County Sheep Flocks in Decline : Livestock: Drought and development are taking pastureland. Fewer than 10,000 head were counted this year.

For decades, fewer and fewer sheep have grazed the foothills and wide-open flatlands on the northern and eastern fringes of Los Angeles County as houses and streets gobbled up pastureland.

Now the drought may have dramatically hastened the death of this pastoral industry by turning rich fields of grass into dusty, denuded land. Recent restrictions on grazing in the Antelope Valley--an attempt to combat dust storms exacerbated by overgrazing and the drought--dealt another blow to the struggling sheep business.

“They’re pushing us around and pushing us out,” said Marie Ansolabehere, whose husband, Michel, has grazed sheep near Lancaster for 23 years. “It’s too bad because part of the history of the valley is going to go.”

Sheep owners say they have scaled back their herds significantly since the drought began more than four years ago, and some have sold out altogether. Estimates gathered by the Los Angeles County Veterinary Services Department show that sheep production has dropped 67% since 1986, nearly twice as fast as during the 17 previous years. Fewer than 20 major sheep producers are thought to remain.

“There’s nothing out there for (the sheep) to eat,” said Hank Heeber, who sold his last small herd earlier this year. Heeber said that before the drought, he and a partner grazed as many as 1,500 sheep in the hills that encircle the west end of the San Fernando Valley.

Not everyone is sorry to see the sheep go. Environmentalists consider them a blight because they ravage native grasses with their teeth and hoofs, wiping out the habitat that attracts wild birds and animals.

Heeber lost the lease on pasture in Calabasas after the land received county approval for 550 houses and a park. Although construction will not begin for at least a year, the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy wants to start replanting native vegetation in the 648-acre park.

For the past four years, the federal Bureau of Land Management has barred sheep from most of its land in the Mojave Desert, where some of the Los Angeles flocks used to spend late springs, because of concerns that the animals were permanently damaging fragile vegetation that supports the desert tortoise population.

March rains made Los Angeles’ hills green again, sending a ripple of optimism through the ranks of the sheep owners--the “sheepmen.” But range scientists say the shorter growing season means sparser and less nutritious grass.

Even if the drought ends next year, livestock experts say that the sheep industry in Los Angeles County will never fully recover because development thirstily awaits the same rainfall. Landowners will be faced with an easy choice, agricultural economists said: Lease land for grazing at a few dollars an acre or sell it for houses at many thousands of dollars an acre.

Sheep will “never come back into that area. The urban sprawl is too great a competition for them,” said Ralph Phillips, a farm adviser with the University of California Cooperative Extension in Bakersfield.

If Phillips is right, it is the end of an era. Since before the turn of the century, shepherds and their flocks have been roaming the canyons above Malibu, the hills around the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys and throughout the Antelope Valley. In 1969, there were more than 63,000 sheep in the county. The year the drought began there were 32,000. The 1991 sheep census counted fewer than 10,000 head, most of them in the high desert of the Antelope Valley.

Shepherds are nomads, traveling with up to 1,000 sheep in search of the best food of the season: from wild grassland in the winter to stubble fields--the nubs left after grain crops are harvested--in the spring. In the summer, some shepherds routinely take their flocks out of the county to the mountains of central and northern California, returning in the fall or winter.

Once they lived in tents, but now the sheepmen provide the shepherds with small trailers that can be moved from pasture to pasture. With faces scorched by wind and sun, they typically look 10 years older than their true age.

Like most of the sheepmen, Jose Maritorena learned his trade growing up in the mountainous Basque region on the border of Spain and France. Like the others, he came to California under a special guest labor program to work as a shepherd and later started his own business, grazing more than 2,000 sheep in Lancaster and near Bakersfield.

After the economy improved in Spain in the 1970s, shepherds began coming from Peru and Chile on three-year federal labor contracts, fleeing poverty in their countries. It is hard, lonely work that pays about $600 month, plus room and board. Yet that meager salary is far more than what they could earn back home.

When one of Maritorena’s shepherds, Arturo Llacza, was asked last week how he would support his family in Peru if the sheep business dried up in Los Angeles, he looked puzzled.

“No se” --I don’t know, he said. “There is lots of work in Peru, but it doesn’t pay well.”

So far the Western Range Assn., which imports the workers, has noticed only a slight dip in demand for shepherds in California and has been able to absorb those men into other Western states, said Larry Gorro, association executive director. About 125 shepherds came to the state last year under the program, he said.

Animal scientists and shepherds say the drought has meant moving animals out of Los Angeles County in the spring instead of the summer, in search of greener pastures. It has meant supplementing range grasses with hay at a cost of up to 30 cents per sheep per day. In some cases, it has meant fewer and skinnier lambs and poorer-quality wool.

