Point Reyes National Seashore ranchers in talks with The Nature Conservancy amid fight over their private leases

Lifeline for struggling dairies?

Point Reyes National Seashore administers 21 ranching operations run by about 20 families both inside the 71,000-acre seashore and on surrounding National Park Service lands in the north district of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

All of the ranches, which spread across a total of 26,000 acres, are governed by the same general management plan challenged in the 2022 lawsuit. All but two families are part of the settlement talks.

Bill Niman, who runs beef cattle on 800 acres in the southern end of Point Reyes National Seashore, learned of the conservancy’s involvement Tuesday from The Press Democrat.

“I would hope The Nature Conservancy would have a better understanding of the ecosystem than the people who filed the lawsuit,” he said.

The owner of natural meat company Niman Ranch sold his land to the federal government in 1984 for a “life estate” or lifetime lease, instead of the 25-year or 30-year leases many original dairy farmers signed when the park was formed, starting in the early 1960s. Niman is not a part of any current park lawsuits, which means he’s not bound by any nondisclosure agreements.

The seashore’s mixed land-use model is so unique that no other location in the country overseen by the National Park Service, with the exception of an Ohio park, allows working ranches within its boundaries.

The presumption, however, that ranching was intended to continue in the seashore is untrue, said retired Assistant U.S. Attorney Jim Coda, of Petaluma, who spent more than a decade working for the Department of Interior and representing the National Park Service in the 1970s and early ‘80s. There’s no legal basis for the claim that Congress intended ranching to go on indefinitely in any legislation, he said.

“This is an extremely weak case for the park service to defend,” particularly given the founding legislation and the park service mission to protect the landscape, Coda said.

In seeking a path forward, The Nature Conservancy may prove to be a good match for the standoff in Point Reyes. It owns 500,000 acres of U.S. grazing lands and collaborates with working ranches around the country.

“I’m hopeful that someone at The Nature Conservancy will be visionary enough to say, ‘This is a unique situation. This is not the Serengeti. This is an urban fringe park where we can demonstrate really thoughtful land stewardship if we all work together,’ ” Niman said.

But he’s also worried that the four remaining dairy ranches — Kehoe, Nunes, Mendoza and Spaletta — might not last much longer, given the broader economic, environmental and operational challenges facing local dairies.

“I think it’s an opportunity being lost here if we don’t try and integrate the pastoral grazing operations. The dairies are a separate issue maybe, but they’re going anyway because they can’t afford to do business here,” he said. “But the grazing operations, I think it would be really unfortunate to buy them out, restrict them and get them off the land in terms of having something return to some imaginary natural state out here, which would be complete open grasslands with thousands of herbivores grazing it. That’s the natural state that it was.”

Frayed bonds among farm and environmental interests

Straus, a longtime Marin County dairy farmer who in 2021 moved operations to Rohnert Park, is spearheading Save Marin’s Food Community, a coalition created to support continued ranching on the seashore as a vital part of west Marin County’s agricultural industry.

The group’s website cites the emergence of a nonspecific “regional threat” to food production on Point Reyes, and says loss of the parkland’s ranches would prove devastating to the community’s food system, economy and schools. Its members include farmers, dairy industry advocates, food producers like Petaluma-based Amy’s Kitchen and organizations such as the Western Organic Dairy Producers Alliance and the Agricultural Institute of Marin.

“We’re trying to say to the park service,” Straus said, “that if they’re willing to go outside the mediation to work with other groups (like The Nature Conservancy), then they should allow the ranchers to work with agencies that are there to support them and help them prove their businesses and worth, while they negotiate their 20-year leases.”

The leasing of the land was a crucial provision when the national seashore was signed into law by President Kennedy and later established in 1972. Point Reyes ranchers sold their land to the federal government with the understanding they would be able to lease back their properties.

At that time, ranchers and environmentalists were banding together to save the remote, wind-swept point from encroaching real estate development and suburban sprawl.

But more than 50 years later, many bonds between ranchers and environmentalists have dissolved.

The most prominent example from the seashore was not a cattle or dairy ranch but an oyster farm, the last of those once in the seashore.

Its owner, firebrand rancher Kevin Lunny, a decade ago lost his contentious bid to renew an expiring lease on a 2,500-acre estuary at the heart of the park. The federal government and a wide array of environmental groups held to long-standing plans to turn Drakes Estero back to wilderness, while Lunny’s allies in food and farming circles sought to preserve a local food producer.

