The bull was wedged against the fence, pointed the wrong direction, grunting and thrashing wildly. All 2,000 surly, sweaty, stubborn pounds of him.
"Git out of there, boy!" shouted the bull's caretaker, rancher Page Baldwin, swatting his hat at the snorting beast.
Meanwhile, two other bulls started butting heads, foreplay before attempting to stomp each other into bloody pulp.
Baldwin was on that, too, breaking up the fight while simultaneously dislodging the bull trapped by the fence. Within 30 minutes, he had herded 20 very uncooperative Angus bulls to a fresh pasture of clover and rye.
If there's one thing in Rio Vista, Calif., that always goes right, it's ranching.
As unemployment soars in Solano County and Rio Vista struggles with layoffs, foreclosures and possible bankruptcy, ranching remains the backbone of the town's economy and identity. Ranching was the first business in Rio Vista, and it might be the last.
"Agriculture is holding steady," said Adam Cline, farm coordinator for Solano County. "We have some of the best soil and climate maybe in the world, and it's a key component to our quality of life."
But there's another face of Rio Vista. An 855-home development sits abandoned, a skeleton of roads and streetlamps but no houses. Across a field, another development is pockmarked with foreclosure signs, and in downtown Rio Vista, storefronts remain boarded up.
Unemployment in Solano County continues to climb, hitting 10.9 percent in March, the highest in the San Francisco Bay Area and more than 2 points higher than the national rate, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
But ranching is far more swayed by Mother Nature than by the nuances of the economy. A few dry years can decimate the business, leading to underweight livestock and stunted crops, but even a global depression can leave a ranch relatively unscathed.
After all, people will always eat hamburgers, Baldwin said.
"The bottom line is, we'll be OK," he said last week, relaxing in the barn after herding bulls all morning. "We're cutting back, prices are down, but we're going to make it."
Agriculture is the original business in Rio Vista. Ranchers and farmers would unload their products to riverboats stopping at Rio Vista, the halfway point between Sacramento and San Francisco.
Over the decades, natural gas, fishing and wind farms have supplemented the local economy, but in the 1990s, the city turned to housing. The population nearly tripled, to about 8,000, over the past 15 years or so, and now many of those newcomers find themselves out of work and unable to pay their mortgages.
But the old-timers, the 100 or so families who've farmed and ranched around Rio Vista for a century or more, are hanging on, if not thriving. They produce everything from gourmet endive to alfalfa to grass-fed calves.
Countywide, agriculture revenue rose 9 percent last year, Cline said.
Baldwin's family began ranching in California in the 1840s, one of the first owners of Rancho Cotati in Sonoma County. Baldwin's father moved to Rio Vista in the 1950s, leasing the historic Willow Ranch, and Baldwin took over the 800-acre spread in 1986.
Baldwin's daily routine is pretty much the same as his father's, grandfather's and great-grandfather's. He wakes before sunrise, saddles up his horse and heads across the rolling fields to check on the sheep and cattle. Then he inspects the fences, bales hay for a few hours and then takes another look at the livestock, checking for weight gain and foot rot.
"I don't know what I'd do if I only worked five days a week," he said as he led his horse, Oscar, into a stable. "What would I do with two extra days? Rest? If I'm not tired at the end of the day, something's wrong."
Baldwin and his neighbors do what they can to help those in town who aren't faring as well. They donate to youth groups and host branding parties every winter.
His friend Jack Anderson, whose family has ranched in the area for five generations, said he'd never leave.
"I like how even these days, you can throw your keys on the floor of your truck and leave 'em there," Anderson said after helping Baldwin herd bulls last week. "It's a great place to live. It's almost like you're living history."
(E-mail Carolyn Jones at carolynjones(at)sfchronicle.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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