Ranch History - T-V Rancho Nuevo

Tucked into the Santa Cruz Valley south of Tucson, T-V Rancho Nuevo sits on land that the Amado family has ranched for more than 170 years. Today the ranch is owned and operated by Gus A. Amado, Jr. and his wife Bobbi Lehman, who raise grass-fed beef on the same desert grassland where Gus's ancestors first ran cattle in the 1850s. The name on the land and the family behind it are one and the same — and always have been.

The Amado family story in Southern Arizona begins in the 1790s, when four brothers left Spain to serve as presidio soldiers on the northern frontier of New Spain. Three of those brothers settled in the Tucson and Sonora areas, putting down roots in a region then defined by Spanish missions, open range, and the Santa Cruz River.
By 1850, Manuel Amado — Gus's great-great-grandfather — had moved north from Hermosillo, Sonora, and established himself as a rancher and freighter south of Tucson. In 1852, he began ranching between two old Spanish land grants, the Canoa and the Otero, running cattle across open range that stretched from the border to north of Tucson. In those years, the family also ran a dairy near Mission San Xavier del Bac, supplying Tucson with milk and butter, and Manuel's freighting business moved cattle and goods between Mexico and California.

In 1880, the U.S.government established the San Xavier Indian Reservation and confiscated the family's dairy farm and home near the mission. Government agents burned the ranch. Manuel's son Antonio, just six years old at the time, recalled watching the smoke rising to the south from the streets of Tucson.
The family moved south to their remaining ranch along the Santa Cruz, a place they called *El Alamo Bonito* — the beautiful cottonwood. It was here that the modern community of Amado, Arizona took shape. The Southern Pacific Railroad opened a station nearby in 1910. In 1919, the post office was established as Amadoville. In 1920, Demetrio Amado — Manuel's son and the family postmaster — formally changed the name to Amado. Stockyards, stores, a train depot, and a pool hall followed. The town took the family's name, and the family stayed on the land.

T-V Rancho Nuevo carries that history forward. Gus Amado and Bobbi Lehman raise grass-fed beef on the same desert range that has sustained the Amado family for generations, managing the land with an eye toward the long term — because families who have worked the same ground for 170 years understand that stewardship is not optional.
Our cattle graze on native grasses in the Santa Cruz Valley, raised the way cattle were always raised here: on open land, without feedlots, withoutshortcuts. The result is beef that reflects this place — this specific valley, this specific grass, this specific history.
When you buy beef from T-V Rancho Nuevo, you are buying something that cannot be replicated anywhere else.

Gus is a direct descendant of Manuel Amado, the rancher who first drove cattle across this valley in 1852. He and Bobbi steward not only the land itself but the story that comes with it — a family history spanning Spain, Sonora, the presidio era, the territorial period, Arizona statehood, and more than a century beyond. They live and work on the ranch today.