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La Chua cattle ranch exported ranch products from the Gulf of Mexico

Source: The Menendez Marquez Cattle Barony at La Chua and the Determinants of Economic Expansion in Seventeenth-Century Florida #163

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SPANISH FLORIDA has the historical reputation of a bleak and unfriendly place, unproductive, impoverished, and unhealthy, where governors and soldiers, friars and passive Indian converts were unable to defend their own borders, much less make the land self-sustaining. The doleful letters from officials of the colony about the lateness or inadequacy of the garrison's situado have made an impact on researchers, if they did not on the Crown... In recent years, however, examples of economic activity have been examined that belie this picture of total dependency. There were times during the seventeenth century when Spanish Florida approached self-sufficiency and was even exporting some of its products.

These periods of economic activity were closely related to pacification of the provinces and demographic contraction. When conditions were relatively peaceful, the Florida-born Spanish--the creoles--would leave St. Augustine to move out into the provinces of Timucua (north-central Florida) and Apalache (the Tallahassee region), taking advantage of Indian settlements for labor and abandoned fields for land. As native population fell due to epidemic disease, the Spanish obtained the rights to more and more of the land for grazing purposes. They raised livestock, partly to supply the garrison, but mostly for the ranch products to ship from ports on the Gulf of Mexico. When these ranches in the provinces ceased to operate, it was not due so much to creole apathy as to pirates, falling prices, and Indian wars.

The most important of the seventeenth-century cattle ranches was the hacienda de la chua ("ranch of the sinkhole") in north central Florida, owned and operated by the Menendez Marquez family, who were related to Pedro Menendez de Aviles himself. The earliest possible date for their ranch is 1646, eighty-one years after the founding of St. Augustine; the first reference to its exports is in 1675, and to its name, 1682. 
(Bushnell MM)