The result is less profit for the sheepmen in a time when lamb and wool wholesale prices already were in two-year downward trend. Sheepmen depend on the sale of lamb meat for about 75% of their income and on the sale of wool for about 25%.

“Lamb prices, wool prices and the drought--any one is devastating to the industry, all three at once are catastrophic,” said Jay Wilson, executive vice president of the California Wool Growers Assn., a Sacramento lobbying group.

In the Antelope Valley, strong winds blowing from the rural west to the urban east carry with them swirling clouds of dust from barren farmland. Residents seal their windows to keep it out. One day in February, 40 car accidents were caused by a fog-like wall of dust.

In 10 minutes, the wind fills a visitor’s ears with sand. Shepherd Arturo Henriquez, his mustache caked with dust, says his eyes ache all night from the constant daytime bombardment.

Although no one believes that the sheep are wholly responsible for the land erosion that creates the dust--the drought and poor farming practices also are to blame--there is some consensus that restricting the animals’ movement to allow grasses to regenerate may be a large part of the solution. At the county agricultural commissioner’s request, the Board of Supervisors last month approved a sheep permit program that allows the county to decide where and when sheep may graze.

“They’re not the total reason, certainly, and we know that. Any disturbance of the soil out there without native vegetation is going to cause a dust problem,” said Leon Spaugy, county agricultural commissioner. “The key is adequate rainfall. . . . But in the absence of any control measures, the dust is just going to continue to get worse.”

So far 12 sheepmen have applied for permits and nine have received permission to use segments of the land they lease, Spaugy said.

Sheepman Maritorena fears that over-regulation will deliver the coup de grace to his business, which depends on moving sheep when the grass is gone and not before.

“They want to tell me 10 days only here, then five days somewhere else, but I can’t work like that,” Maritorena. “If they don’t let me stay here longer, I’m going to have to sell.”

Maritorena and other sheepmen say they have had casual arrangements with landowners over the years and coming up with proof of land leases, as the county requires, will be difficult. Critics say the land leases have not existed in many cases, that sheepmen have been used to wandering where they pleased on private land.

“They’re freeloaders. They move them across the valley without leases and they’ve been doing it for years,” said Debra Smith, a real estate agent who lives in the far northwest corner of the Antelope Valley, near Kern County.

Few of the sheepmen’s children are learning the trade, preferring occupations that promise more steady income with less wear and tear. Even if they were poised to take over the businesses, economics do not favor it.

As sheepmen rush to sell off their flocks in the drought, they receive about $50 a head, said Wilson of the California Wool Growers Assn. If they try to restore their flocks when the drought lifts and there is more demand for sheep, they will have to spend at least $120 a head and may have to wait more than a year for their first lambs.

“It takes a lot of capital and a long time to set up an effective infrastructure,” Wilson said. “It just seems like once they go out of business they’re lost and gone forever.”

The Declining Sheep Industry

Urban sprawl into rural Los Angeles County has gradually gobbled grasslands that used to feed sheep. Then the drought dried up much of the remaining vegetation. A look at the county’s sheep industry, then and now: Declining numbers of sheep and cattle:

Numbers

Before drought Now % change Statewide: Sheep and lambs 1,065,000 1,015,000 -5% Beef cows and steers 1,870,000 1,605,000 -14% Los Angeles County: Sheep and lambs 44,600 34,263 -23% Beef cows and steers 4,000 3,378 -16%

GRAZING GLOSSARY

Sheepmen: Flock owners. Most arrived as shepherds in 1950s from the Basque region between Spain and France. Many worked under labor contracts and later started own sheep businesses. Shepherds: Flock tenders. Most come from Peru and Chile under three-year contracts with Labor Department. Paid about $600 a month plus room (a trailer) and board. With the help of two dogs, one shepherd can tend up to 1,000 sheep and lambs.

Acreage: One sheep eats up to 6 acres a year in Southern California (one cow can eat up to 30 acres). Sheep eat fresh grass and alfalfa--known generically as forage; they also eat nubs left after grain and grass crops are harvested.

Income: About 75% of sheepman’s income comes from lamb meat; about 25% from sale of wool.

Meat prices: Lamb is selling wholesale for about 55 cents a pound, down from 91 cents in 1989. It costs a sheepman about 65 to 70 cents a pound to raise lambs, which usually weigh about 115 pounds but are as small as 80 pounds this year due to poor food from the drought. Wool prices: About 60 cents a pound this year, down from $1.50 or more in past year, partly because of poorer quality due to the drought as well as worldwide glut.

Sources: Los Angeles County Veterinary Services and the California Agricultural Statistics Service.