Thursday, May 2, 2024
ALL IN THE FAMILY: Fall Creek Ranch, located at 8220 Langon Leake Court, has been in the Langdon family for approximately 50 years. To ensure Fall Creek Ranch will continue to stay a working ranch and a wildlife preserve forever, Joe and Karen Langdon, pictured, have decided to put their ranch into a conservation easement — a voluntary, legal agreement that permanently limits use of the land in order to protect its conservation values.
LIFE ON THE LAND: Fall Creek Ranch is home to several annual events like the agricultural/conservation day for local schools, pictured, where students learn about the importance of farmers and ranchers. The church is also where Kelly Langdon, Joe and Karen’s son, hosts weddings with his wife, Kristyn, in the spring and fall.
In this day and age, farms and ranches are few and far between — especially as cities continue to grow and land owners become priced out by developers, forcing them to sell their property to incoming housing developments or commercial businesses.
According to finance.yahoo.com, farmland acreage in the U.S. has decreased by more than 13.62 million acres since 2014, an average loss in excess of 1.9 million acres per year.
Many farmers and ranchers are doing whatever they can to save their land — and the Langdon family of Hood County is no exception.
RANCH HISTORY
For more than 100 years, the Langdon family has resided in Granbury and the surrounding areas, while the family ranch, Fall Creek Ranch, has been owned by the Langdons since the early 1970s.
When the current owners of Fall Creek Ranch, Joe and Karen Langdon, took over the ranch from Jack Langdon, Joe’s uncle, in the 1980s, the couple started a cow calf operation and a horse boarding operation — the former of which is still operated to this day.
Joe and Karen ran the horse boarding operation for more than 20 years, but retired the operation in 2005.
Now, the family continues to run the cow calf operation and a hay operation off of the 1,400-acre ranch located at 8220 Langdon Leake Court.
“We continue to run cattle," Karen said. “We used to run a herd of 85 cows, and then once we had a little gas money, we cut that down to about 35 and now we're up to like a 50-cow herd.”
Keeping the ranch in the Langdon family was always a goal for Joe and Karen.
“We raised our two boys on the ranch and live in the original ranch house that was built in 1882,” Karen said.
Their sons, Kelly and Kit, have each built a home on the ranch where they are raising their families. Kelly has worked on Fall Creek Ranch full time since graduating from Tarleton State University in the mid-2000s. Now, Kelly and his wife, Kristyn, operate a wedding venue on the ranch, while Kit and his wife, Brianne, teach at Granbury High School.
“We've been in business doing (weddings) for the public for about four years now, but we don't do a lot of advertising; it's all just word of mouth,” Kelly said. “I do about 15 to 20 weddings a year. We just do them in the spring and fall.”
What makes the wedding venue at Fall Creek Ranch stand out from other venues is the fact that the funds that Kelly and Kristyn raise help keep the ranch alive.
"When somebody books a wedding with us, that's actually helping me be able to stay on the ranch and continue to work a working cattle ranch,” Kelly said. “That's what I try to explain to people when they book a wedding with us — they're almost helping keep a working cattle ranch (alive) by having their wedding here. If I didn't have that, I don't know what else I would be doing to be able to stay here to work, farm and ranch.”
The wedding chapel, Kelly describes, is multifunctional, as several different types of events have been held inside, like a Granbury Optimist Club banquet, a Texas Master Naturalist meeting, a Habitat for Humanity anniversary party, Friends for Animals Adoption Shelter fundraisers and dinners for Hood/Somervell Farm Bureau (for which Kelly is serving as vice president).
For the past several years, the Langdons have hosted an agricultural/conservation day for local schools where students learn about the importance of farmers and ranchers, as well as how conservation and agriculture are interrelated.
CONSERVATION EASEMENT
As Granbury continued to grow with more developments, the Langdon family knew they needed to do something in order to keep Fall Creek Ranch as it is now, which is why the topic of putting the ranch into a conservation easement came into play.
A conservation easement is a voluntary, legal agreement that permanently limits uses of the land in order to protect its conservation values.
“The (plans for the) conservation easement moved forward quicker once everybody started moving to Granbury and things were getting developed,” Kelly said. “There's not a lot of farms and ranches left in Granbury anymore, but the few that are left, we've seen them in the last year or two start getting cut up and housing developments going in on them and I think all three of us decided that's not what we wanted to happen to this place, and so that's why we started looking around at ways to protect it and we decided a conservation easement was probably what fit us best.”
“After seeing all the development in Granbury and ranches and farm ground being broken up, we felt like it was necessary to protect our 1,400 acres by placing it in a conservation easement,” Karen said. “What a conservation easement does is protect the land from ever being subdivided or developed. It was a big decision for us to make, but we love the ranch and don't want to ever see it developed.”
In December 2021, the Langdon family put Fall Creek Ranch into a conservation easement with Texas Agricultural Land Trust (TALT).
“We chose TALT because it was formed by members of Texas Farm Bureau, Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers and Texas Wildlife Association — all of which we are members of,” Karen said. “After placing our ranch in an easement with TALT, the CEO, Chad Ellis, asked our son Kelly to join the board of directors, which he accepted earlier this year.”
“When you put it into a conservation easement, there's no turning back. You can't 10 years down the road say, ‘We decided not to put it in an easement. We want to get it back.’ Once it's done, it's done, so it should stay a working ranch,” Kelly said.
The Langdon family had to map out several years ahead in regard to future developments on the ranch because unless it was listed in the original planning of the conservation easement, it can’t be changed.
"You try to think out as far as you can in the future thinking, ‘Well, one of the grandkids might want to build a house here or something like that,’ so we saved a few of those little areas, but other than that, they're pretty strict on what all you can do with it other than use it as a working ranch,” Kelly said. “It goes even to the extent where if you wanted to come and pave the road coming out here, you can't do that anymore; it's got to stay a dirt road. It's pretty much absolutely no development. If I decided that I want to build a new horse barn, unless you had that in the plans, that doesn’t happen.”
Unfortunately, putting Fall Creek Ranch in a conservation easement greatly diminishes the property value because it is no longer available for future development, but the desire to keep the ranch in the Langdon family for future generations to come was well worth it in the end.
“It is a tremendous decrease in value, but we all just felt that money is not everything and keeping it as a working ranch was more important than the monetary aspect of it,” Kelly said.
Karen added, “We gave up a lot of monetary value of the ranch by putting it into a conservation easement, but this helps ensure that it will be left to our boys where it will continue to stay a working ranch and wildlife preserve forever.”
