End of Ranching in Iconic California Community Signals Bigger War on Land Use in West

POINT REYES STATION, Calif.—The buffalo milk soft serve here is an open secret, found near the butcher’s counter at the back of the local market. Like everything else in this tiny farm town, nestled in the coastal grasslands about an hour north of San Francisco, it’s made with milk from a nearby dairy.

California’s Marin County is a pioneer in organic ranching, known for its gourmet cheeses, multi-generational dairies and pasture-raised beef. The legacy of more than 150 years of agricultural production is baked into its contemporary rural charms, which, along with the nearby Point Reyes National Seashore, make it a popular tourist destination.

It’s also a corner of the country where locals tend to see ranching and environmentalism as symbiotic pursuits.

The agreement  between three environmental groups—the Resource Renewal Institute, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Western Watersheds Project—the National Park Service, and the Point Reyes Seashore Ranchers Association saw 12 of 14 ranches on Point Reyes agree to cease ranching within 15 months.

On one side, preservationists say cattle and dairy ranching at Point Reyes has led to environmental degradation that threatens the future of the park and biodiversity in the state; on the other, family ranchers see themselves as stewards of the land, their practices as the future of conservation—and as a bulwark against the ravages of Big Ag.

As the Trump administration moves to roll back Biden-era reforms, the high-profile case has become a flashpoint in the broader fight over land use in the West—where the federal government owns nearly half of all public land, and where ranching is considered a living legacy, part of the cultural heritage that built the West itself.

Point Reyes, a spectacularly beautiful coastal peninsula where ranching predates the park itself by a century, is an unusual case—and one bound to attract scrutiny from activists who oppose ranching on public lands.

“ I’ve never seen a private grazing lease on public lands that wasn’t doing environmental damage, whether it’s to salmon or to sage grouse, it doesn’t matter what ecosystem you’re in,” said Jeff Miller, a senior conservation advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the organizations that sued the National Park Service over its ranching leases in 2014 and 2022, resulting in the current agreement.

In the West, damage from private cattle grazing leases is “immense,” Miller said, second only to logging. Preservationists cite water pollution, soil erosion, and habitat loss, among other concerns.

The organization has focused on the issue since its founding in 1989, routinely intervening with National Forest and Bureau of Land Management plans and suing over grazing leases in cases where there is explicit and documented environmental damage, Miller said.

“President Biden left America’s public lands and natural resources in a sorry state,” Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wis.) told the House Natural Resources Committee during a February hearing on restoring multiple use.

“For four long years President Biden and his federal land managers have abandoned the longstanding and previously uncontroversial principle of multiple use. Instead, they adopted top-down, preservationist schemes designed to placate extreme environmentalists.”

In the same hearing, Tim Canterbury, president of the Public Lands Council, an organization representing cattle and sheep producers who hold 22,000 grazing permits across the West, highlighted challenges for ranchers, and urged Congress and federal agencies to recognize public lands ranching as an essential part of the multi-use framework.

“I manage these lands and waters, and the wildlife and multiple uses they sustain, as if they were my own,” Canterbury said. He said the infrastructure, ecological stewardship and investments that ranchers provide benefit the public and environment, not just privately owned livestock.

“My family has managed the lands we utilize since 1879. Our commitment to these lands is baked into our way of life,” Canterbury said of his Colorado ranch operation, adding that “deep historical and ecological knowledge of the working landscape” are handed down through generations.

Ivan London, a senior attorney with the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which frequently intervenes pro-bono on behalf of ranchers facing challenges to their grazing permits, said regulatory interpretations may shift with the balance of power in Washington, but the law governing grazing rights hasn’t changed.

“Congress actually said, ‘Here are some priority uses of public land—grazing, timber, harvesting, mineral production.’ And that law hasn’t changed. But from administration to administration the various regulators find ways to read it differently,” London said, pointing to President Bill Clinton’s attempts to increase grazing fees in the 1990s, and President Joe Biden’s embrace of conservation easements.

“According to the Taylor Grazing Act—an actual law, unlike the conservation leases—grazing and ranching are the highest use of public lands,” London said. That regulations allowing conservation leases to “lock up land away from ranchers” might be ending under the Trump administration is “huge,” he said.

Recognized as a Traditional Cultural Property on the National Register of Historic Places, the Green River Drift cattle drive is still operated by descendants of families that homesteaded the area in the 19th century.

It’s a familiar narrative, often reduced in court to a zero-sum game between preserving either vulnerable animal or plant species, or prized human cultural practices with histories that pre-date the authority managing the lands.

