HOME ON THE RANGE IN CENTRAL FLORIDA
Deseret Ranches—where the deer, cattle and alligators play
Deseret Ranches— where the deer, cattle and alligators play
I’m headed south from Palm Coast on I-95 to a curious place where nature rules, an out-of-place place in a Florida dominated by beach resorts, swimming pools and golf courses. The billboards of Daytona Beach and Orlando snicker at my foolish journey despite my growing curiosity. As I exit south of Orlando and head west, the bumper-to-bumper pile-up of lodgings, Cape Canaveral and Disney World fade in the distance behind me. My destination? Deseret Ranches, a world somewhere in the middle of nowhere.
A rare sign signals I am approaching St. Cloud, aptly named, and I turn on a road lined with wood posts, gray wire, trees and grass. No houses, stores or buildings. Just a broad, tufted sky drifting above a corridor in the greenery. Oh, and cows. Lots of cows. Welcome to the Deseret Ranches, a massive 290,000-acre swath of nature that lies one hour and a lifetime away from the unnatural sprawl that is Orlando. As I turn up Deseret Lane thinking I have just arrived at my destination, I realize I’ve been engulfed by it for the past 15 miles. Slightly bigger than the state of Rhode Island, the property spreads nondescriptly but stunningly across Orange, Osceloa and Brevard counties, and offers a peek into a world where land management and repurposing take on whole new meanings.
Begun in the 1950s, the initial acreage was purchased by Mormon elder Henry Moyle in a forward-thinking and humanistic approach toward providing sustenance for church members and the poor. What was once timberland, stripped of pine and cypress and left to die, became a 60-year project of stewardship of the land. Today it is a highly productive cattle ranch, and so much more.
I drive the packed sand road to the Visitor and Information Center, where I've arranged for a tour. The center is a “cracker” house, an example of 19th-century popular Florida architecture impressive in its simplicity and functionality. As our tour guide explains inside the house, the raised floor allows for critters to be under and not inside, and the “shotgun style” of open space from front door to back creates a cooling draft with both doors open. The screened-in, painted wood porch topped with cozy rockers reminds me of seashore houses of my youth, and the view seems endless as it runs from green lawn to pastures to the ever-present sky.
Our guide for the day, Sister Tinney, begins with statistics about the Deseret Ranches, staggering information that again confirms I’ve arrived somewhere incomprehensible. The property consists of 14 mini ranches, each with its own manager and cowboys. With 45,000 cows and 1,350 bulls, it is an efficient way to manage the herds. The cattle work is still done on horseback by the multiskilled cowboys who also maintain their 120 workhorses, providing health care to the
animals as needed. There are no veterinarians on-site. “We have cowboys here with bachelor’s and master’s degrees,” Sister Tinney says with pride.
As we head out on a mini-bus to tour the cattle ranch, the sky broadens to a size that recalls Wyoming and Montana more than Florida. I exit the bus often to take in the massive view of land around me, scanning crossroad vistas calibrated in miles.
Ah, yes, the cows. They are nowhere and everywhere. The sheer amount of acreage betrays their presence. All along the roads they gather, in shade and in water, barely curious at our passing as they peer through the 1,400 miles of fence line. Sister Tinney tells me I’ve just missed the roundup. “The bulls and cows breed from March 1 to June 1,” she explains. “They calve from mid-December to February. The calves ship out in August.” Just my luck.
So today, the cowboys I don’t see and the cows I do are like parents in September—tired and glad to have a break from the kids.
While the cattle are the heart of Deseret, stewardship of the land through animal, soil and ecology science offers much more. Management of a 2,000-acre reservoir maximizes the availability of water. A quarter-million trees over 1,700 acres produce a huge citrus crop, the harvests leased out to companies like Tropicana. Cucumber, cauliflower and corn, along with tree harvesting and sod production, round out the agricultural operations. Mounds of fossilized shells harvested from the ground are used to pack the 250 miles of sandy roads crisscrossing the property. There are also leased hunting lodges that tap into the management of wildlife. Large-mouth bass, Osceola turkeys, wild hogs, white-tailed deer, wood storks and the omnipresent Florida gators thrive in the woods, marshes and rookery of this amazing Eden.
I’ve wandered the ranch for almost two hours and I’ve seen a mere fraction. Climbing back into my car, I take account of the day. I know that "cracker" houses, horses and cattle are called so because of the whip used by the cowboys. I know that, according to the Book of Mormon, "deseret" means honeybee, representing industriousness and hard work, and the ranch uses a beehive as its brand. And I have a sense of the remarkable effort it has taken over the past half century to create and maintain this unique world within a world. As the glimmering cracker house disappears in the rear-view mirror, I’m hopeful it will be found by others in another 50 years, reappearing like the magical Brigadoon, somewhere in the middle of nowhere.