ORLANDO, Fla. - The hired hands are milling around the barn in the gray light of dawn, getting ready for another day in the saddle, when Jennings Overstreet pulls up.
In this rustic corner of Osceola County, Fla., miles from the rush-hour masses swarming to the north, morning is unfolding to an almost-forgotten rhythm amid the smells of sweet hay, leather and damp earth.
A dog barks at the stir of activity; the horses snort and shuffle impatiently. Down on Lake Tohopekaliga, in front of the house Overstreet's father built in 1935 for $800, a flock of sandhill cranes feeds noisily. The exuberant trumpeting all but drowns out the dripping of last night's rain from the live-oak canopy overhead.
Overstreet joins the other men to hurry the horses onto a trailer that will carry them south to Rough Island. He had hoped to round up all the cows there on this recent day, but rain set them back.
The 67-year-old cattleman will be on his feet - or in the saddle - until well after dark, heading home, bone-weary, about 9 p.m. Few men like Overstreet still roam the pastures of Central Florida, and the fourth-generation rancher knows he's playing out the last chapters of 125 years of family history in Osceola County.
But so many things have changed. Florida lost nearly 5 million acres of agricultural land to development - about 14 percent of the state - between 1964 and 1997, when Orlando grew from cow town to theme-park metropolis. Another 1.3 million acres will be houses, office parks and strip centers by 2010.
Every year, the city creeps a little closer to Overstreet's faraway corner of Osceola. With metro Orlando gaining 115 residents a day, the suburbs are bulging onto vast stretches of open range that cattlemen have used for centuries.
And developers keep looking farther out, dangling multimillion-dollar offers in front of ranchers weary of mounting regulation, rising costs and the wild swings in beef prices.
Two years ago, Overstreet sold out.
Edgewater Ranch, where he grew up, was the last of his land in Osceola. The buyer lets him keep running cattle there - for now. The new owner, a major developer called Avatar, paid $8 million for 1,100 acres - three times what Overstreet could have gotten in the 1980s.
As the caravan of trucks bounces along the sandy road out of Edgewater Ranch, Overstreet scans a horizon of pasture broken by stands of pine, oak and bald cypress. It once was rough woods and native grasses - back before picky consumers grew accustomed to the tender beef that comes from grazing on cultivated pasture.
'This county is ruined'
In the land-rich, cash-poor life of a cattleman, it's what folks do now and then to keep going.
"It like to broke my heart to sell this property," Overstreet said. "This county is ruined.
"And we haven't seen the worst of it."
The Edgewater Ranch sale was just one in a long history of transactions propelling Florida from mosquito-ridden wilderness to tourist mecca and haven for newcomers. In an economy that depends so heavily on vacationers and home-building, there's little room left for agriculture.
In Orlando, the transformation has been most visible in citrus.
During the past 15 years, large swaths of fragrant green groves gave way to carbon-copy subdivisions and generic mini-marts, scattered across the region in checkerboard fashion.
"We're in a perilous situation," said Charles Bronson, the state's agriculture commissioner, who belongs to an old Florida ranch family. "With each generation, you have to sell land to stay in business."
In the northern reaches of Osceola County - the state's largest beef-cattle producer and a place where kids get a school holiday for the annual rodeo - the change has been striking. From 1987 to 1992, 60,000 acres of pasture vanished. In the five years ending in 1997, the loss accelerated to 100,000 acres. And experts expect more of the same when new numbers come out next year.
The boom in tourism combined with home buyers' love of country living made Osceola the fastest-growing central Florida county in the past decade. By 2010, Osceola is expected to have 53,000 more people, a 30 percent increase. Employment could climb 37 percent, with 20,100 more jobs.
The race is on to cash in on the growth.
Among the largest ranch transactions in recent years, the Partin family sold 1,100 acres to the Seminole tribe in 2001. In 1998, developers bought the 10,000-acre Triple E Ranch, where a city-size golf-course development called Harmony is rising 10 miles east of St. Cloud.
As other Osceola ranches disappeared, the sale of Edgewater became a question of when, not if, for Overstreet. New neighborhoods and construction sites with "coming soon" signs were closing in on the picturesque ranch halfway between Kissimmee and the sprawling community of Poinciana, where Avatar is in the midst of a building frenzy that drew 10,000 new residents in the 1990s.
With other investors "barking at the door to buy it," Overstreet said, Avatar made the $7,200-an-acre offer he couldn't refuse. "When land gets that valuable, you just have to do something else," he said.
On Florida range
Arriving at Rough Island at 8:40 a.m., the cowmen - they prefer that term to "cowboy" - unload the horses under clouds that threaten more rain.
Their job is to round up 600 heifers and steers scattered across a few thousand acres, and they fan out fast.
In this big-sky expanse of swamp and prairie dotted with cabbage palms and framed by baldcypress domes and hardwood hammocks, Jennings Overstreet is as much at home as the bald eagles that swoop across the flood-prone terrain.
Guiding his horse through soggy muck and tawny grasses growing so high they brush against the legs of his neatly creased blue jeans, Overstreet surveys the landscape looking for the shapes of cattle. "That old broom sage is so high you can't see 'em," he says. The sharp "kee-aw, kee-aw" of a distant hawk punctuates the thought.