The families in question, their lawyers argued, cared for the land longer and better than any agency or activist, their continued existence providing “124 years of evidence that ranchers are the real conservationists.”

In other cases, such as Santa Rosa Island—now part of California’s Channel Islands National Park—the outlines of which presaged the fate of Point Reyes, environmental activists have succeeded in bringing nearly a century of ranching to a close.

In 1986, the federal government purchased Vail & Vickers Ranch, run by four generations of cattle ranchers on what was known as “Cowboy Island.”  In 1998, the last working island cattle ranch in the United States shuttered for good.

“Cowboys versus environmentalists” is a common tableau throughout the West, with infamous spectacles such as Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy’s militarized standoff with the federal government.

In Point Reyes, the fight has pitted environmentalist against environmentalist in one of the most liberal enclaves in the country, exposing an existential schism within the conservation movement.

Ranchers Say They Were Pressured

In a protracted battle over the park’s ranch management plan that culminated in lawsuits in 2016 and 2022, both ranchers and the organizations who sued the park service accuse the agency of bias.

“These emails prove they were totally in on it and celebrating this victory against ranching,” said Andrew Giacomini, a San Francisco attorney representing pro-bono more than 60 ranch workers and subtenants who are set to be displaced by the Point Reyes settlement.

Despite apparent neutrality, Giacomini accused the government of conspiring with the conservationist organizations, which brought in a third party to mediate a settlement behind closed doors, all in an effort to push out ranchers.

“They could have defended that lawsuit and won,” Giacomini said. Instead, he alleges, the park service entered secret negotiations, overturned the results of a public process, and kowtowed to a “handful of special interests.”

“It’s exactly as our lawsuit says. The way it was handled violates the law in multiple ways and it can’t stand.”

Even before the case begins moving through the courts, Giacomini said he thinks shifting priorities in the new administration may result in a reversal of the decision to end ranching at Point Reyes.

Miller, of the Center for Biological Diversity, said the idea of any collusion between his organization, fellow plaintiffs, and the park service is “absolute nonsense,” calling the park’s 2014 ranch management plan a “wish list” from the ranchers, developed in secret without input from conservationists or the public.

Particularly egregious to conservationists was a request to cull once-endangered tule elk herds, which compete with cattle for food during periods of drought.

“They rolled this thing out in 2014 and said, ‘Guess what? We’re going to shoot tule elk. We’re going to expand ranches, and we’re going to enshrine private commercial ranching forever in the park.’ That was the park service’s first bite at the apple,” Miller said.

“That is not conservation, that’s collusion with the ranchers, which is what the park service has been doing for half a century.”

The Department of the Interior and its National Park Service did not respond to inquiries.

Miller contends the park service “has never taken an environmental position in their entire history—we’ve had to sue them the entire way.”

The Center for Biological Diversity, he said, will intervene in two new lawsuits against the park: one brought by ranch workers set to be evicted due to the recent settlement, and another brought by remaining ranchers seeking to preserve agricultural use in the park. “We are not going to allow a settlement between them and Trump’s Department of Interior.”

But ranchers say they were pressured to accept the January settlement and keep quiet about the process, which they say was negotiated behind closed doors by The Nature Conservancy, a nonprofit powerhouse that raised a reported $30 million for the buyout. Once ranchers agreed to leave, the Park Service rezoned 16,000 acres of land originally set aside for ranching as a new Scenic Landscape Zone, and handed over management of it to the Conservancy.

“Point Reyes National Seashore was specifically established to protect ranchers and their lands and their livelihoods,” Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.), chairman of the committee, told The Epoch Times, suggesting a campaign to force ranchers off the land violates the congressional mandate that founded the park.

The lawmaker expressed dismay that organic ranches, in a region recognized for regenerative agriculture, would be targeted.

“I feel like these groups are attacking the Western way of life,” Westerman said. “We want the park to remain as it was agreed upon, and I don’t know an agency has the authority to come in and usurp a law passed by Congress. It’s the kind of executive overreach that I think has really aggravated Americans across the country.”

Pointing to efforts in states such as Montana to buy up vast blocks of grazing land and donate it to the federal government for conservation, the congressman added, “They want to create something like the North American Serengeti. And that’s attacking our Western way of life. It’s also attacking American agriculture and the people who actually feed the country.”

Food Supply

After visiting bovine-themed bakeries and a feed store that moonlights as a café and gift shop, visitors to Point Reyes Station can follow a winding road off Highway One to a celebrated cheese store; depending on the season, they might be greeted by a pair of silky Holstein calves, followed by the sharp smells of a working dairy.

