over us
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i bought in to a place with ~14" average rainfall, but it is also ~70" of snow and stays cold. any water that lands on me, i'm free to use. well drilling will likely end up around 250-350' based on what i've seen. i'm hoping that stockpiling snow will let me build a decent sized retention pond to at least do something with it and stretch out the grass growing season by an extra month of so.

i dunno, it will either work out or be my most expensive failure :rasta:
 
We didn't even have to have the driveway cleared this year it never got more than 4 inches deep, and then it was gone by the next day
 
bigun said:
We didn't even have to have the driveway cleared this year it never got more than 4 inches deep, and then it was gone by the next day
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that's just another one of those Things to Watch For. :laughing: ours was comparatively cheap because it isn't considered year round access, on account of the ~5 months of snow and few miles of unmaintained roads.

i'm trying to visit in a month or so to try and get a better plan for that side of things. On the plus side, we have rights to maintain the road up to 60' wide on "existing private roads" and the county doesn't have a map of what those existing roads may be. I highly doubt anybody would complain about me taking a medium duty truck and making something functional, but at least i know that the law is on my side if they want to get shitty about why the 2 track going through their property is now wide enough to pass two trailers on :lmao:
 
Goggle maps shows the road turning onto our driveway going past the house then out the south gate, instead of following the fence line. It had been a while since someone came down the driveway, now this year we have had 4 or 5 vehicles on the driveway camera, I finally put up a private drive sign at the fence line.
 
that's wild :laughing: people put too much faith in GPS most days it seems.

I'm very slowly working up a weather station of sorts to drop out there to see what really happens over a year or so and want to put a camera there to take some pictures at the same times every day. probably worth it to put a motion sensor camera up on the "road side" just to see how many people end up randomly driving back in to BFE
 
rockmup said:
Those things have been around for 40 years or more. They are much like a timeshare, they don't care if you default because they just turn around and re sell it. Mineral rights are almost never included in the sale.
Theres tons of that shit on ebay or at least used to be. I worked with a guy once from Alabama who couldn't wait to tell me that he owned property in Elko NV and thats where he was going to retire to. He bought 2 40 ac. lots, after I got done laughing I had to tell him there wasn't anything out there except hookers and tumbleweeds.
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Lots of room out here, I mean we're full. Elko County is the 4th largest County in the lower 48.
Be careful looking on the map. Just because it shows a road doesn't mean it's actually there and can be driven over 1/3 of the year.
 
bigun said:
Should have read up to 100, very few places can do that most are running way less the big problem is water unless they have spent the money to move water from the well to multiple places on the place the cows tend to graze in the same area near water.

Now quit screwing me with math! :flipoff2:
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There isn't anywhere in New Mexico you are going to be able to run 100 cows per section, unless you are planning to bankrupt yourself buying feed. I'd be surprised if you could get under 20 acres per cow even in the greenest, grassiest areas in New Mexico.
 
'84 Bronco II said:
There isn't anywhere in New Mexico you are going to be able to run 100 cows per section, unless you are planning to bankrupt yourself buying feed. I'd be surprised if you could get under 20 acres per cow even in the greenest, grassiest areas in New Mexico.
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Not that it matters for most of this discussion but there are some areas in the Hondo Valley and foothills up past Ruidoso and over around Capitan where that was more than possible. Likely broken up into smaller parcels now though, but a few decades ago, very possible. They were running 20-30 acres per but well managed.

edit- not disagreeing, just pointing out that not all of NM is the barren shithole it looks like from a distance.
 
Out near terlingua they have blue quail. I hunt them up near fort Stockton.

I'd rather live near fort Davis and vacation in terlingua. Terlingua is the ghostest of towns.
 
mrblaine said:
edit- not disagreeing, just pointing out that not all of NM is the barren shithole it looks like from a distance.
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This part is the truth. People around me are running cattle on less than 20 acres per cow. The largest ranch in the area has roughly that per. This is in the Chama Valley area of NM. To be fair though, this spring has been miserably and abnormally dry so far and they may be selling off soon if we don't get any rain. The Brazos and Chama rivers are still flowing full for now though.
 
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mrblaine said:
Not that it matters for most of this discussion but there are some areas in the Hondo Valley and foothills up past Ruidoso and over around Capitan where that was more than possible. Likely broken up into smaller parcels now though, but a few decades ago, very possible. They were running 20-30 acres per but well managed.

edit- not disagreeing, just pointing out that not all of NM is the barren shithole it looks like from a distance.
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I am kind of partial to the "barren shithole" part of the state :laughing: but you are right, there are plenty of mountainous, forested portions of the state. Surprisingly little of New Mexico is classified as a true desert; most of it is semi-arid, i.e. grassland and scrub. The trans-Pecos region of Texas is very similar to southern New Mexico.

As others have pointed out, make sure you can get water. Personally, I would not be willing to deal with the hassle of hauling water. The next big thing is electricity. Sure, it is a great area for solar, but I personally wouldn't want to deal with the hassle and expense of an "off-the-grid" solar system. Also, I would make sure all the rights come with the land (mineral, water, grazing, etc.)

As others have said, the reason these "Ranch" parcels (I wouldn't consider anything less than a section to be an actual ranch) usually go so cheap is because they are in the middle of nowhere without any decent means of getting utilities. They are usually undesirable for any commercial purpose (ranching, mining, oil, etc.) so the only reason anyone would buy them is because they want to live out in BFE away from everything. While the idea seems attractive, the reality leaves a lot to be desired. I personally would love to have a big ranch out in the middle of nowhere someday, but there is no way that would be my sole residence.
 
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