For months, Kevin Lunny got ready to leave the land at Point Reyes National Seashore where his family had lived for three generations. He shipped out the cows, sold off equipment, and moved most of what he owned. In late May, it was time to go, with his wife, Nancy, and his 94-year-old father, Joe, to Auburn, in the mountains east of Sacramento.

“Our ranch has been abandoned since then,” said Lunny. “They put a gate across our driveway, locked out the public​, and put up a sign that says, ‘NPS property, do not enter.’”

“They” is the National Park Service, which owns the land where Lunny lived and worked. He was the last of 11 ranchers and dairymen to sign a settlement agreement that mandated the end of their operations at the seashore. The Nature Conservancy, which mediated the deal, paid a total of at least $30 million to the ranchers in an effort to put to rest their decade-long battle with environmentalists. The conflict had pitted neighbor against neighbor, but the resolution is no less contentious. One community member called it “the result of environmental terrorism.” The eviction deadline is spring of 2026.

Moving has eased the transition for Lunny. ​He’s no longer reminded of what he’s lost every time he looks out the window. But he likens the experience to losing a family member. “We still have these pangs of grief when we look up … and think to ourselves, ‘I cannot believe that’s not home​,’”​ he said.

Each of the 11 ranchers and dairy operators reportedly received $2.5 million to $3 million for their Point Reyes properties — not enough to purchase a comparable farm in West Marin. 

Lunny has remained involved in continued negotiations between the ranchers and farmers, the park service, and environmental groups led by TNC out of concern for his former workers and dozens of others who lost their jobs and homes and lack a solid place to land. The workers’ settlements, $70,000 to $100,000 per family and the possibility of temporary shelter, are a fraction of what the ranchers received.

For Lunny and the others, the developments of the last six months have marked an abrupt end to a way of life at the seashore that ranchers and farmers had enjoyed since shortly after the Gold Rush and a hollowing out of an already shrinking agricultural community in a region that has long served two intertwined purposes: as a playground for nature lovers and a hub for small-scale food producers.

But for some environmentalists and animal rights advocates, it’s a hard-fought win that could pave the way toward a more pristine version of the park, with more space and water for native and endangered species, more amenities for recreators, and a more sustainable use of public land.

The changes taking place at Point Reyes are representative of a larger shift in the North Bay, which is being reshaped by climate change and an influx of money. As high-end hotels, shops, and restaurants geared toward the region’s wealthy residents and visitors proliferate, ​the ​agricultural landscape is shifting. More of the region’s dairy operations are shutting or leaving for California’s Central Valley, Idaho’s Magic Valley, or other places where entire communities are shaped around large dairy operations.

While the end of ranching may mean less land for dairy cows and cattle ranches and more for native species and visitors, the other impacts may be pushed far out of view of the average Point Reyes visitor.

In the eyes of most visitors, Point Reyes has long been an unusual combination of public park and fenced-off ranch land. Tourists who make the trek to catch a glimpse of tule elk and calving elephant seals drive miles through pastureland dotted with grazing cattle and hike past “no trespassing” signs.

The two interests haven’t always been at odds.  

When development was encroaching on the coastline in the 1950s, conservationists and ranchers, who had been producing milk and beef there since the 1850s, formed an alliance to preserve the point. The National Park Service created the seashore in 1962. The government paid ranchers for their land, then leased it back to them at 25- to 30-year terms to continue ranching. And the park service reintroduced a herd of tule elk, which had been hunted to local extinction.

The park service in the ’90s gradually began renewing the leases for shorter intervals, and the ranchers and dairy producers lived with a new sense of instability. They stopped making investments to modernize their operations. Other dairy families in the region started diversifying, launching agritourism operations and making high-end Point Reyes-branded cheese. But the park leases required the operations in the seashore to stick solely to milk production. Several had to expand their herds to keep their businesses afloat. 

Meanwhile, rising temperatures and historic droughts reduced the amount of time each year that the grass is green enough to make grazing a significant source of calories for dairy cows and beef cattle. As a result, the operators became much more dependent on expensive imported feed. The persistent dry conditions have also affected many of the native plants and animals, including the tule elk.

By the early 2000s, environmental and animal rights groups became increasingly alarmed over the state of the park. They documented algae and E. coli in local water sources, as well as emaciated elk. Since then, the conservationists and ranchers have been firmly at odds, with the park service stuck in the middle. The Center for Biological Diversity, Resource Renewal Institute, and Western Watersheds Project sued the park service in 2016 and again in 2022. The Nature Conservancy was called upon to mediate.