The high-profile fight, which roped in the Interior Secretary and U.S. Supreme Court, ended with the farm’s 2014 closure and a taxpayer-funded $4.5 million cleanup of the estero, now a prime destination for kayakers and paddleboarders.

Two years later, a lawsuit challenging continued ranching on the parklands without a full analysis of its environmental impacts resulted in a settlement the next year requiring completion of an environmental impact statement and amendments to the seashore’s four-decade-old management plan.

The new plan was ultimately approved in the fall of 2021 after a robust, four-year public process. Among its provisions was an allowance for ranching leases up to 20 years in duration. Ranchers had been operating under one-year leases before development of the new plan got underway but were granted interim five-year leases while it was considered.

Soon after the new plan was approved, however, the three original environmental plaintiffs — the Fairfax-based Resource Renewal Institute, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Western Watersheds Projects — filed a new federal suit citing years of evolving park policy that allowed for ranching on the seashore only “without impairment of its natural values,” enabling “maximum protection, restoration and preservation of the natural environment.”

It was a breach of park policy to authorize long-term leases when ranching continued to pollute the water and operate “at the expense of native wildlife and natural habitat,” the plaintiffs said.

The January 2022 suit cited ongoing water quality violations, surface and groundwater consumption, spread of invasive plant life and conflict with wildlife species including the park’s iconic tule elk as “significant” harms to “environmental, scenic and recreational values” in violation of federal laws.

It also cited the seashore’s allowance for lethal control of tule elk populations, an issue that has sparked passionate criticism from hundreds who commented on the draft management plan.

“The Park Service needs to stop authorizing chronic water contamination, harassment and suppression of tule elk, degradation of public recreation and destruction of native coastal prairies for the sake of a handful of unsustainable ranching operations,” Laura Cunningham, California director at Western Watersheds Project, said when the suit was announced. The group opposes private grazing on public lands in the western United States.

In the meantime, ranchers seeking long-term leases were limited to interim 5-year agreement during the management plan update and environmental review. After the lawsuit was filed, they received 2-year leases to see them through the next round of settlement talks. Those leases expire Sept. 14.

Short-term leases hobble ranchers

Ranchers, as they have all along, say the uncertainty around short-term leases makes it financially infeasible to invest in infrastructure improvements, much less adopt innovative, regenerative farming methods proposed by Straus, who claimed to be the first 100% organic dairy creamery in the country when he made the switch in 1994.

Moreover, they are obliged to make environmental improvements and demonstrate progress under a water quality strategy for management of ranching operations required of the park by the California Coastal Commission for ranches in the coastal zone and thus under the commission’s jurisdiction. There’s a Catch-22 in the need for investment without the promise they can stay.

“It’s just a very difficult situation out there, because the ranchers don’t have lease renewals, and they can’t get the lease renewals until they can deal with the water quality issues, and they can’t deal with the water quality issues because they don’t have the money,” said Caryl Hart, chair of the Coastal Commission and former director of Sonoma County Regional Parks.

As a result, said Hart, who had been unaware of the The Nature Conservancy’s entry into settlement talks, leaseholders might find relief in a buyout.

“We have been in complete limbo and uncertainty on these ranches for a decade and a half,” said Kevin Lunny, who runs about 90 beef cattle on the fourth-generation Lunny Ranch and is an intervenor in the legal case.

Brower, the Berkeley environmental writer and activist, balked at the notion of a buyout, saying the idea had been circulating in environmental circles for a while.

“When I first heard of any talk of buying back the land, even before The Nature Conservancy was involved, I thought, ‘Buy it back from them again?’ All those ranchers were compensated for that land. They agreed to a price. It was a fair price … I thought, no, they’ve been bought out once. But as I began to think about it, I thought maybe this is the way out, maybe buy them out again.”

Straus, after learning about The Nature Conservancy’s involvement, held a Zoom meeting March 12 with Mike Sweeney, the organization’s executive director of California, and Michael Bell, its protection strategy director.

“We asked them what their role was in the park since we were hearing they we were negotiating with the ranchers and dairies, and they acknowledged they’re helping Point Reyes National Seashore, but they did not say specifically what they were negotiating,” Straus said.

During the half-hour meeting, Straus said he tried to convince The Nature Conservancy representatives that “there are all kinds of collaborations that could happen to help really build the model of dairy farming in the national seashore that is a model for the country and the world, around sustainability and working in harmony with nature,” he said. “The Nature Conservancy could work with the farmers, as they have around the state and the country and the world, to help our community rather than trying to remove them.”

