Tio Kleberg Leaving Day-To-Day
King Ranch Operations June 1

KINGSVILLE, Texas —(AP)— Stephen J. "Tio" Kleberg, great-grandson of King Ranch founder Capt. Richard King, will leave the day-to-day operation of the famed ranch on June 1.

Kleberg, who has worked on the ranch for 28 years, will step down from his position as vice president for agribusiness, said King Ranch spokesman Larry Worden.

Kleberg will no longer be involved in the company's day-to-day operations, but has been nominated to the board of directors of King Ranch Inc. The nomination has to be approved at the annual shareholders' meeting in Kingsville in June.

Kleberg's successor has not been named, Worden said last week.

With Kleberg, the son of late King Ranch executive Richard Kleberg Jr., in charge, the King Ranch modernized its financial reporting and inventory systems, Worden said.

The ranch also developed a new breed of cattle, the King Ranch Santa Cruz, which is half Santa Gertrudis, a quarter Red Angus and a quarter Gelbvieh, and is marketed for its improved reproduction and fertility, meat quality, good disposition and early sexual maturity.

"It was a time of modernization, and he has been a very effective bridge between the old ways and new ways," Worden told the Corpus Christi Caller-Times.

Kleberg, who did not return a phone call seeking comment from the Associated Press, has said he's made the King Ranch a more efficient operation, estimating that profitability of the ranch's agribusiness has doubled since the 1970s with the addition of farming and wildlife recreation enterprises. "We've had to do things smarter," Kleberg has said. "We don't have any more land, but we've tried to improve the return off of that land," he told the Caller-Times.

Kleberg grew up on the ranch and went to work for it officially in July 1971 after graduating with an agriculture degree from Texas Tech University.

Bob Kleberg, his father's uncle, ran the ranch as president and general manager for 40 years. When he died in 1974, the ranch was reorganized with Tio Kleberg responsible for the domestic operations of King Ranch along with his father, who was chairman of the board, and then-vice president Bobby Shelton.

Shelton left in 1977 and Richard Kleberg Jr. died in 1979, leaving Tio Kleberg in charge of the ranching, farming and horse duties of the ranch. He was appointed to his current post in 1988.

Ranch workers nicknamed him Tio, "uncle" in Spanish, after Bob Kleberg.

The King Ranch has about half of its 825,000 acres in South Texas in hunting leases with 60,000 acres in cotton and grain sorghum. The ranch also has about 50,000 head of cattle.

The ranch's agribusiness controls about one million acres of property, Worden said. It also has a Houston-based oil and gas division, which handles mineral developments.

In addition to the Texas ranches in Nueces, Kenedy, Kleberg, Jim Wells, Brooks and Willacy counties, the agribusiness division includes a cattle operation in Brazil; a Lexington, Ky., horse farm; a St. Augustine sod, citrus and sugar-cane operation in Florida; and a 6000-acre irrigated alfalfa, onion and honeydew melon farm in Arizona.