“The status quo was failing miserably and really creating a lot of harm to both nature and people,” said Michael Bell, protection strategy director for TNC. “There was a consensus that the situation had become untenable.” TNC doesn’t usually enter entrenched legal fights but realized it was in a unique position to help end a conflict that had been tearing a community apart, Bell said.

The result is a settlement that will pay the ranchers to close their operations. More than half of the pasture lands at the seashore and in the bordering district of Golden Gate Natural Resources Area will be reclassified as a scenic landscape zone, open to native elk and visiting hikers. At least one of the struggling dairies had closed by the time the deal was finalized in January.

“If we hadn’t signed the settlement, most of those ranches were going to leave in the next two decades,” said Jeff Miller, a senior conservation advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity.

The deal was announced at a crowded town meeting, where Lunny spoke for the ranchers and dairy producers on a panel beside Bell, park service staff, local politicians, and a representative of the Resource Renewal Institute.

For two hours, people from the community responded with surprise, relief, frustration, and anguish. “It’s unimaginable,” Lunny told the crowd. “It’s who we are, it’s our existence, it’s our identity, and we have to walk away from it.”

Months later, the agricultural community is split. Some are ready to put the conflict behind them, while others are still pushing back.

Some of the region’s most high-profile ranchers and dairymen see the seashore heading in the wrong direction.

Bill Niman and Nicolette Hahn Niman own a ranch at the southern tip of the park, near Bolinas, where they hold a rare lifetime lease that long allowed them to stay out of the battle. For years, the Niman name was synonymous with a movement toward more humane, higher-quality meat. Bill Niman cofounded the pork company that bears his name but left it nearly 20 years ago. Since then, he and Hahn Niman have been raising cattle. “It’s not the cow, it’s the how” has been their operating principle.

Now, they’re concerned that the deal for the seashore will make that better “how” even tougher. 

After watching the conflict from afar for years, they filed suit against the National Park Service in February in an attempt to stop the settlement from being finalized. If they don’t succeed, the rezoning of agricultural land could be nearly impossible to reverse.

Hahn Niman says the loss of neighboring farms was a shock, and one that poses a risk of hollowing out the West Marin agricultural community. Only theirs and one other ranch will remain on park land.

“You can’t have the feed mills, the fodder houses, and the hatcheries unless you have enough farms and ranches to support their existence,” she said.

The loss of those permanent businesses and residents affects the few remaining community spaces in West Marin: fewer students in the school district; fewer families at church. All of it coincides with a larger shift toward transience in the region, with more of the housing stock becoming second homes and vacation rentals.

Earlier in the legal battle, the park facilitated a fairly public, transparent process around making changes to the way the ranches were managed. But the TNC deal that will all but end ranching at Point Reyes took place behind closed doors.

The Nimans intervened in hopes of preventing the land from being rezoned permanently. They want to see the park become a place where a wave of new farmers and ranchers can invest with support for modernized and diversified operations and regenerative grazing practices — “a process that allows for a whole new approach to how this land is managed and overseen,” said Hahn Niman.

At Straus Family Creamery in Petaluma, second-generation owner and CEO Albert Straus has a herd of dairy cows but also buys milk from nearly a dozen organic farms in the region, including two at the seashore, in hopes of keeping regional dairy afloat.

He worries that the region is turning into “a playground for the wealthy” and warns it needs to return to a community-based approach to save the local dairy industry. He would like to see the creation of a North Bay dairy trust that would acquire land, make it suitable for dairy production, then lease it with an option to buy for next-generation farmers.

“My parents worked their whole lives to help environmentalists, farmers, community members, and the government work together in a collaborative way, to come up with a common vision,” he said. “I’m not accepting that we can’t work together now.”

Straus reached out to Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the hope that the Trump administration would step in and prevent the TNC deal from moving forward. But how exactly that would work is unclear.

“These are private business transactions with The Nature Conservancy. I’m not sure there’s much they can do,” said Miller. On the other hand, he added, “we now have a Department of the Interior that is hostile to the very concept of public lands, and they may direct the park service to try to change course.”

But most of the displaced ranchers don’t want that.

After a group of Republican congressmembers announced in April that they had launched an investigation into the TNC deal, seven of the departing ranchers sent a letter to the chair of the House Committee on Natural Resources saying they felt they had been pushed out, but were ultimately thankful for the opportunity the deal had provided. They did not want it overturned.

One of the signatories was the Lunny ranch. The family felt worn thin from years of conflict and was packing up to leave.

The crowd who gathered this year at the Tule Elk Freedom Party at the Mill Valley Community Center was ebullient. In the corner of the room, a chocolate sheet cake with vanilla frosting said “Cows Out” in red letters. Beside it, a yellow cake with chocolate frosting and white letters said, “Elk Free.”

