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Ranching - now for MBAs

A Texas university launches a master's program for ranchers, saying you need more than the sciences to run a business.

KINGSVILLE, Texas - Once upon a time, in the Wild West, all it took to raise cattle was land, grass and cowboys who knew how to rope the critters. Now, it may take an MBA.

Texas A&M at Kingsville's Institute for Ranch Management is offering what university officials call the first master's degree program for ranchers - sort of a Harvard Business School for cowboys. In addition to graduate-level business courses, students are schooled in rangeland specialties, including animal nutrition and wildlife management.

During a Friday noon session over brown bag lunches, a laptop computer beams a long list of letters and numbers. It's an equation, Les Nunn tells his colleagues in cowboy hats, for getting the most beef out of your pastures' grass. Nunn's Power Point presentation, "Searching for the Economic Optimum Stocking Ratio," follows another student's profit loss analysis of a government incentive program for land conservation.

It's an exclusive club, coming with the promise of a job after graduation. The first graduating class had two students; this class has four, with seven students enrolled in the program this year. Twenty students applied for a slot.

The program signals a new era for the occupation. In the past, those aspiring to careers in ranch management might have pursued degrees in animal science or agriculture and rounded out their resumes with on-the-job training. Today's ranchers need business and wildlife management skills.

"You can't just be an animal nutritionist and horse person and manage a ranch any more," said Barry Dunn, a former South Dakota rancher who heads the program.

"The market for most of ranching's history has been a commodities market," he said. "But now the markets are moving into specialized (fields) - whether it's hunting or specialized beef production. ... All of that just adds more and more sophistication."

Dunn said graduates could expect to be recruited for $50,000 to $75,000 to start.

The King Ranch, which endowed the institute, epitomizes the kind of modern ranch the school wants its students to be able to manage.

At 825,000 acres, it is the largest ranch in the United States, so vast it appears as a dark spot from outer space, so unspoiled it has more species of birds than the Florida Everglades. It includes a small school district for employees' children. It originated several cattle strains and is considered the birthplace of American ranching.

But these days, cattle raising is only a small part of the ranch's operations, which include oil and gas leases, ecotourism, hunting tours, a publishing company and a retail arm. The ranch farms cotton and citrus. Its corporate headquarters are in Houston, 200 miles away.

David Delaney, vice president and general manager of ranching operations, said he spends at least 60 percent of his time in front of a computer, managing the operations with charts and spreadsheets. Much of the other time he's out hobnobbing, "being the face of the King Ranch." Yet he knows each of the ranch's 160 pastures.

"I would have gone to this program if it had been available at the time," said Delaney, who started out wanting to be a vet. "But there was no such thing."

[Last modified September 26, 2007, 23:58:51]