Spotting movement to the west, he uses his spurs gently, and the horse breaks into a canter. The cows scatter, but Overstreet traces a wide arc around them, herding the animals into a tight group before leading them to fenced pasture.
For three hours, the rancher and his cowmen traverse the flat countryside, searching for cattle. At one point, some cows retreat into the woods, mooing loudly as they scramble around sprawling live-oak branches cloaked with lush green ferns. The men yelp and whistle, closing in on all sides.
At noon, the men gather outside an old bunkhouse, saying little as they heap plastic plates with fried chicken, lima beans, potato salad and fruit.
"You all hold up a minute while I say a blessing," Overstreet says as he takes a seat on a wood bench. Hats are lifted from heads to broad chests as he offers a few words of thanks.
Ten minutes later, the rancher rises. Time to "mammy up" the cows. He mounts his horse and rides into the crowded paddock, mentally matching calves to their mothers. Then, shouting to be heard over the boisterous lowing, he calls the cowmen back to work.
'Such a big country'
It will take hours to separate the herd into two groups - yearlings destined for feed yards out West and mothers with calves that will be trucked to Sebring, where Overstreet has 1,500 acres of pasture.
They do this by steering the skittish animals through a series of pens connected by a chute with gates at either end: "Get on here, yellow! Come on, ladies! Go on there, yearling!"
Amid the clamor, Overstreet remains silent, studying each animal and signaling with his hand which way to send it as it charges through the chute.
Fourteen hours after his day started, it will end when he drops exhausted into his comfy bed at home. It's the kind of day that filled the best years of his boyhood, when his father would take him on two-week cattle drives across a verdant tapestry of fields and forest.
"It was such big country, and I was just a kid," he says. "Those were happy years."
To many newcomers, the disappearance of ranchland is just more pretty scenery succumbing to stucco and asphalt. But as cattle disappear from the horizons, the region loses a big chunk of its history.
Nearly 500 years ago, in 1521, Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon brought the first cattle to Florida. Despite the hot climate and battles with local tribes, ranching was well established by the late 1600s.
In Central Florida, Overstreet's grandfather, E.L.D. Overstreet, was among the handful of men who helped turn the region's wet prairies into cattle country. His father, Henry Overstreet, had brought his 10 children from Georgia in covered wagons with only a few cows in the mid-1800s.
By the time E.L.D. Overstreet's son, Malcolm "Mack" Overstreet, had a family of his own - Jennings was the youngest of his five children - they had about 7,000 cows grazing pastures from Orange County to De Soto and Highlands counties.
Then came the 1960s, with the fateful - and secretive - purchases of large tracts of ranchland by Walt Disney, whose Magic Kingdom opened in 1971. One of the biggest deals was 8,380 acres sold by the late Irlo Bronson Sr., whose mother was an Overstreet. He unloaded the swamp around Reedy Creek for about $100 an acre in 1965.
Overstreet remembers his father coming home after hearing Walt Disney's pitch on what he would do with his 27,000 acres: "Daddy said those people are crazy as hell. But everything they said that day has come true to the nth degree. They'll go forever and ever and ever.
Ranches make money some years and lose it in others; the average return on the land is 1 percent to 2 percent - "enough to make a Wall Street banker laugh in your face," said Craig Evans, head of the Florida Stewardship Foundation, a farmland-protection advocate.
The 10-year swings in the cattle market that ranchers ride out are described as "vicious" by one expert. The average profit for this decade has been $13 per calf. It's the reason so many ranchers also sell sod, citrus and pieces of land.
"The old beef cow's only going to bring a marginal level of return on the land as compared to growing houses and condominiums and golf courses," Prevatt said. "There's not a lot of profits out there, I assure you."
About living
For Jennings Overstreet, ranching never really was about earning a living. It was about the living itself.
It was getting on a horse and going on adventures with the father he revered. It was having a wild place of infinite green all to themselves as they made camp at dusk.
And it was working cattle for the love of it, with a touch that none of his brothers or sisters ever had.
Overstreet learned a lot from his father, whom he describes as very smart but "a man of few words." One bit of advice still resonates today. Being in the cattle business, Mack Overstreet told his son, means being in the real-estate business.
"The cowman never has any money until you sell a piece of land," Jennings Overstreet said.
His father died in 1976, and "it took forever and a day to get used to him not being here." In 1983, Overstreet lost his oldest son, Cole, in a car accident. Earlier that same year, his younger son, Clay, nearly died of brain injuries from another crash.
Today, Jennings Overstreet is recovering from heart surgery he had in the fall and is grateful to be getting back out on the range. He hopes that Clay, 42, and his 7-year-old grandson, also named Cole, will continue the family tradition. They still have 1,800 cows and the ranch in Sebring, Fla.
Every year, Overstreet picks out 15 or 20 of his best heifers for Cole and marks them with the EO brand that belonged to E.L.D. Overstreet. It's the one piece of family's history in Osceola left for him to pass on to the boy.
That and his love of ranching.
"I'll always have cows on this earth," he said. "As long as I live, I'll have cows somewhere."
Christine Shenotis a reporter for The Orlando Sentinel, a Tribune Publishing newspaper.