For urbanites who rarely encounter the origins of the food they eat, it’s a chance to experience the elegant circuit of a local food ecosystem, a Platonic ideal of the “farm-to-table” movement.

Those critical of the Point Reyes settlement contend that what’s at stake is not only the loss of the ranches and the displacement of their long-time workers and tenants, but the critical role family ranches play as stewards of the land, and as small-scale producers of high-quality food.

Ranchers point to a declining critical mass in the industry: Farmers are aging out, demand is exceeding supply, and compounding industry pressures means more food will come from large conglomerates—or from overseas.

“Our neighbors and friends, their cows just left this beautiful, cool marine layer peninsula with green grass year-round, and they’re in a hot loafing barn in Texas right now,” said Kevin Lunny, one of six multi-generational cattle ranchers who, along with six dairies, have agreed to leave Point Reyes by next April.

Cattle from ranches like Lunny’s, which is certified both organic and grass-fed, live their entire lives on grass and are locally marketed. “That’s rare and it’s hard to find, but the demand will still be there,” he said.

“We love humane treatment of animals and we like having them out on pastures, not in confined spaces. But people are still going to drink milk. They’re not thinking, what kind of dairy produces this milk? They just need the milk,” Lunny said.

With demand exceeding supply, the animals will just be raised elsewhere, he said. “They’ll be on feed in Nebraska. That’s our standard model. It’s making the big factory farms, the bigger industrial operations bigger, and we lose those family farms. It’s as simple as that.”

Albert Straus, whose Straus Family Creamery sources from two dairies on Point Reyes, says more than 90 percent of dairies in Marin County are organic, and supply more than half of California’s organic milk. But in just a few years, the county has lost more than half of its organic dairies.

”We’re now short organic milk in California and nationwide, so this loss of family farms, of the ability to produce organic milk, is having a direct impact on our ability to produce organic dairy products,” Straus said.

The result, ranchers say, is more power concentrated in the hands of large conglomerates.

“It’s getting bigger and bigger and less environmentally friendly and the quality of the milk’s not as good, because organic cows have to be on pasture, but conventional cows are mostly confined in smaller areas where there’s water pollution issues, air quality issues,” Straus said.

As the first fully certified creamery in the country, Straus’s dairy is a leader in organic farming; he expects to be fully carbon neutral in the next few years, and he works with other local farms toward the same goals.

Last year, his plan was recognized by the United Nations as a global model. In October 2024, Straus joined dairy organizations worldwide in signing the Global Dairy Sustainability Declaration at the 2024 World Dairy Summit in Paris.

But environmentalists who support closure of the ranches say there is nothing sustainable about Point Reyes agriculture.

Ranchers and advocates who want agriculture to continue on the peninsula want to privatize the park and are averse to the idea of public lands, Miller said.

“There’s nothing sustainable out there. I know they like to use all the buzzwords, but they were causing pretty significant environmental damage. And the park, the ecosystems and the public interest is going to be a lot better off without them.”

With the vast majority of the park’s carbon emissions coming from cattle, he said, removing the ranches will take care of around three-quarters of its carbon footprint.

Environmental groups argue that ranches already struggled with droughts; it was a matter of time before they folded—the settlement just accelerated the timeline by offering them a way out, and nothing is preventing them from relocating to private land.

But Straus estimates the cost to relocate is between $5 million and $10 million per dairy, far more than the settlement will cover.

And the problem is bigger than the individual ranches.

“I have a list of 40 defunct dairy farms that have gone out of business and I’ve not been able to relocate even one of them,” he said. “Land is being bought by wealthy individuals that use it as a hobby estate, even ones that have agriculture easements are not being fully utilized for food and fiber production.”

Meanwhile, as organic acreage declines in America, global organic and transitioning land is growing, meaning the United States has slipped from its rank as a top global producer, according to the USDA.

Last year, the United States clocked record dairy imports, while beef production is expected to decline in 2025 as imports continue to rise.

A Shifting Paradigm

Family ranches and dairies have been operating on the Point Reyes peninsula for longer than the state of California has existed. Since it was designated a national park in the 1960s, the abiding vision—and congressional mandate–has been a harmonious amalgam of private agriculture, public access, and wilderness preservation.

Conservationists say change was necessary to confront a broader, looming extinction crisis.

The idea is that the park’s new management plan will lead to a larger scale restoration, “to stave off the worst of the extinction crisis and biodiversity crisis that we’re currently experiencing across the state,” said Chance Cutrano, of the Resource Renewal Institute. He estimates about a third of the state’s species are currently at risk.

But for ranchers and their supporters, this vision of a rewilded park—imposed by activists viewed by some on Point Reyes as radical and out-of-touch—erases human culture and history, prioritizing tourism while gutting the scenic landscape of its economic engine and life force.

