Oil magnate Steve Rooney buys Montana cattle ranch for $50M

Steve Rooney is living out his cowboy dreams. 

“I’ve always been intrigued by the Western lifestyle. I like to ride my horse and work the cattle. I like to help with the hay. I’m working on some irrigation ditches right now. I’m a hands-on kind of guy,” he told the Wall Street Journal, which reported his more than $50 million purchase of an almost 37,000-acre cattle ranch near White Sulphur Springs, Montana. 

Rooney founded Precision Pipeline, an oil and gas pipeline company based in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. He sold it to the Coral Gables, Florida-based infrastructure firm MasTec in 2009, according to the outlet.  

He bought the Montana cattle ranch, known as Camas Creek Cattle & Sheep Company, from Jock and Jamie Doggett. The Doggett family has owned the property for more than a century, and have worked the ranch for five generations. The property has three homes, the 2,400-square-foot Yellow House, the 2,300-square-foot White House, and 2,700-square-foot Mom’s House. They listed it for $58.8 million earlier this year.  

Ryan Flair of Hall and Hall, one of the country’s top luxury ranch brokerages, represented Rooney, and Mike Swan and Tim Anderson of Swan Land Company had the listing. 

The ranch has capacity to maintain 1,800 animals, the listing shows. Rooney plans to maintain the property as a working cattle ranch, with his son handling meat processing out of a plant in Wisconsin, he told the outlet. 

Rooney has owned other agricultural properties. He sold a ranch in Larimer County, Colorado, called the Diamond Tail Ranch, for $46.9 million in February, Bizwest reported. When he’s not digging irrigation ditches and riding on horseback, Rooney is at home in Wisconsin or his house in Jupiter, Florida. He bought a waterfront mansion in the gated Admirals Cove community for $9.9 million last year. 

–– Kate Hinsche