Cloudy Skies on the Range

Richard Atmore, suburban cowboy, keeps spurs on his boots and a wetsuit in the back of his mammoth truck.

Atop the Ventura hillsides, where Atmore is the lone rancher on 8,000 acres of scrub and plunging slopes, he has the best view in this coastal city. On one side, the tumble of chaparral. On the other, a Monopoly board of city life stretching to the sea he loves as much as the spot where he lives and works.

It’s a view people would pay millions for.

“I know why people would want to live here,” he said, looking out from a hill where he, 260 cows and only a handful of others can legally stand. “These hills are one of the most beautiful places going.”

And that may be his problem. Where the two lifestyles collide--where suburbs meet cattle herds, where rancher meets surfer--ranchers get the squeeze. And, at the moment, it’s his prize place on the hillside that’s in question.

As debate bubbles over what development, if any, will happen on the land Atmore leases, his future is uncertain. Will he simply co-exist with new development? Live as he is? Or, as some grazing opponents hope, could he be banished from his exclusive perch?

Atmore, 42, is a member of a steadily shrinking industry. Never much of a force in Ventura County agriculture, livestock has been pushed into the crevices of an increasingly urban county. And at this moment, few of the 100 or so cattle-ranching families in the county are feeling the burn of suburban encroachment more than he is.

“There’s a whole industry up there that, unless a cow gets out, you don’t even know is up there,” said Rex Laird, executive director of the Ventura County Farm Bureau. “It’s almost like time has stood still within miles of high-density development.”

In 1995, livestock production--which includes poultry, hogs, sheep and cattle--was an $8-million industry in the county. Last year, it reached only $2.61 million, a nearly insignificant wisp of Ventura County’s $1.59 billion agriculture industry, according to figures from the Agricultural Commissioner’s office.

But Atmore is confident that he will be able to stay. He thinks development can’t be stopped, but he’s counting on the hillside’s owners needing someone to watch over the treacherous areas where building is nearly impossible. His cattle help control fires by keeping brush low. They keep nonnative plants from taking over. They do good, he says.

Making a Home in the Hills

“Behind every city in this county, behind the Oxnard plain, behind Moorpark, above every single community, there is cattle ranching,” Atmore said.

Atmore is the opposite of the cowboy archetype. He’s not laconic or slow-talking or given to stony stares. The squint on his face comes, not from years of looking into the sun or from flinty determination, but from his frequent laughs.

He surfs several mornings a week, his time to get away from it all, and then comes back up to the only home in these hills--and to his wife, his children.

He’s boyish and round-faced, an enthusiast and optimist prone to super-friendly discussions of the positives of cattle grazing, land-range management, controlled burning and life as a Ventura-bred cattleman.

He is the suburban son of Ventura schoolteachers, a graduate of Buena High School and Ventura College.

But he has been up working in these hills since 1980, trained, beginning at the age of 22, by cattlemen who, between them, ranched in these hills for 100 years. They are names that among some Ventura residents are legend--Rocky Esparza, who has since died, and Toots Jaregui--and they taught Richard Atmore almost everything he knows about cattle.

It started simply because Atmore needed a cheap place to live and Esparza had a spare trailer.

“[Rocky] said, ‘I’m only 83 years old; I can take care of myself. Just come in and check on me in the mornings,’ ” Atmore said. “Then, I spent about seven years as an indentured servant” before he bought Esparza’s operation and took on the work himself. He took over Jaregui’s operation on the other part of the land in 1994.

On any given day, Atmore does what he always does, what Esparza and Jaregui did before him and what the Spanish did before that. He moves the cows; he mends fences; he checks for the calves that look a little sickly; he worries that there won’t be enough rain. Several weeks ago, he had to sell some of his cows because the grass was parched.

And he probably knows this land better than anyone, anywhere, besides Jaregui.

“I feel like I know every habitat here personally, every creek, every water hole,” Atmore said. “I know the open space. I know all the trails. It’s been my whole life.”

Though it’s not enough to support him--he also runs firewood and weed abatement services--he wants to do this for a long time, if he can.

“I could say this is my place, but, myself, I’m a tenant,” Atmore said. “I never lose sight of that.”

He doesn’t own the land. Five thousand of its acres belong to a group of families who have had it for 100 years, want some development and have recently begun a series of public meetings seeking input on what should happen there.

The families say they’re not sure of Atmore’s future, just that he’ll be the caretaker as long as they own the land. And it will be years--if ever--before anything gets built there.

“He will remain there as long as the owners have the property and until something is worked out--or isn’t worked out,” said Frank Cribbs, the president of Dabney-Lloyd Corp., the family company.

Conflicting Visions

At this point, though, public sentiment seems strongly anti-development. In some cases, it’s also ardently anti-grazing.

Environmentalists say that cattle grazing can damage the environment, leading to erosion problems. All across the West, battles have raged between ranchers and activists concerned about grasslands.

The first draft of Ventura’s “vision”--a statement of the direction of the city--called for grazing land to be turned back into “original vegetation types to reweave the frayed ecological values of the area.”

But that was changed after complaints from the county farm bureau and a letter from Atmore, who was, until a year ago, president of the Ventura County Cattlemen’s Assn.

Kim Uhlich, an analyst at the Environmental Defense Center in Ventura, said that even ranchers who mean well often overgraze their land as they attempt to make economic goals.

“If there are too many cattle in a given area, they can eat the grass down to a point where it can’t re-create itself,” she said. “That obviously results in more erosion [and] sedimentation of water bodies.”

But Atmore says he thinks hard about those things, listens to environmentalists and tries to work in ways that won’t harm the land, such as moving his cows regularly and letting some pastures rest to let seasonal grasses grow.

He doesn’t roar across the land in an off-road vehicle. Most of his work is done on horseback, and the truck is saved for the trails.

“I’m not the standard, typical stereotype,” Atmore said. “We do some things the old way and some new.”

Some agree that, if it’s done right, modest grazing can be healthy, or at least not detrimental. The Nature Conservancy--which some had hoped could be the preserver of the land, although the group itself says it won’t be stepping in--allows grazing, in some cases, because it provides a manager for the land.

“If you take the cattle off an area that’s been grazed for many years, then what comes up is nonnative [plants], which spread themselves,” said Wendy Millet, south central coast area director for the organization. “There’s no check.”

Millet said she suspects that Atmore should be allowed to continue to live in his hillside home and keep his million-dollar views.

Protecting the Land

“Some want to protect it for cattle; some want to protect it for scenery,” Millet said. “They’re reasonably compatible, which is a whole lot better than a subdivision.”

All Atmore hopes for is the chance to hold onto some of this land, even if his acreage shrinks with development. He would miss the view out across the ocean; the perfect look at Two Trees, the hilltop landmark he likes to think of as representing Toots Jaregui and Rocky Esparza; the chance to roam over land that has changed very little since the Spanish worked it.

He, above all, understands those who want to share his world.

“I can see why someone would want to live back here. . . . Who wants to live in town when you can live up here?” he asked. “For me, it’s something that comes with the job.”