Ranches

Cindy Harris and Doug Fieg run what they believe is the largest alpaca ranch in California. With 400 animals -- each valued at between $10,000 and $50,000 -- they decided years ago that evacuation was not an option in a brush fire. "It would take so long to evacuate them, and they get really stressed," Harris said. So when flames reached their street in Somis late Tuesday, the couple tried another strategy. They herded all 400 animals into the ranch's central pastures, turned on the irrigation system and prepared to ride out the fire as best they could.

A land-management company financed by Boston-based hedge fund Baupost Group agreed to purchase two neighboring ranches that cover more than 24,000 acres of undeveloped coastline in California. The purchase of the Cojo and Jalama ranches north of Santa Barbara closed Tuesday, the buyer, Coastal Management Resources said. The price wasn't disclosed, and the company didn't announce plans for developing the property. The ranches had been listed for sale at $155 million.

Conservationists seeking to limit coastal development are scrutinizing the new owners of one of the largest undeveloped stretches of California coastline, which changed hands this week for about $140 million. The remote property -- 25,000 acres of ranchland on Point Conception, up the coast from Santa Barbara -- was purchased by a Los Angeles investor group Tuesday after being owned by the same family for nearly a century.

The snow curled up before the massive plow blade fitted to the front of one of John Duvall's tractors. The 58-year-old rancher clenched his jaw as the vehicle trembled and then stalled. He still had a hundred yards of snowed-in road to clear before he could haul hay to the starving herd of cattle clustered in a small clearing. "This is [what] you put up with every day," Duvall said. "You're working your butt off and looking at your livelihood go down the drain."

AS a full-time sales rep for national van-line companies for 12 years, Ellen Sullivan understood radical moves. One day she decided to make one herself. Sullivan and her chemist husband, Paul Bernhardy, sold their Orange County home in Monarch Beach -- they were empty-nesters -- and bought a spread in San Diego County's rural Valley Center. That's when they added a new line on their resumes: hobby farmers.

At dawn, John Lacey and four hired hands head out on horseback from the Fish Creek Corral to perform one of the American West's most venerable pastoral rites: corralling a herd of bellowing steers scattered across thousands of hardpan acres. Lacey, a rail-thin third-generation rancher, leads the way atop Notch, the sure-footed 10-year-old mare he prefers for such chaotic chores.

kingsville, texas -- From a laptop computer in a university classroom beams a long list of letters and numbers -- an equation, Les Nunn tells his colleagues in cowboy hats, for getting the most beef out of your pastures' grass. It's noon Friday at Texas A&M University-Kingsville's nascent Institute for Ranch Management, time for brown-bag lunches and "bullosophy."

Caliente, Calif. We crawled up and around the mountain just before dusk, winding along a skinny highway noteworthy for its spectacular sunset views, hairpin turns and an army of fearless cattle that graze the slopes and regularly amble into the middle of the road. Cows far outnumber people in this wild pocket of Southern California's Tehachapi Mountains, 2 1/2 hours north -- and another universe entirely -- from Los Angeles.

The mystery began in July 2006 when a prominent Beverly Hills plastic surgeon was gunned down on his rugged 200-acre Lancaster ranch, where he grew olives, pistachios and other produce from his native Iran. For months, detectives were stumped, saying they could not figure out who would want to kill Dr. Esfandiar "Steve" Kadivar. Then last spring, the man who had leased the property from Kadivar's family, Efrain Martines, was found shot to death a few miles away in the bed of his pickup truck.

Clearly, someone who isn't particularly nervous about the economy -- and certainly not real estate -- is hedge-fund manager Louis Moore Bacon, who recently shelled out $175 million to purchase Trinchera Ranch in Colorado. In the world of residential property, it easily tops the $103 million spent this year for an estate in the Hamptons area of Long Island, N.Y. The ranch, part of the estate of Malcolm Forbes, is the largest in Colorado with more than 171,000 acres and five residences.