Still at Home on the Range

He is among the last of his breed, a survivor who has hung on to a slice of Orange County’s past even as bulldozers have carved the future out from under him.

He looks out at what he has now, 500 acres of leased land, an island of rolling green hills amid a sea of rooftops less than a mile from a county landfill.

“You’ve got to be crazy or a . . . fool to do this,” said Fred Love, one of Orange County’s last ranchers. “But it’s something that just gets in your blood.”

At 57, Love is a cattleman in a place where once cows outnumbered people on vast Spanish land grants. It is now a place where the ranch exists mostly in the imagination, a name given to developments by marketing pros who sell their lots like cuts of beef wrapped in cellophane.

In 1959, more than 100,000 cows still roamed Orange County. The ranching and dairy industry rivaled oranges in profitability. Ten years later, the number dropped to 22,000. By 1979, there were about 6,500.

In 1999, the official count was 245.

“Almost every inch where those houses are was prime grazing land,” said John Braly, executive vice president of the California Cattlemen’s Assn. “But a cow needs 10 to 15 acres a year to graze. You can get a lot of homes on 10 acres.”

On its undeveloped acres, Rancho Mission Viejo still runs cattle that are not counted by the county. And some cattle still graze leased Irvine Co. land.

Fred Love is a different class of California cowboy, a man of the land who could never afford to buy any. Once, Orange County supported dozens of ranchers like Love, who in the 1970s ran 1,200 cattle on more than 10,000 acres of leased land.

He remembers each piece he has worked: the 4,500 acres in Anaheim Hills that were scraped clean for homes; the 900 acres that are now part of a state park; the 3,500 acres that became a shopping center and a big chunk of Coto de Caza.

“It’s just progress,” Love said. “There’s the myth of ranching. And then there’s the reality. I’ve lived the reality.”

He is a compact man, with a weathered face and a right hand that’s missing three fingers, the result of a mistake with a rope, a saddle horn and an uncooperative steer 27 years ago.

“I’ve taught 10,000 people how to rope over the years and I’ve never let anyone do something so stupid,” Love said. “I should’ve lost my arm.”

That is the reality. Love grew up with the myth. Television westerns. The animals in his parents’ Orange County pet store. The neighbor who kept cows and show horses.

Love took a job cleaning the neighbor’s stalls and got hooked.

His parents didn’t understand, but Love went ahead anyway. He learned to shoe horses and once drove 125 miles just to watch a legendary farrier at his work. Eventually, Love became an expert himself, something of an artist, a guy you called for a problem horse--or an expensive one.

He made good money and borrowed the rest needed to buy his first 25 Holstein heifers. He raised them, sold them, borrowed more, bought more.

Borrow, buy, sell, borrow. They are the true seasons on a ranch.

“I took nothing and I turned it into something,” Love said. “I’ve made a lot of money and I’ve lost a lot of money.”

A while back, he lost a lot of money--$400,000--when a venereal disease decimated a herd he kept in Central California. It wiped Love out, and it took him 6 1/2 years to pay back his debts.

“If it happened when I was 30, I would’ve laughed,” he said. “But it happened when I was 50. . . .

“I’ve thought about quitting, but . . . I got to get that dough back.”

A few years ago, Love set up an operation in South County. Part of the land belongs to San Juan Capistrano.

*

It had been raining for a week, and Love’s corrals had turned to soup. Love boards the horses of local city folk. He also trades and breeds horses, mixing pedigrees in the hope of producing a show champion, or a stallion that can command top-dollar stud fees.

There’s money to be made in this game. And money to lose.

Love had just returned from the airport where he picked up a cooler containing a vial of horse semen. It set him back $2,500, plus shipping.

“Hopefully, if everything goes the way it should . . . “

He waded into a corral and his boots disappeared in the muck. He moved toward the quarter horse to be inseminated. Two years ago, this horse aborted. Last year, an infection prevented her from breeding. It was time to try again.

Love inched closer, slogging through the mud with that left knee caught by a calf a decade ago and has never been the same.

The horse ran, showering him with mud.

“I came to get you, not chase you,” Love shouted.

He tried again, and was peppered some more. His Wranglers were coated in mud. His hat and face were flecked with gray.

“Now whoooa!” he yelled, really angry this time. “You need to be whipped for that one.”

But when he finally cornered the horse, Love gently slipped a bridle on. He whispered something in her ear. And then he led her over to where a veterinarian waited, holding the syringe full of life.

For Love, ranching has been like a marriage that begins with love at first sight and evolves, over time, into a workable arrangement defined less by youthful emotion than by the routine of hard work.

Each spring, the work shifts to the hills above the corrals, where Love’s cattle graze. For the annual roundup, he enlists the help of a dozen horse owners who board their animals with him. Greenhorns jump at the chance to play cowboy.

“To us, it’s a way to get away,” said Jim Danner, 59, a Laguna Beach contractor. “It’s recreation.”

For Efren Malagon Jr., it has been a way of life. Malagon grew up on Rancho Mission Viejo, where his father worked as a cowboy for more than 30 years. Fred Love, he says, has been a father figure to him.

“When I was growing up, the ranch was home,” Malagon said. “Out here was the big world. That’s what we called it. It was scary coming out to the big world.”

He’s 39 and works as the sports equipment manager at Saddleback College. He dreams of ranching himself. But though he’s an expert horseman and cattleman, it’s an expensive game to get into.

“For me to reach my dream, I’ll have to go up north. Anywhere up north where there’s cheap leased land,” he said. “Orange County is no longer for cattle.”

And yet here the cattle come, led down the hill by a contractor, a home builder and an insurance broker.

They herd them into a corral where the heifers are cut from the pairs. They begin roping the yearlings. The two who know what they’re doing, Malagon and Love’s son, Matt, help the others in this dangerous business.

“Hey,” Love shouts to a man who has let a rope tied around a cow’s front legs go slack. “You have men’s lives in you hands. Remember that.”

One by one, they pin the animals to the ground. Love takes a branding iron from a rusty grill and presses it into each one’s hip. Flames and smoke and the smell of burning flesh mix with the dust.

“Want me to castrate?” Malagon said. Love tosses a pocket knife.

Malagon grabs a young calf by its tail, lifts the animal to his chest and pile-drives him to the ground. He kneels, and with two quick cuts slices off the testicles. He throws them off to the side, wipes the bloody blade on the animal’s back and stands for the next one.

When it’s all done, the men are covered with sweat, dirt and blood. And they are drinking Coors Light before noon.

“Never had more fun with my clothes on,” said one weekend cowboy, a big grin on his face.

Behind him, trucks piled high with trash lumbered to the nearby county landfill, the sound of their engines masked by mooing cows.

“Just another day in paradise,” Love said.