Rancho Nuevo is located deep in the South Texas Brush Country on the border of Webb and Zapata Counties just Southeast of Laredo Texas.

Rancho Nuevo was purchased in the early 1950’s by Carlos Vela Sr. and Juan Manuel Vela. Between the 1950’s and the mid 1980’s Rancho Nuevo was strictly a cattle ranch. In 1985 Carlos Vela Jr. and his two brothers Guillermo (Memo) and Arturo Vela high-fenced the 2,400 acre ranch. Only a selected few animals were harvested between 1985 and 1991. In 1994 the Vela brothers implemented an intense year round supplemental feeding program. Since then, Rancho Nuevo has harvested many trophy whitetails.

Rancho Nuevo maintains a 1 to 1.1 buck to doe ratio. Aerial game surveys and plotted night surveys under the direction of Shane Sieckenius of Texas A&M University, and the Texas Department of Wildlife are a couple methods utilized to maintain and track Rancho Nuevo’s deer population. Predator control is also an integral part of our game management strategy which reflects in our low post rut buck losses and exceptionally high fawn survival rate.  This insures plenty of quality trophy bucks every year. Our supplemental feed program permits us to have a higher deer density and it is not uncommon for our hunters to see and observe 20 bucks per day.

In 2002 Rancho Nuevo along with wildlife biologist Shane Sieckneius of Texas A&M implemented a buck tagging program. The purpose of this research is to ear tag known age deer, these are fawns and yearlings. The reason these are known age deer is because of tooth replacement, not wear. Fawns will only have 5 teeth per side, their last molar will not erupt until a year of age. Yearlings will have a "milk tooth" present which will not be replaced until 2 years of age. We can then have a definite known age deer through its life span. As hunters harvest these deer we retrieve the jaws along with their ear tags for verification, to build a data base of known age jawbones. The reason for this is that the tooth wear aging technique was developed up North in a captive deer population. We feel that the tooth wear in Northern deer does not properly reflect our deer populations in South Texas, thus by collecting many years of known age jaws we can build a suitable sample size of the various age ranges and show a more accurate tooth wear pattern for this area.

Prior to the buck tagging process, Rancho Nuevo accidentally harvested a few 4 1/2 year old bucks that gross scored over 160 B&C and field dressed over 175 lbs. The buck tagging process has paid major dividends in assisting Rancho Nuevo in accurately harvesting proper aged bucks for Trophies and Management purposes. Our buck tagging process has also added hard data to the very controversial SPIKE theories that spikes can grow into trophy bucks.

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