No, I do not fault these folks for owning hectares of land. But they make it most unlikely that I can find enough land to make a range in my backyard.
86. Lykes family: 248,880 hectares
Starting small, Dr Howell Lykes shut down his medical surgery in the 1870s and moved to Florida to take over his family's modest 202-hectare ranch. Today, the doctor's heirs control 248,880 hectares in the Sunshine State and Texas.
Hardly anything, because it's unimproved. If you own enough connected parcels you keep the assessed value depressed too because nobody is living near it.
And the #1 land-owner, with a whopping 6,671,845,299.613 acres is...
1. Queen Elizabeth II: 2.7 billion Hectares
By far the world's largest non-governmental landowner, Queen Elizabeth II is the head of the British Commonwealth and therefore legal owner of around 2.7 billion hectares of land, as estimated by The New Statesman. That's as much as a sixth of the planet’s land surface. The Crown Estate includes prime chunks of London, massive tracts of agricultural land in rural Britain and more than half of the UK's foreshore. The Crown also owns over 90% of land in Canada, where Queen Elizabeth II is head of state. However, the land cannot be sold by the Queen and is not considered her private property.
How'd you like to mow dat?
- I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it for you... -
Land/citrus/beef are just a part of the Lykes empire. We grew up on Lykes' baloney and hot dogs, while paying our light bill to TECO (offspring of People's Gas).
Then there's the shipping & trucking lines.....
....and some rin up hill and down dale, knapping the chucky stanes to pieces wi' hammers, like sae mony road-makers run daft - they say it is to see how the warld was made! Saint Ronan's Well - Sir Walter Scott, Bart. (1824)
