TURNER  (CONT)

mejo Park Ranch in New Mexico, for example, offers weeklong elk hunting excursions at $12,000 a pop. He has also entered the restaurant business with gusto, opening more than 50 Ted's Montana Grill restaurants across the country that feature bison meat.
Turner declined to be interviewed, only accepting written questions answered by spokesman Phillip Evans.

"Our agenda is not to create a vast wildlife preserve," Evans, vice president of Turner Enterprises, said in an e-mail. However, he said, Turner is concerned about preserving animal habitat while ranching. "We think we can do both."

Ron Arnold, head of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise and author of several books critical of the environmental movement, said he has studied Turner's activities and come to his own conclusion.

Turner is amassing land for "his own sense of grandiosity," he said. "If he wants to hunt ducks on it, he hunts ducks on it. If he wanted to raise buffalo, he raised buffalo on it. That's all I could conclude."

Turner owns the largest buffalo herd in the country, 45,000 strong, many of them on the 425,000 acres he owns in Nebraska.
The sturdy bison need less attention than cattle, requiring fewer ranch hands. That adds to people's worries here in Hooker County, where there is about one person for every 721 square miles, just 15 kids graduated from high school last year, and the population dropped 3.4 percent from 2000 to 2006.

Another persistent complaint is that Turner's extraordinary ability to outbid just about anyone is driving up land prices, making it tougher for longtime ranchers to expand and keep their operations afloat.

Over the past decade, ranch land in the Sandhills region of the state where Turner owns all his property has more than doubled in price to over $300 an acre.

Kevin McCully, a Mullen-area land broker, said only a part of the increase can be attributed to Turner. Maybe, said Kime, but he just knows he can't compete: The recent auction was the third time in recent years that he was outbid by Turner, who now borders about three-quarters of Kime's ranch.

Kime now wonders whether someday he might have to sell the ranch that has been in the family for generations.
"Turner might be the only one around that would want to buy it," he said.

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