Ted Turner’s Blue Creek Ranch, located north of Oshkosh. Turner, the billionaire who founded CNN, owned nearly 500,000 acres of Nebraska ranch land at his peak. Now 85 and living with Lewy body dementia, Turner is presumed to be transferring much of that land to a nonprofit ag research institute bearing his name. Photo by Ryan Soderlin for the Flatwater Free Press
Ted Turner’s Blue Creek Ranch, located north of Oshkosh. Turner, the billionaire who founded CNN, owned nearly 500,000 acres of Nebraska ranch land at his peak. Now 85 and living with Lewy body dementia, Turner is presumed to be transferring much of that land to a nonprofit ag research institute bearing his name. Photo by Ryan Soderlin for the Flatwater Free Press
Long before anyone talked about China, Bill Gates or multinational corporations buying up Nebraska land, another name was spoken, with curiosity and frustration, on farms and ranches from Ord to Ogallala.
Ted Turner, they said. Ted Turner is buying everything.
The media mogul’s Nebraska land purchases in the late 1990s made him the single largest landowner in the state while sparking speculation.