National Parks Traveler

Editor’s note: Due to ongoing litigation, National Park Service personnel, including Point Reyes National Seashore Superintendent Craig Kenkel, declined to talk to the Traveler for this story. The superintendent’s comments were pulled from his public meeting testimony.

POINT REYES NATIONAL SEASHORE -- One of the world’s most famous earthquake faults runs beneath this sweeping coastal park– albeit generally unnoticed by the millions of visitors who enjoy the bucolic escape that’s just a day hop from San Francisco and other Bay Area cities.

And while the San Andreas Fault holds a destructive history up and down California, seismic activity is not what’s erupting these days around the riparian habitats, undulating grasslands, and bluffs that rise over the Pacific beaches of Point Reyes National Seashore.

What’s churning at Point Reyes -- embroiling the National Park Service in litigation and debate -- is the longstanding and escalating tension over cattle and dairy ranches that were on the land for decades before the peninsula was named a national seashore in 1962.

On a recent spring day, park denizens central to the debate populated a picturesque tableau that was either disturbing or pleasantly rustic, depending on your point of view.  Under a cloud-flecked blue sky above rippling grasses, several dozen black-and-white dairy cows lolled, some shoulder to shoulder, others sprawled on the clotted dirt-manure mix of their corral, the occasional low “moo” or burp or clomp of a hoof interrupting the calm. Similar gatherings were visible amid wooden farm structures, close or far from the two-lane route that traverses the national seashore’s historic ranch district.

Sporadic roadside signs announced “Dairy of the Year” and 19th century ranch founding dates, and proudly proclaimed the ranches’ organic status.

Further along, beef cattle grazed out on the rolling green landscape, while a handful of tule elk watched from across the fence. Out at Tomales Point, limited by their own controversial fence, more elk trotted in groups of four, five and six, silhouetted against the bluff ridges and the ocean backdrop beyond.

Is Cattle Ranching Appropriate At Point Reyes?

The controversy around cattle operations is front and center this year as Point Reyes officials seek to convince the public and California’s powerful Coastal Commission that no-bid “multigenerational ranching” as a historic, cultural resource is appropriate at the only national seashore on the U.S. West Coast.

The ranches operate in a rare arrangement under federal leases created after the Park Service purchased their lands by the early 1970s. They have become a growing flashpoint for environmental concerns over bovine impacts on the land and water and greenhouse gas emissions at the 71,000-acre seashore. Tangled up in the debate is the fate of endemic tule elk, which neared extinction in the mid-1800s but have rebounded and now compete with cattle for water and forage in parts of Point Reyes.

Environmentalists say dairy and beef cattle ranching is polluting the seashore and being given priority over tule elk/Rita Beamish

Environmentalists are suing over the seashore’s ranch management plan released last fall, and the Coastal Commission has set a September deadline for officials to detail how they will protect water bodies that nourish the ecosystem, and reduce ranching’s greenhouse gas emissions. A separate lawsuit challenges the seashore’s management of the fenced tule elk reserve.

Amid publicity about sewage leaks and cattle trampling on natural habitat, the seashore is promising stricter environmental standards to mitigate ranch pollution and damage that officials acknowledge will persist.  

Point Reyes Superintendent Craig Kenkel says things are changing: Mandatory conditions, such as improving dairy manure-management, now will be a bottom line for new, 20-year ranch leases that the Park Service wants to issue to existing ranchers and their descendants or long-term employees.  

“The importance of this general management plan amendment is it provides us a framework from which we can better manage ranching and natural and cultural resource conditions into the future,” Kenkel told the Coastal Commission. He said the park will hold off for now on the 20-year leases, instead starting with new 1-2 year leases as new operating requirements are rolled out.

“We're committed to resetting how our ranch operations are happening at the seashore,” he said.

The new plan covers ranchlands at Point Reyes and a northern portion of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area that Point Reyes manages, encompassing 28,000 acres.

At its core, the debate swirls around how — or whether — the Park Service can safeguard the seashore’s bountiful biodiversity and varied ecosystems while fostering commercial ranching that keeps more than 5,000 cattle on the land at 24 beef and dairy ranches.

A Question Of Sustainability

“It’s definitely proven out that what’s currently taking place out there is unsustainable and what the Park Service proposes is not viable,” said Chance Cutrano, director of programs at the Resource Renewal Institute, which is suing Park Service in federal court along with the Center for Biological Diversity and the Western Watersheds Project, over the new management plan the Park Service adopted last September.  

