Meant to post this a while back. Michael Kruse: FORT PIERCE — Bud Adams, slim and dressed in blue jeans and a blue button-down shirt and cowboy boots and a cowboy hat, drove his Ford Explorer around his ranch in western St. Lucie County, looking at his land and his cattle. His truck, with manure caked in the tires, jounced in the ruts of rough paths. He’s been the president of the Florida Cattlemen’s Association. He’s been named landowner of the year by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conversation Commission. He’s a member of the Florida Agricultural Hall of Fame. Now he showed his guests his bounty, pointing to heifers and calves, herons and hawks, egrets and turkeys, baby gators and boxes of bees, centuries-old hammocks of cypress, pine and palm. He stopped the truck. A hot breeze blew through Spanish moss. He plucked a fat grapefruit and knifed off its top and sucked on a juicy wedge.
This land, unpolluted and pristine, was here before he was here. All he has done, he explained, is keep it intact.
“So far,” he said.
What Adams wants, here near the end, coming up on 89 years old, is for the ranch land that bears his name, some 40,000 acres spread over four Florida counties, to remain the way it is — for his children, for their children, for the children’s children.
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