Larry Kueter is a Wisconsin native who grew up in Manitowoc. His parents were educators, and his father was involved in conservation efforts in Manitowoc County throughout his life. That included being an officer of Conservation Education, Inc., based at the Collins Marsh Wildlife Area. It was there in the 1980s that Larry saw his first Sandhill Cranes, a passion that grew with visiting Bosque del Apache NWR, Aransas NWR, and Mongolia with the International Crane Foundation in 2016.
Professionally, he is an attorney with The Law Office of Lawrence R. Kueter in Denver, Colorado. Since 2011, his law practice has been limited to land conservation.
Since 1990, he has represented numerous landowners, local land trusts, governmental entities, and statewide and national conservation organizations in land conservation matters. He has been involved in over eight hundred conservation transactions, conserving almost one and a half million acres of primarily working agricultural lands. He has been legal counsel to the Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust since its creation in 1995. With his involvement with the Colorado Cattlemen’s Agricultural Land Trust and the Partnership of Rangeland Trusts, he has been at the center of the movement in the Rocky Mountain West to create and support land trusts affiliated with statewide cattlemen’s and stock growers associations. He is currently a board member of the Partnership of Rangeland Trusts.
Mr. Kueter is a frequent speaker to landowners, land trusts, and various audiences on land conservation matters in most of the states of the Rocky Mountain West and at conferences of the Land Trust Alliance, the national association for non-profit land trusts.
In 2004 and 2005, he co-chaired the Land Trust Alliance’s Standards and Practices Committee, resulting in the creation of the Land Trust Accreditation Commission, an accreditation program for land trusts throughout the United States. He was appointed the founding chair of the Land Trust Accreditation Commission and served in that role from 2006 through 2014. From 2006 through 2015, he was also a member of the Board of Directors of the Land Trust Alliance.
In September 2013, he was awarded the Kingsbury Browne Conservation Leadership Award by the Land Trust Alliance and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy of Cambridge, Massachusetts. In addition to his advising and serving on local and national conservation non-profit boards, closer to home, he served on the Vestry and as Senior Warden for Saint John’s Episcopal Cathedral in Denver. He has two adult sons from his marriage to his late wife, Nancy. In 2017, he married Rebecca Richardson, a retired non-profit governance and development consultant, adding three stepdaughters and seven grandchildren to his family.