Home on a Shrinking 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 leased acres, 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 . . . to do this,” says 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 cows once 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 steak wrapped in cellophane.

In 1959, more than 100,000 cattle still roamed Orange County. The ranching and dairy industry rivaled oranges in profitability. Ten years later, the number had 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,” says 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 people like Love, who in the 1970s ran 1,200 cattle on more than 10,000 leased acres.

‘I’ve Lived the Reality’ of Ranching

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 says. “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 says. “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 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 that he 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 in ranching country.

“I took nothing and I turned it into something,” Love says. “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 out Love, and it took him 6 1/2 years to pay off his debts.

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

“I’ve thought about quitting, but I can’t quit. I got to get that dough back.”

A few years ago, Love set up an operation in south Orange County. Part of the land belongs to San Juan Capistrano, which needs to keep its acreage from becoming a wildfire hazard.

Homes pushed out Orange County’s cattle. Now, grazing cows protect homes.

It had been raining for a week, and Love’s corrals had turned to soup. He 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, of course, money to lose.

Love has 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 wades into a corral, and his boots disappear in the muck. He moves toward the quarter horse that was to be inseminated. Two years ago, this horse aborted. Last year, she had an infection that prevented her from breeding. It is time to try again.

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

The horse runs, showering him with mud.

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

He tries again and is peppered some more. His Wranglers are coated in mud. His hat and face are flecked with gray.

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

But when he finally corners the horse, Love gently slips on a bridle. He whispers something in her ear. And then he leads her over to where a veterinarian waits, 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 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 for a day.

‘To Us . . . It’s Recreation’

“To us, it’s a way to get away,” says 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. Love, he says, has been a father figure to him.

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

Malagon is 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 says. “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 your 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, Freddy?” Malagon asks, and Love tosses him 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,” says one weekend cowboy, a big grin on his face.

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

“Just another day in paradise,” Love says.