Shortly after the National Park Service, environmental nonprofits, and 11 ranching families reached a settlement, the federal agency took down a portion of a 1.7-mile fence that had separated one of three elk ranging regions from the ranches, allowing the animals to cross into new territory. 

That day at the community center, the event’s organizers projected photos of elk as they moved through the gap in the fence for the first time without hesitation, looking regal with their crowns of antlers.

“Because of the activism in this room, when this deal goes through, all the tule elk will be reunited for the first time in 46 years,” said Jack Gescheidt, a photographer and activist. The “elktavists” — hundreds of volunteers who had spent years showing up for vigils and protests, and even formed human chains to deliver bottled water to the elk during extreme droughts — broke into applause.

The conservationists are hoping to marshal those volunteers to spearhead restoration of native species on the seashore, including lupine, ceanothus, and coyote brush.

Miller is optimistic, despite the impacts of federal funding cuts. “It’s an incredible opportunity to restore ecological processes on those lands,” he said.

However, if the TNC deal continues to move forward, cows won’t be gone entirely.

While more water-intensive dairy operations will be out, regenerative beef will be in, if at a smaller scale than before. According to TNC, some grazing at the seashore will be necessary to fight invasive species, prevent wildfire, and maintain open space. The organization is working on a plan with the National Park Service and Graton Rancheria, the federally recognized Indigenous tribe in the area, to use GPS-enabled virtual fencing that would keep cattle in place and make more space accessible for recreation. There will be significantly fewer cattle; most will likely be part of a regenerative beef operation that will bring in animals on a seasonal basis. Some ranchers are skeptical that the plan will work.

“We’re never going to go back to a time when we had pristine environmental space,” said Lily Verdone, executive director of the Marin Agricultural Land Trust, which supports sustainable farming in the region. “And we’re never going to be in a position where ranchers can just do whatever they want. We have to work in the gray area.”

Even if Hahn Niman and Straus manage to overturn the Point Reyes deal, the odds are stacked against dairy in West Marin.

In the spring, MALT helped William Nunes, a fourth-generation dairy farmer, look for another piece of property in Marin or Sonoma County. Everything was out of his price range. He told the Point Reyes Light he was prepared to move as far as Washington. “The opportunities just don’t exist here,” he said. Similarly, when another dairy at the seashore closed in January, it shipped its cows to Texas.

Most dairy families don’t have a next-generation farmer willing to take the reins. Even if they do, the costs associated with climate-driven drought and consolidation in the marketplace are simply driving dairy out of Marin and Sonoma.

Marin is one of the smaller California counties and, at least for now, one of the top organic dairy producers. “If it's not financially viable here, that’s a huge deal,” said Verdone. “That is a reckoning that we need to have as a community — and as a state.”

As she sees it, the loss of small-scale dairies in Marin and Sonoma counties also marks a decline in innovation and more environmentally friendly farming practices. That better “how” is slipping away.

Some experts say the continued loss of small-scale dairies in the North Bay has broader equity and environmental implications. A larger percentage of California’s milk could come from out of state and from the Central Valley, where residents who live near industrial-scale dairies face high levels of air and water pollution.

Francesca Hopkins, associate professor of climate change and sustainability at UC Riverside, doesn’t want to see even more dairy consolidated in those regions where animal agriculture has had devastating impacts on the environment and local communities.

“If we end up moving our dairy production from [Marin] to the San Joaquin Valley, we’re making those environmental injustices worse,” she said.

Kevin and Nancy Lunny, who are in their 60s, haven’t retired just yet. They still own a composting business in Marin, but they’re doing less. They moved their herd to a piece of rented pasture​ land in Oregon, and they’ll sell their animals off in pairs once the last round of calves is born this fall.

They’ll keep four cows on their new land in Auburn, just to keep a hand in raising animals and so their grandchildren will still be exposed to farming. It’s a small consolation and the best way they know to maintain a connection to California’s swiftly changing landscape.

For years, Kevin Lunny also ran an oyster farm at the seashore, until the park service, under pressure from environmental groups, shut it down in 2014. Lunny fought that battle to the bitter end. In 2019, he met with President Donald Trump to curry support for the ranchers and spoke about his experience during an event at the White House. Trump signed an executive order designed to make agency guidance more transparent, “so this doesn’t happen to other people.” Then he handed Lunny the pen.

Now Lunny feels resigned to the end of the fight, and the end of ranching at Point Reyes. “It’s just the way it’s all coming together,” he said. “We feel pretty powerless.” 

This article was supported by the Climate Equity Reporting Project at the UC Berkeley Journalism School.