ORLANDO, Fla. – With the announcement that Farmland Reserve, Inc. has filed a proposal to annex part of its massive property into the city of Orlando, you may be wondering what Deseret Ranches is.
Farmland Reserve itself is an investment arm of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
According to The Salt Lake Tribune, the Mormon Church is one of the nation’s top private landholders with U.S. properties valued at around $16 billion.
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An article from the newsroom of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints called Deseret Ranches “one of the largest cow-calf ranching operations in the country” at 300,000 acres with operations involving beef cattle, citrus, shells, sod, solar and water management.
The massive property spreads over Orange, Osceola and Brevard counties.
Deseret Ranches boasts on its website that it maintains a herd of around 42,500 cows, divided into 14 management units. Each unit contains about 3,100 cows with a single cowboy managing 1,200 of them.
Florida currently ranks ninth in beef cattle production with 883,589 head of beef cows, according to the UF-IFAS Range Cattle Research and Education Center.
Farmland Reserve said Monday it is seeking to annex 52,450 acres of property into the city of Orlando, saying it will work with the city to “envision a framework for smart growth in future decades.”
“Annexation of our Deseret Ranch property into Orlando allows us to look ahead to the next 70 years and beyond, to establish a long-term vision for this land as an integral, unified planning area to prepare for the future of a growing region, with conserving natural resources always as the first consideration in our planning,” Doug Rose, president of Farmland Reserve, said in a prepared statement.
Rose also said that putting the “property under a single municipal government will avoid the piecemeal planning of the past.”
The News Service of Florida contributed to this article.
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