Ranchers Nicolette Hahn Niman and Bill Niman, who were not party to the negotiations that resulted in the settlement, but are now suing the park along with another ranching family, are well-known advocates for sustainable food production and humanely raised meat.

Hahn Niman said she feels the push to move ranchers out of Point Reyes was motivated by a desire to end animal agriculture.

“The same kind of work is being done here with the Point Reyes National Seashore by a sort of amalgam of groups that purportedly have environmental concerns at the top of their list, but if you look at their work and their websites and the stuff that they are always saying and doing, it’s really largely driven by an animal rights agenda,” Hahn Niman said.

A former environmental attorney who worked on industrial agriculture pollution issues with Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s Waterkeeper Alliance, Hahn Niman has focused her advocacy in recent years on both humanely raised meat and defending the “value and importance of animals in agriculture and our diets,” she said.

More broadly, in her own interactions with environmental advocacy organizations over the years, she describes a shift from animal welfare to an animal rights paradigm, in which veganism is the only acceptable answer to climate change, and any ownership of animals is a kind of barbarism.

She recalled discussions in 2021 over the park’s management plan, during which she was seated across the table from a member of one of the conservation groups that sued the park.

“This is supposedly an environmental lawsuit. And he began talking about why they filed this lawsuit, and he really focused on the fact that 15 elk had been culled by the National Park Service.”

Hahn Niman said those specific elk had been culled because they were diseased, an action she describes as necessary in the management of animals.

The Nimans’ attorney, Peter Prows, suggested that targeting some of the most reputable and responsible organic ranches in the country for removal was a peculiar strategy if the end goal is animal welfare.

“Why start here, why pick this as the big fight? Unless it’s not about ranching but about trying to mold people’s lifestyles.”

The vision, said Straus, the dairy farmer, “is to get rid of all livestock on public land. It’s a vision that doesn’t have people included in it.”

‘I Gave My Youth’

On a Friday afternoon in March, Kathy Hunting, a Point Reyes Station resident and retired environmental health scientist, was volunteering for a local climate action organization at a fundraising party in town.

She said she was disappointed in the decision to phase out the ranches.

“I’m an environmentalist. And I think that this is a case of extreme environmentalism. (People) who have put the purity of the environment and tourism over people,” Hunting said.

“ I believe strongly that local food systems are important for community resilience and for climate resilience. And this is destroying part of our local food system,” said Hunting, a former professor with the Milken Institute of Public Health at George Washington University.

The decision to remove ranching may have been supported by thousands of people around the country, she said, but most in the local community are very much against it—not least because it will displace around 100 people, many of them low-income families, from their homes.

An employee of a local nonprofit who asked not to be identified by name told The Epoch Times, “I’m all for the practice of ‘land-back,’ but the decision-making happening with the ranch closures, I find it performative.”

Both pointed to the area’s housing crisis, and a wealth disparity between lower-income workers who commute to the area or live on the ranches, and those who own homes there.

Lourdes Romo, a local business owner who grew up on the Point, came to the United States from Mexico when she was 9 years old, joining her father on a Point Reyes ranch, where he worked for two decades. She stayed in the area and raised her family here.

“For me, this is one of the fondest memories that I have, living up in the Point. I mean, what a treasure, what a place to live,” Romo said, balancing her grandson on her hip while running her home decor shop.

While reports have surfaced over the years of mistreatment of ranch workers, Romo said her family’s experience was always positive. “They took care of our needs.”

Currently, there are only a dozen workers remaining on the ranches slated for closure. Along with subtenants, they have joined a lawsuit against the park.

For the past 34 years, Margarito Loza Gonzales has risen daily at 1 a.m. to milk cows on Point Reyes ranches. With his wife, who cleans the Dance Palace, a community center in town, he raised six children on the peninsula.

At 58, his face is weathered and work-worn but youthful beneath a trucker’s cap.

“Nobody has a plan,” he said, describing how workers were left in the dark during negotiations.

The Nature Conservancy has committed to raising more than $3 million to relocate workers and ranch subtenants, but Gonzales said he hasn’t seen a dime of that yet.

“They should give workers half of it now, and half when we leave, so we have something. Because otherwise we’ll end up under a bridge.”

After decades of working the vampire shift, rescuing lost tourists, tending the land as if it was his own, it’s a devastating blow.

“I gave my youth,” he said, removing his cap for emphasis to reveal a smooth pate above wolverine sideburns.

“I gave my health. And now I’m saying goodbye, after 34 years staying up all night.”