NPR
written by Wade Goodwyn
Tuesday February 2, 2010
Ranchers in central Texas aren't known for their fondness for government regulation or the Endangered Species Act. But one rancher — a former vacuum cleaner salesman turned fried chicken tycoon — has become a champion of land stewardship and habitat restoration. And it's rubbing off on his fellow ranchers.
David Bamberger converted 5,500 acres of some of the most badly damaged and overgrazed hill country in Texas into a showpiece of environmental restoration. Bamberger has been hailed by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, and has won the state's top voluntary land stewardship award.
A visit to Bamberger Ranch is like a trip back in time. Instead of cedar brush and barren limestone breaking the soil's surface, large hardwood trees surround grassy meadows. Wild turkey and deer wander in the open, and bobcats lurk in the hollows hunting game.
One recent morning, a dozen hill country property owners took a daylong tour of Bamberger's ranch to see what they can learn from him. But why would Texas ranchers care about conservation? The answer is a combination of the hill country history and generational change.
Sowing The Seeds Early
The first explorers to the central Texas hill country wrote in letters that the grass came up to their horses' shoulders, and when the wind blew it looked like ocean swells rolling across the countryside. But a century of overgrazing by cattle and goats reduced much of the land to a cedar-filled brush with much of the topsoil gone with the wind — good for looking at, but not much else. When Bamberger bought his ranch in 1969, he was determined to show what the land could look like again.
He started out in the 1940s in Ohio selling vacuum cleaners door to door. He eventually earned his college degree, but instead of moving into a respectable desk job, Bamberger stunned everyone by packing up his wife and baby, and moving to Texas, where he proceeded to sell ever more vacuum cleaners — 12 hours a day, six days a week. His parents and friends did not understand why this smart, likable young man didn't move into a white-collar desk job with a little more dignity.
"Everybody was disgusted with me," Bamberger says. "Selling vacuum cleaners door to door — anybody could do that."
But Bamberger had discovered that he could make a small fortune door to door — and he did. It was straight commission, and Bamberger brought his likable Midwestern personality to a state that was exploding in population. After 10 years, he had banked half a million dollars.
That's when opportunity came knocking. Another vacuum salesman, a man named Bill Church, needed a financial backer. He was trying to expand a fried-chicken restaurant. So Church and Bamberger became partners, with the first chicken shack across the street from the Alamo.
By the late 1960s, Church's Chicken had exploded across Texas, and Bamberger's stake made him seriously rich. It allowed him to try to fulfill his lifelong dream: habitat restoration, two words that few people had heard of in 1969.
Those seeds were sown early in Bamberger's life.
As a young teenager in rural Ohio, Bamberger's mother gave him a book about farm life by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louis Bromfield called Pleasant Valley. Bromfield lived a few farms down from Bamberger, and the families knew each other. After reading the book, Bamberger decided there was no more noble cause a man could undertake than restoring the land, while still using it to benefit.
Bamberger found 5,500 intensely overgrazed acres west of Austin near Johnson City, Texas.
"Realtors were trying to show me places with landing strips and big fancy houses, and I says, 'You got me all wrong. I'm not interested in this kind of stuff. I want something nobody else wants. I want something that has been so beat up, so neglected,' " Bamberger says.
And he has spent 41 years strategically restoring his land.
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