About Us
Chico Basin Ranch is an 87,000-acre working cattle ranch 35 minutes southeast of Colorado Springs, Colorado. It is owned by the Colorado State Land Board and managed under a one-of-a-kind lease by Duke and Janet Phillips and their family. The ranch offers education and recreation opportunities for adults and children.
Chico Basin is dedicated to the enhancement and preservation of the natural world and our western heritage. Our mission is to create a working ranching model that views the ranch as an ecological resource base, using cattle as an important tool to manipulate the surface of the ground to achieve conservation goals. This base supports a complementary mix of enterprises that emphasize sustainability, innovative management, and diversification as the keys to economic and ecological viability.
We believe that ranchers provide an important role in the stewardship of our nation's native rangelands because ranchers already live on the land and because our families' futures depend on our success at building and maintaining the health of the ecosystem on our properties.
The Chico Basin Ranch operates on the high prairie and is owned by the State of Colorado. It is leased by Duke and Janet Phillips and their family for a 25-year term that began November 1, 1999. Its sprawling ranges of shortgrass and sandsage prairie, spring-fed lakes, meandering creeks, and hidden pools are home to a diverse wildlife population of birds, pronghorn, deer, fish, prairie dogs, coyote, badgers, and more.
