Of Land and Legacy

Off in the distance, on a bare, straw-colored hillside fringed with coastal oak, Eleanor Truocchio spots a dark speck. It's at least half a mile away; to the untrained eye it looks like nothing more spectacular than a rock. But Truocchio stops the pickup she has been driving around her family's 4,100-acre cattle ranch north of San Luis Obispo and grabs her binoculars.

"There's a cow by herself," she announces. "There's something wrong with her, or she has a calf." She pans away from the cow until she focuses on a brownish form almost camouflaged by the grass--the cow's newborn calf, probably less than a day old.

How could she even suspect there might be a cow there?

"Oh," she replies with a shrug, "you get to know these things better than the back of your hand."

In her hawk-eyed stewardship of the ranch she calls Lone Valley, Truocchio is maintaining a family tradition that goes back four generations. At 70, she is a bronzed, sinewy dynamo--branding cattle, rounding up strays, fixing fences, heaving hay, still getting satisfaction from all the tough, physical things a rancher needs to do. "When an animal is in the corral, I've won," says the former San Luis Obispo County Cattlewoman of the Year, wearing jeans and a checkered shirt with a Cowgirl Co. logo. "I can come home and say, 'There's a lot of people who couldn't do that.' "

Truocchio eventually would like to pass along her domain of rolling chaparral hills, cottonwood copses and 250 head of cattle to her daughter, Pat Abel, and thus avoid having it developed into 10-acre ranchettes or sold to a corporate ranching enterprise. That's how the American dream is supposed to work, isn't it? The beloved land stays in the family, and the child profits from the parents' labor? The family ranch, that symbol of the pioneer spirit in the West, would live on.

If only it were that simple.

The Truocchios, like many other families ranching cattle on California's Central Coast, face a vexing dilemma. With profit margins of less than 1%, ranching is a cash-poor business. Yet in terms of assets, notably real estate, ranchers are among California's rich.

Truocchio and her husband, who formerly owned an auto-repair business, live in a modest bungalow near Santa Maria, and she tours her land in a Ford pickup without air conditioning. But in San Luis Obispo County, land values have become so inflated that Truocchio estimates Lone Valley is worth around $16 million, or $3,900 an acre--60 times what her father paid for it in the 1950s. If her daughter wants to keep the ranch, she may have to pay an estate tax bill of as much as $6 million, even after exemptions and credits. If Truocchio puts the ranch in a trust, either the estate or gift tax would still apply.