James Clement is a rancher, Marine Corps reservist, and senior leader at Earth Optics. His work sits at the intersection of multigenerational ranching, soil science, emerging technology, and land stewardship.

TXR: Can you start by sharing your background and how you came to ranching?

James Clement: My father's family is King Ranch, sixth generation member of that family. It's a large family, as you know. And then my mother's family is Begga's Cattle Company, 1876, so next year's our 150th year. North and Northwest Texas. And and so I'm 5th generation on that side, and then my grandfather purchased a property in South Texas called Los Hermanos Ranch, 1967.

Then in 2013, I took over management of that property, and so my personal operation, which is, I think we discussed, but Bloody Buckets Cattle Company that me and my siblings and my parents — and then now we have some partners — and so… and then my wife and I have some cows, so… we now run cows personally on 6 ranches in four South Texas counties, so we mostly lease, but it was kind of built out of that as the home operation, and then grown from there.

And we've added on some… some land and some, you know, we do wildlife management.

TXR: What shaped your experience beyond your family ranches?

James Clement: Growing up, I think I worked on every cow camp… I know I worked on every cow camp on King Ranch, and then spent some time at Beggs.

Out of college, I went to work in Australia and Florida, basically internships, 6 months in each, working at large-scale operations in Australia, Consolidated Pastoral Company, and then I worked at Deseret Cattle and Citrus in Florida.

Then I went to the Marine Corps, enlisted in the reserves, came back to ranching while I was doing reserves. Then I left again, and became an officer. And left for a few years, and then came back, and now, so flash forward, I'm still in the reserves.

TXR: You also worked at King Ranch professionally. What did that entail, and how did it lead you to Earth Optics?

James Clement: I went to work at King Ranch for about 10 years. I ran the horse program until 2021, and then I spent two or three years as a land man.

So got my license and was working for King Ranch as a land man. Part of that job is — especially at a ranch like King Ranch, where it's not traditional landman work — it was a lot of kind of working about all the new opportunities that goes on in ranching.

One of those opportunities ended up being soil carbon. Exxon funded a study with a group called B-Carbon out of Houston… and they were looking at soil carbon analysis on 17 ranches from South Texas and North Dakota.

At the same time, on the personal ranch, I was looking at selling carbon credits, and it was the same company doing both opportunities — Earth Optics.

A couple months later, I called the CEO… and I said, hey, do you know what a landman is? … And I said, you know, that is the reason that the oil and gas business really scaled — it was personal relationships connecting the companies, the engineers, and the ranchers.

I said, I think carbon and soil data collection in general could use that.

TXR: How do you describe the role of a landman?

James Clement: I use the example of a Comanchero… somebody that spoke Comanche, English, and Spanish, and so could serve as a middleman between these parties.

It’s somebody that… speaks enough of either language where they can put in perspective: this is the opportunity, this is the impact to your land.

So yeah — the middleman between land and opportunity.

TXR: What does Earth Optics do today?

James Clement: We’ve grown that soil carbon and also our other analytics. So we also sample nutrients, biology, compaction — basically anything where somebody wants to claim regenerative practice improvement.

We measure regeneration, because the soil is the most important key in regeneration. Sometimes we work with farmers, sometimes with ranchers, sometimes with carbon credit developers.

TXR: You’ve spoken about technology helping ranchers learn faster. Why is that so important now?

James Clement: I worry about the future of ranching because the average rancher is 58 years old… and so what opportunities are out there to push these lessons learned to people.

Traditionally, you could spend 10, 20, 40 years learning and getting better year over year, but now, with how tight margins are, you have to very quickly understand what you're not doing or what you could be doing better, or you'll go broke. So trying to speed up that process of learning lessons.

TXR: Where do you see AI being most useful in ranching?

James Clement: Every sample we take is teaching what we call a digital twin.

You can take an acre of land and base it on similar soil types, elevation, rainfall, history… and now you can run models and say, well, if I ran cows, what is the life of productivity of that?

Right out the gate, you can have a better chance of success from day one.

TXR: And where do you see risks with AI?

James Clement: AI only gets better as it learns, and if you're using a platform that doesn't truly know all the things… then you're just getting an answer. People just have to understand that that answer might only be as good as the data it has.

TXR: What concerns do ranchers have about new technology?

James Clement: The biggest thing is privacy. What is the world going to know about my operation? How many cows I have, how often I rest pastures, what infrastructure I have — people don’t like others looking over their shoulder.

But that’s all easily solved. As technology’s grown, so has the ability to retain privacy.

TXR: How has the role of a ranch manager changed?

James Clement: The type of information a rancher must know today has evolved a lot. A ranch manager today is expected to know imminent domain issues, legal issues, landman issues, new cutting-edge technologies. There are a lot of lessons that you just cannot learn day-to-day on a ranch that are needed of a ranch manager of the 21st century.

TXR: What’s the biggest challenge for the next generation of ranchers?

James Clement: The barrier of entry is incredibly high. Land prices, cattle prices, labor, feed — everything.

Most Texas land was an 80- to 120-year payback period. You have to work for 20 years before you can even start being an owner-operator.

TXR: Why do ecosystem services matter for the future?

James Clement: That’s why these ecosystem service markets — soil carbon credits being the biggest — are important. If we don’t put a higher value on food and water in this country, we’re going to keep depleting those resources.

TXR: You’ve said you’re cautious about labels like “regenerative.” Why?

James Clement: Are you regenerative? Most ranchers are going, get out of here. It used to be called sustainability, holistic, adaptive. What they’re trying to say is simply this: Is the ranch better today than it was yesterday? And are you gonna try and make it better tomorrow?