The global nonprofit is involved in restorative, land-use projects in 79 countries around the world. Last year, it raised nearly $875 million in private funding and membership dues, and spent more than $976 million directly on conservation land and easements, according to a 2023 financial summary on the TNC website.

Its stake in ranch land is expanding, and a prime example of its collaboration with the federal government, ranchers, other private landowners and public land managers is the Heart Mountain Ranch Preserve, located 60 miles from Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, where elk, mule deer and antelope, share the plains with grazing cattle.

‘We are muzzled’

In Point Reyes, though, the intermingling of cattle and dairy operations with some wildlife populations, and especially, the seashore’s tule elk, has been fraught.

Tim Kehoe, who runs Kehoe Dairy with his brothers Tom and Mike, did not return phone calls seeking comment about the mediation talks and The Nature Conservancy’s role. His silence was an about-face from last October, when he described a controversial plan to remove fencing separating the tule elk preserve from ranches as a possible “nail in the coffin” for local dairies. In a recent text message, he would only say, “We are in the middle of the mediation, and it’s not a good time to get into what is going on.”

According to Straus, Kehoe Dairy has drastically reduced its herd, from more than 400 cows down to around 80 head.

Among the Point Reyes ranchers contacted, the most outspoken was Lunny, whose Drakes Bay Oyster Co. closed in 2014 after his unsuccessful bid to renew an expiring, 40-year mariculture permit in waters designated by Congress as marine wilderness.

Though he declined to reveal anything about the confidential talks, he said he strongly disagreed with the secrecy surrounding the seashore’s future, given the public process that had drawn input from thousands who weighed in on the amended general management plan.

“I wish I could talk about substance, but I’m not allowed to,” he said. “I can tell you that we are muzzled, and we really do think there are things in the process that the public would be interested in.”

“I hope the outcome will be consistent with what the public agreed to in this process because it would seem to me to be wrong if that public process gets all undone,” Lunny said.

Public kept in dark

The Nature Conservancy already is engaged in a search for donors tied to its work in Point Reyes, according to Straus and others familiar with the group’s work who asked to not to be named for fear of breaching the cloak of confidentiality around it.

Michael Bell, the protection strategy director, gathered potential donors at a house party in Ross on March 14, meeting with well-heeled prospective donors who might help fund a Nature Conservancy buyout of rancher leases, according to Straus.

Later, at a March 27 meeting of the Committee on Housing Agriculture Workers and Their Families, a coalition of Marin County stakeholders, Straus brought up The Nature Conservancy’s involvement in the mediation process to everyone in attendance at the National Park Service’s Bear Valley Center.

He said he was interrupted by Melanie Gunn, the national seashore’s spokesperson, and Marin Agricultural Land Trust Executive Director Lily Verdone, a former Nature Conservancy employee, who told him he was not allowed to talk about that information because “nondisclosure agreements are in place.” Straus said he replied that he had not signed a nondisclosure agreement and thus was free to talk.

Gunn, in calls and emails this week and last week with The Press Democrat, declined to discuss developments in the mediation process, citing confidentiality, except to note that “Albert Straus is not a party to the confidential mediation discussions.”

Verdone said she similarly wanted “to respect the confidential process of mediation,” and had nothing to contribute.

The Nature Conservancy officials Sweeney and Bell referred inquiries to the mediator, Bradley O’Brien.

It remained unclear what role or stance the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria might have in recent developments. The tribe in 2021 entered into a 20-year, government-to-government partnership agreement with the National Park Service — the first in the nation — allowing it to focus on management issues involving designated Native American cultural properties and “to ensure Tribal views and traditional ecological knowledge are part of the management of tule elk and the ranching lands in PRNS,” the tribe said in a statement at the time.

Tribal Chair Greg Sarris was unavailable Tuesday to comment on The Nature Conservancy’s role in the settlement.

Straus, who is following in the footsteps of parents who were dairy ranchers in Marshall, and were instrumental in helping broker the original national seashore deal in the 1960s, said he is speaking out now because he doesn’t want to wait until all closed-room deals are done.

“Usually, the public finds out after the fact, and by then it’s too late.”

You can reach Staff Writer Mary Callahan (she/her) at 707-521-5249 or mary.callahan@pressdemocrat.com. On X (Twitter) @MaryCallahanB. You can reach John Beck at john@beckmediaproductions.com.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story has been revised from the original online version, published April 3, with additional voices included representing stakeholders in the pitched debate about Point Reyes’ future.