KERRVILLE, TEXAS, April 30, 2019 – Texas Parks and Wildlife Department has announced winners of the 2019 Lone Star Land Steward Award to six private property owners across Texas, including the H. E. Butt Foundation. Other winners include Vacek Family Farm, Pigfoot Ranch, Lochridge Ranch, Rolling Plains Quail Research Ranch, and Kirchoff Farm.
Winners are selected for excellence in habitat management and wildlife conservation. On May 16, this year’s award recipients will be recognized at a banquet in Austin.
“We’re honored to be named among these incredible land stewards,” said David Rogers, president of the H. E. Butt Foundation. “It’s inspiring to see so much hard work going into ensuring the long-term health and beauty of our state’s natural resources.”
Over ninety percent of Texas land is privately owned or operated, so strong conservation practices among land owners are essential for overall ecological health.
Environmental stewardship has been a priority for the Foundation since 1954, when Mary Holdsworth and Howard Butt purchased over 1900 acres of ranch land along a canyon on the Frio River in Real County. “Today,” said Rogers, “even as the Foundation welcomes over 25,000 visitors to its camping and retreat programs each year, we also prioritize land and wildlife management” with practices such as prescribed burning, reseeding native plants, clearing ashe junipers, population control of wildlife, and more.
The Foundation was nominated for the award by two biologists, Joyce Moore, the Texas Park and Wildlife Department’s technical guidance biologist for the Hill County, and Ben Hutchins, the assistant director of research and education at Texas State University’s Department of Biology.
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The H. E. Butt Foundation (www.hebfdn.org) exists to cultivate wholeness in people and institutions for the transformation of communities. We are a private operating foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization with offices in Kerrville and San Antonio, Texas. We are a distinct financial and legal entity from the H-E-B Grocery Company.
