KEN KLEMM IS an American rancher who can talk proper land management techniques just as easily as Enlightenment theory and the importance of individual rights.

“Liberty is the key to healthy land,” Ken explains. “There’s a direct link between people having choices to do what they want with their land and having healthy lands.”

For Ken, this is no armchair philosophizing. He has improved the health of thousands of acres of ranchland all over the country. And he’s currently fighting the government in court to defend voluntary conservation as an alternative to heavy-handed government mandates.

But Ken didn’t grow up busting broncos on the open range. He grew up a city kid in Chicago itching to get out.

Ken Klemm on his ranch in Goodland, Kansas

A DAY AFTER Ken’s high school graduation, he was on a train to a new job and a new life on a dude ranch in Cody, Wyoming. “Growing up, whether it was with Boy Scouts or just as a family, we pretty much went camping once a month virtually year-round,” remembers Ken. “I just loved the outdoors. It kept me sane, kept me out of trouble (generally speaking). So there was never a question of if I was going to leave the city. It was just a question of when.

As a teenager working on the ranch, Ken knew he was green. He was the city kid trying to learn ranch life. He modestly describes his formative years as “a little bit of a challenge.” In the 1980s, “ranch work didn’t pay anything. I took one ranch job where I worked seven days a week from 7 in the morning till 5 at night, and then checked cattle every two hours all night long, all winter long. I got paid $500 a month for that. It tests your mettle; it makes you a man.”

Ken grew up fast through various ranch hand jobs. And while he loved ranch life, being a ranch hand was not a lifelong goal. He set out to learn the management side of the business. “I began to teach myself all sorts of things,” he recalls. “I learned how to manage men, deal with finances, Excel spreadsheets, all of that. I learned how to talk to ranch owners and the workers who made their ranches operate. I could be at a dinner with billionaires and walk out and translate their vision to the cowboys—and we’d get it all done. Learning that wasn’t easy; it’s hard work. But I had drawn a hard line that I was never going back to the city—I couldn’t go back; I had to go forward.”

Becoming a ranch manager was lucrative for Ken, but his success wasn’t just due to his ability to maintain the land—his success was due to his ability to improve the land. Ken explains, “In the ’90s, I was hired to be the manager of a 157-square-mile ranch in Southern Colorado, and I thought, ‘Holy cow, I’ve got 157 square miles that I knew were not being run towards their optimal health. There had to be a better way.’”

His better way eventually became “holistic management.”

Holistic management is based on the maxim that everything about land management is interconnected. Soil quality, water usage, crop rotation, livestock operations all affect each other. You can’t change or adjust one without affecting all the others. Ken elaborates, “Holistic management isn’t limited just to land or just to animals, but it also encompasses people and finances and all the other things as well. It’s an amazing tool. For example, when I took over that ranch, we had 800 buffalo and about 1,500 cattle. When I left five years later, we had 3,500 buffalo, 3,000 cattle and 800 wild elk. We had springs come back, artesian wells come back, and we actually improved the water cycle as the land got healthier. If you’re going to really succeed in life and in business, you have to have an unfair advantage. Well, holistic management is my unfair advantage.”

So with his unfair advantage and years of ranch-managing experience, Ken was ready to go out on his own. “I was very grateful for the men that gave me opportunities to manage their ranches,” Ken described. “I learned a lot. I say that’s where I got my MBA and PhD in all sorts of things. But at the end of the day, I was the caretaker of other people’s land and that just didn’t satisfy me. I wanted my own land. I wanted my own house. I wanted something that I could call my own.”

In 1999, Ken and a business partner bought a Kansas ranch and started raising bison and cattle, and crops like wheat and rye. It was anything but easy. In addition to being the beginning of a 20-year-long drought that is still going on today, 1999 and 2000 saw the biggest collapse in the bison market in recent history. In 1999, a rancher could sell a buffalo cow at market for around $3,500. By the end of 2000, that same buffalo would sell for around $200.

With four kids, and a fifth on the way, Ken had just purchased a ranch at the beginning of a decades-long drought and on the cusp of a massive market collapse. But he wasn’t discouraged. Instead, he pressed his “unfair advantage.”

Through holistic management, Ken improved his land, brought back native plant and animal species, and expanded his livestock operations. Today, Ken and his partners not only are surviving, but thriving.

However, the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA) threatens to upend Ken’s efforts to restore his land. Paradoxically, the ESA penalizes property owners, like Ken, who manage their land to accommodate rare species and conserve their habitats by imposing costly regulations that lower the land’s value and restrict its use.

Recognizing these concerns, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service worked with state wildlife officials, conservation groups, and landowners in the early 2000s to develop a policy that encourages species recovery and habitat restoration, rather than punishing it. With that policy, the service will not list a species under the ESA and trigger its counterproductive regulations if private conservation efforts adequately address threats to the species.

However, the Fish and Wildlife Service never submitted this rule to Congress, a step required under the Congressional Review Act to make it law. In 2018, the Kansas Natural Resource Coalition (KNRC), a state-based conservation group Ken has long been a part of, sued the government, demanding it follow the law and submit the rules to Congress. Only by taking this step could the agency secure the rule’s conservation benefits and avoid the Endangered Species Act’s worst effects. PLF represents KNRC in court.

WHEN KEN WAS a teenager still living in Chicago, his family visited a ranch out West on vacation. During the trip, they went on a back country horse trek. When an older member of the group got hurt, Ken helped the guide save his life. “We splinted his leg and stayed [on the mountain] with him for hours and did our best to stop the bleeding and prevent him from going into shock. Then, right at dark we heard the helicopter come to take him away. When we got back to the ranch, the owners of the dude ranch said, ‘Hey, if you ever want a job, you got one here.’ So I said, ‘I’ll be here next summer.’”

Ken Klemm grew up a Chicago kid itching to get out of the city. Today, he’s a rancher fighting to better his land and the environment.