The Man With a Million Acres

People who have worked for Mr. Kelley recall him showing up at his ranches with groups of friends and family for occasional hunting and fishing weekends. At night, the group played cards and drank bourbon.
Homer Mills, who started working for Mr. Kelley in West Texas in 1999 and helped him manage the dozen or so ranches he bought over the next five years, describes Mr. Kelley as a "good old boy from Kentucky." He recalls that Mr. Kelley sometimes wore a kilt ("they're comfortable," says Mr. Kelley when asked), liked cooking (he made a "mean cornbread," says Mr. Mills) and didn't hunt, though he did fish. At one point Mr. Kelley sported a long red beard, earning him the nickname "ZZ Top."
Colorful eccentricities aside, Mr. Kelley is also a shrewd businessman who avoids the limelight. Much of Mr. Kelley's land is listed under LLCs with names like Spanish Trail Land & Cattle Co. and Texas Mountain Cattle Co. Brokers say they often deal with his business manager, an attorney named Greg Betterton, who works out of an office in Venice, Fla. "You don't call Brad Kelley. He calls you. People all over the South try to get land in front of him. He's been one of the most effective people at flying below the radar in this space," says Joe Taggart, a managing director with LandVest, a real-estate and timberland-consulting firm based in Boston.
Mr. Kelley grew up in Franklin, Ky., near the Tennessee border, on a tobacco farm that also had livestock and a little grain. He always assumed he would become a farmer, he says. He bought his first piece of land—a farm with cattle near his childhood house—in 1974 when he was 17, shortly after graduating from high school. He dropped out of Western Kentucky University four times and never graduated.

Iron Mountain Ranch, about 30,000 acres northwest of Marathon, Texas. (Bill Murphree)As the tobacco industry shifted in the 1980s and the business of preliminary tobacco processing began to decline, there were a number of old warehouses around Kentucky that were no longer being used. Mr. Kelley got into the business of buying them and converting them for other uses, leasing them out to businesses like furniture and paper processing. One day, in the process of removing old equipment from a warehouse, Mr. Kelley came across some old cigarette-making equipment that still worked. He had wanted to get into manufacturing consumer products, so he seized the opportunity.

He started Commonwealth Brands, a small cigarette manufacturer based in Bowling Green, Ky., with discounted brands like USA Gold, Sonoma, Commonwealth, Country Value and a cigar called Brahman in 1991. He sold Commonwealth in 2001 to Houchens Industries, a Bowling Green, Ky.-based conglomerate, for about $1 billion.
Mr. Kelley doesn't smoke. "I never defended it," he says of his old business. "Hopefully it will be phased out of society."
Mr. Kelley began investing in land outside Kentucky in 1997. He was drawn to West Texas, where he says he now has about 850,000 acres, because prices were good and he found the land beautiful and out of the way, he says. Once he bought something, brokers started contacting him about buying more land.
Mr. Kelley's foray into Florida began in 1997 with the purchase of a house in Boca Grande for about $1 million. He sold that and bought his current three-bedroom, 5,923-square-foot house, also in Boca Grande, in 2000 for $5.5 million. He was looking for property to set up a place for his animal breeding operations—a hobby that started with rare breeds of cattle, he says. That led to the acquisition in 2004 and 2005 of some 40,000 acres in De Soto County, in the western part of the state for a reported $50 million.
Mr. Kelley now has a breeding operation on some of that acreage, known as Rum Creek Ranch, that's dedicated to a range of endangered species including tapirs, anoas (small buffalos), hippos, rhinos, bongos (antelopes), bentang (wild cattle) and a host of others. He works with zoos and conservation groups, with the ultimate goal of reintroducing the animals back to their native habitat.
His primary home is in Franklin, Tenn., where he lives with his wife, Susan, and his three daughters. He bought his 8,176-square-foot house with a swimming pool and a tennis court on 26 acres in 2003 for $1.9 million.
He frequently travels to his different properties, he says.He owns about 60 properties in Simpson County, Ky., where he grew up, as well as land in New Mexico, Wyoming and Colorado.
Though he is still buying large pieces of land—mostly in Texas, where he purchased about 44,000 acres in adjoining cattle ranches over the summer, and Kentucky, where he bought the 800-acre Calumet Farm this spring—land only represents about a quarter of his businesjs interests. He owns some land in Chile and has looked at Argentina, but says there were too many transactional hurdles there. His other business investments are in venture capital in companies that range from telecommunications to construction materials, beer and energy technology.
Mr. Kelley says he just takes opportunities as they come. "There's never been a grand plan. Life takes you a lot of places. Every day you adjust your compass," he says.

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