There’s something almost eerie about a dairy so quiet the loudest sound is birdsong. Normally, a constant mooing would bellow above the clanging that cows make when they rub against steel gates. The rush of tractors and delivery trucks would fade in and out all day.
For the past 101 years, the cows on this farm near San Pablo Bay were milked twice a day. In recent years, that meant you’d hear the loud hum of vacuum pumps running from midnight to 7 a.m. and again from noon to 7 p.m.
“You normally don’t hear the birds,” said Mike Mulas, who served as Mulas Dairy president for the past 13 years, after his father and uncle before him and his grandfather before that. It is now a ghost town of empty barns and corrals. The only cows left are a pair of marble statues on either side of the driveway off Carneros Highway.
Mulas was standing near a drainage ditch on the east side of his 800-acre Schellville property. The shallow stormwater trench runs through part of the farm and empties into a field, not far from a network of creeks that flow into San Pablo Bay. It was a major point of contention in a lawsuit filed over alleged water quality violations in early 2023.
Mulas, who was an equal partner with his brother Ray and two sisters Vickie and Carolyn, tried to fight back. For nearly a year, they went back and forth with attorneys, consultants and state water quality inspectors, racking up nearly $300,000 in debt. Until finally, as part of the settlement, they agreed to cease operations and go out of business last October.
“If we had stayed in it, there was all kinds of stuff and more money,” he said. “I’d still be fighting it. By the time I was done, it would be a million-dollar investment.”
Mulas occasionally shakes his head in frustration when he talks about the case. It’s how he felt the day he watched his last cow loaded up and shipped out for the Turlock livestock auction.
The closure, which ended 13 jobs outside of the family, wasn’t reported at the time. Mulas didn’t want to talk about it for months. But other farmers in the area knew. They talked about it, and some wondered if they were next.
“We were using funds on attorney fees versus funds to pay the operating bills,” Mulas said. “This industry can’t support both. I don’t care who you are, it’s tough to withstand ongoing battles.”
The closure marks the end of an era for the Mulas family, stalwarts of the small community in this rural corner of Sonoma County, where family members have helped lead the fire department, school board and local resource conservation district, to name just a few.
For the North Bay’s struggling dairy industry, it could also be read as another signpost of the new era. In an age where some environmental groups take to the courts in higher numbers, going after farms they allege are polluting surrounding watersheds, many struggling family farms simply can’t put up a fight anymore.
In one of the most high-profile examples, in Point Reyes National Seashore, dairy farmers and cattle ranchers have been locked in legal battles with environmental groups since 2016. Many of them say the writing has been on the wall ever since Drakes Bay Oyster Co. owner Kevin Lunny came up short in his divisive bid to keep operating in the federal seashore and closed shop in 2014.
One of four dairies left on the western Marin peninsula, Kehoe Dairy, is down to around 80 cows. All the farmers recently signed nondisclosure agreements and can’t comment during the latest round of mediation.
But last fall, around the same time Mulas was selling off his herd, Tim Kehoe stood on a hill overlooking the farm his grandfather founded in 1922 — the same year Mulas Dairy started — and shared his doubts about keeping on. “Up until about five or six years ago, we never thought about this coming to an end,” Kehoe said.
Now, it could only be a matter of time. Kehoe’s next-door neighbor, McClure’s Dairy, closed in 2021. Petaluma’s Corda Dairy closed in 2022. In their heyday, there were around 300 dairies in Sonoma County. Today there are 50.
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