Skip to content
Texas Land Consultants

Ranch Management & Wildlife

Ranch Management

Boots on the ground for owners who do not live on the property. Someone checks the gates, runs the water, vets the hunters, collects the lease, and keeps the tax valuation intact — 200 miles from where you live. The wildlife and habitat work sits inside this, not beside it: our own biologist writes the plan, and the same crew carries it out.

Talk About Managing Your Place

Included, Not Extra

The wildlife work is part of managing the place

Most firms sell these separately: a caretaker who mows and checks gates, and a consultant who flies in once a year, writes a habitat plan and invoices. We do not split them, because the plan and the work are the same job done twice.

  • It is the same crew

    A habitat plan is only worth the practices actually performed on the ground. When the plan and the work order come from one operation, supplemental water is a trough that gets filled and logged, not a line item in a report nobody reads.

  • It is the valuation, which is money

    Losing the 1-d-1 productivity valuation is the largest recurring cost exposure on a ranch. Wildlife management use is how an owner keeps it without running cattle they do not want.

  • The evidence is already being collected

    Census counts, supplemental water, predator control — the practices the appraisal district asks about are things the management operation is doing anyway. Dated and GPS-stamped, they become the annual filing.

The wildlife work in fullBook a Valuation Review

Who This Is For

You are buying a weekend, not a job

The owner who needs this most lives two hundred miles away, comes down when they can, and has no way of knowing whether a float valve failed in March.

Absentee recreational buyer

San Antonio, Austin, Houston, Dallas

Someone on the ground 200 miles away who checks the gates, runs the water, vets the hunters, and keeps the tax valuation intact. They are buying a weekend, not a job.

Legacy family ranch & heirs

The operation outlived the operator. They need a plan the appraisal district accepts, a lease structure the family agrees on, and an honest number if they ever sell.

What Is Covered

The scope

  • Absentee owner ranch management — scheduled property checks, photo and condition reporting
  • Infrastructure: fences, gates, cattle guards, roads, pens, barns, water lines, troughs, solar and windmill pumps
  • Lease administration — grazing and hunting leases drafted, executed, collected, and enforced
  • Hunter vetting, lease rules, liability documentation, and season coordination
  • Agricultural use compliance: keeping the operation genuinely qualifying so the 1-d-1 valuation is not at risk
  • Vendor management — brush crews, fence contractors, well drillers, dozer work, aerial applicators
  • Drought, wildfire, and storm response protocols
  • Boundary security, trespass documentation, and neighbor relations
  • Rural residential leasing and management — ranch houses, foreman quarters, guest cabins, hunting camps
  • Owner reporting: monthly statements, annual operating summary, capital plan
  • Wildlife management valuation — converting qualifying 1-d-1 open-space land to wildlife management use, so the productivity valuation survives without running livestock
  • Wildlife management plans written to Texas Parks & Wildlife standards and filed with the county appraisal district
  • The seven approved practice categories designed, implemented and documented: habitat control, erosion control, predator control, supplemental water, supplemental food, shelter, and census counts
  • Deer surveys, harvest recommendations, and Managed Lands Deer Program enrolment and administration
  • Brush management and sculpting plans, prescribed burn planning, native grass and forb restoration
  • Annual reporting that documents practices actually performed, so the valuation survives review

Owner Dashboard

See the whole place from wherever you are

On our upper management plans an owner gets one login that pulls together the systems already on the ranch — water telemetry, the gate controller, the game cameras, the weather station, the lease ledger and the valuation file. Most owners are running four apps and a folder of emailed photographs. This is those four apps in one place, kept current by the people on the ground.

Cinco Robles Ranch

1,512 acres · Medina County · Full Stewardship

Last sync 4 minutes ago · 28 devices reporting

P2Cedar Pasture — Trough 4: refill rate 38% below normal for six hours. Float valve suspected. On site tomorrow 7:30 a.m.

Water systems

11 / 12

1 trough under review

Rainfall month

2.5 in

18.4 in year to date

Gate events / 7 days

14

9 vendor · 5 owner party

Open work orders

3

1 awaiting your approval

NORTH PASTURECEDARSOUTH PASTURERIVER412 ac368 ac401 ac331 acHQW1W2W3T4G1G2G3Property map

Water & wells

Well No. 1Headquarters · 42 gpm
82%
HQ storage tank8,400 gal
78%
North storage tank5,000 gal
41%
Trough 4Cedar Pasture · refill anomaly
22%
Illustration of the owner dashboard. Sample data for a property that does not exist — no client account is shown.

What it carries:

  • Water & wells

    Live level and flow on every well, storage tank and trough. A trough that stops refilling raises an alert the same day instead of at the next visit.

  • Rainfall by pasture

    Gauges read per pasture, month to date and year to date, so stocking and spraying decisions rest on what actually fell where.

  • Weather & fire

    On-site station: wind, humidity, soil moisture, dew point, fire danger index and the county burn ban status.

  • Work orders

    Every job open on the place, the vendor assigned, what it costs and what still needs your approval. Closed jobs keep their photographs.

  • Gate & access log

    Every entry through every gate, with plate reads on vehicles the system does not recognise. Who came, which gate, and when.

  • Equipment, fuel & power

    Hours on the tractor and the side-by-side, service intervals, diesel and propane levels, generator exercise log, connectivity uptime.

  • Game cameras

    Every camera on the ranch in one gallery, filterable by camera and date. Tagged images feed the census count.

  • Deer surveys

    Population estimate, acres per deer, buck-to-doe ratio, fawn crop, year-over-year comparison and the harvest recommendation behind it.

  • Drone video & aerial

    Flight log with the footage attached — thermal survey flights, brush encroachment mapping, damage assessment after a storm.

  • Wildlife & ag valuation

    Which qualifying practices are documented, which are short, and the dated GPS-stamped evidence behind each one, ready for the appraisal district.

  • Leases & ledger

    Hunting and grazing leases with their renewal dates, what has been collected, what has been spent, and net to owner year to date.

  • Documents

    Secure archive: the management plan, filed annual reports, executed leases, the boundary survey, well completion reports.

Which integrations are available depends on what is already installed on the property and on the plan. We will tell you what your ranch can support before you sign anything.

How It Runs

A rhythm, not a callout service

Management that only happens when something breaks is not management. This is the cadence an owner is buying.
Every visit
Gates, fences, water, roads and improvements walked and photographed. Anything broken is reported the same day with a cost to fix, not a month later in a summary.
Monthly
A written owner report — condition, photographs with mapped locations, work completed, lease status, and what is coming next.
Seasonally
Lease administration and hunter onboarding in the fall. Water and drought response through the summer. Practice implementation in the spring.
Annually
An operating summary and a capital plan: what the place cost to run, what it earned, and what needs money in the next twelve months.

Objections, Answered

Fair questions

“Management is just another fee.”
“It is. Against a rollback assessment, a busted water line found in March instead of August, and a hunting lease that actually gets collected. Let's price it against those.”
“Can't I just hire a biologist directly?”
“You can. Then you're coordinating a biologist, a fence crew, a lease attorney, and a broker who's already moved on. We do it as one file.”

The Rest of the Firm

What We Do

Ranch Sales

Farm and ranch brokerage for buyers and sellers who need more than a listing agent with a drone.

Read more

Part of Ranch Management

Wildlife Consulting

Wildlife and habitat consulting, delivered by a biologist on staff and run as part of ranch management — not a referral.

Read more

Start Here

Tell us about the place

County, acreage, what is on it, and how often you get down there. We will tell you plainly what managing it would involve.
Start the Conversation(830) 426-8432

Also from John Chunn Realty