Bob Kleberg and the King Ranch by John Cypher

Author:John Cypher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Texas Press

CHAPTER NINE

BRAZIL, A MULTIFACETED ADVENTURE

AT THE PERIMETER OF the next concentric circle beyond Venezuela lay the King Ranch do Brasil properties, one of Bob’s earliest forays in his ring of expansions into Latin America.

Keeping to his credo of going first to the men who knew the country, in 1953 Bob took up the offer of an old friend, A. Thomas Taylor, to join him in looking at the possibility of setting up an operation in Brazil. Taylor was chairman of the board of International Packers, a subsidiary of the giant meat-packer Swift and Company. In the U.S., Swift had long been the principal King Ranch fat cattle buyer; Bob and Tom had an ongoing relationship.

Tom was a Yale graduate, a football standout who had married Geraldine Swift of the Chicago family that descended from the company founder. Tall, broad-shouldered, ruggedly handsome despite a prematurely bald pate, Tom had a resonant, commanding voice that could convince his employees and associates, by persuasion or intimidation, to do just about anything. The Kleberg-Taylor association, beginning here, wove a thread through the King Ranch multinational complex.

Tom invited Bob down to look around, escorting him on an extended trip through the south central states of São Paulo, Mata Grosso, and Minas Gerais. Companhia Swift do Brasil, an International Packers subsidiary, was already in the ranching business in the Presidente Prudente area, about three hundred miles west of the city of São Paulo, mainly fattening steers for their packing operation. Bob found that part of the country, on the western frontier of Brazil at the time, well suited for his Santa Gertrudis. Its rich red soil, high in iron and balanced in the other minerals, received a fifty-inch rainfall. He became a partner in a joint venture with International Packers by purchasing two properties near the two owned by the company. They then bought a property jointly, merging the five—Bartira, Larenga Doce, Formosa, Mosquito, and Brasilandia—into a unified ranching operation of 147,000 acres. Four of the properties were adjacent, or almost; Mosquito, King Ranch–owned, was about ten minutes’ flying time to the south.

KING RANCH DO BRASIL officed with Swift do Brasil in the country’s leading industrial city, São Paulo, an overcrowded, underserviced, smogchoked wasteland that made it a pleasure to get out into the country; the flight to the ranches was a hygienic relief.

Clearing, the first step in the chain of developments leading to creating a ranch on a frontier, was done in two ways: the time-honored and the Bob Kleberg—efficient. In the first, Indians moved in, hand-chopped and burned, and planted a crop of sorghum. By contract, they had the right to stay on the land for three crop seasons. On harvesting the third crop, they planted perennial grass seed furnished by the owner and then moved on to another location to repeat the process. The government smiled upon this form of putting to work as many colonos as possible. Over time, owners got their land cleared; at the end of three seasons tenants were ready to move anyway.

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