Environmental organizations accuse the Park Service of putting ranch operations ahead of its Organic Act mission to protect natural resources for future generations, and of violating the Clean Water Act. They bolster their arguments with evidence of cattle standing in wilderness-designated waters, ranchers bulldozing in riparian habitat, septic system deficiencies revealed at two ranches, and elevated fecal and other bacteria found in water tests commissioned by environmental groups. It was the 2017 settlement of earlier litigation by the same advocacy groups that ordered the park to develop the new management plan and assess environmental impacts of Point Reyes ranching.

“At the end of the day, this is a national park. And with this kind of water quality and its pollution into the Pacific Ocean — it just shouldn't be happening anywhere — and shouldn’t be happening in a national park,” said Scott Webb, advocacy and policy manager for the nonprofit Turtle Island Restoration Network.

The ranchers say 20-year leases, in lieu of recent 1- and 5-year leases, will provide stability for them to invest in new environmental and land stewardship projects and infrastructure improvements.

“If you want to make an improvement on the place, the park is not going to help you” financially, said Tim Kehoe, a third-generation rancher who, with two brothers, owns one of the seashore’s five organic dairies.

“Most of us don’t have the cashflow to go out and build stuff tomorrow … You’re more likely to have to get a loan to do that,” he said, referencing the potential for pricey requirements like methane digester systems that capture greenhouse gases from cattle waste.

“You’re going to have to be there long enough to build that stuff,” he added. “The investments you can make on a short-term lease to be 100 percent compliant — we try our best, and it’s a tough road.”

He said the Kehoes spent about $5 million over five decades on infrastructure upgrades, much of it related to water quality, such as manure management systems and free stall barns that contain the manure during rainy months.

“All of us have been here for 100 years. There’s going to be issues no matter what,” Kehoe said.

Fixing “legacy issues” also costs money, he said, referencing another ranch’s ditch full of junked vehicles and parts that was recently publicized. “These are things our parents accumulated and now we have to deal with it. …It’s a tough thing but we’re working through it.”

“As ranchers we’re doing our best, and it might not be perfect, but we’re doing our best.”

Tule elk were on the verge of extinction in California, in part because of cattle operations/Rita Beamish

While the park focuses on the “how” of perpetual ranching, the management update has injected new vigor into a push for a more fundamental U-turn -- albeit one that’s not on the official radar. Critics call for an end to Point Reyes ranching altogether, saying it undermines the seashore’s mandate to protect diverse marine, intertidal, and terrestrial species. The park has more than 50 endangered, threatened, or rare animals, including fur seals, reptiles, and amphibians like the California red-legged frog; a vast array of endemic plants and creatures; and the greatest avian diversity in the National Park System.

“I don’t think there’s sustainable ranching,” said Theresa Harlan, whose Coast Miwok forebearers were displaced in the 1950s by Point Reyes ranches. The Coast Miwok for generations were stewards of the region, long before they were forced into servitude by Spanish missionaries in the 18th and early 19th centuries.

“It's the animals’ wear and tear on the land,” Harlan explained. “The way that they are fed with growing silage, and destroying the natural plants, and then the seeding of the invasive species — it's every way you look at it. Even if you say, OK, we can feed them seagrass to help to lessen the carbon emission from the cattle, they’re still peeing and pooping. Their weight is still trampling the ground, and so there's still degradation of the land and the water.”

The shuttered cottage of Harlan’s family still stands near Tomales Bay, where her mother once picked wild berries and dug clams at the beach.

“This land has no business being ranching or dairy or anything else. It’s a park” is how Coastal Commissioner Dayna Bochco put it at the commission’s April 7 meeting. Recalling the bitter fight over commercial oyster farming at Point Reyes that culminated in the Interior Department’s 2012 decision to end the oyster tradition, she said, “We saw that it was a federal park, it belonged to the people, not to the ranchers or the oyster famers, and they were polluting. It wasn’t their purpose to pollute. It’s just the nature of the way their farms worked. That’s what we have here.”

The seashore, however, has closed the door to a no-ranching option: Officials rejected the notion during their management update — in contrast to other national parks that long ago banished commercial activities like fur trapping, domestic grazing, old-growth logging, and oil and gas exploration.

Political Subterfuge

Critics are up against not just the park’s embrace of ranching, but also decades of push-back from proponents in surrounding Marin County and their powerful political supporters — most notably California’s long-serving Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein and the area’s Democratic U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman.

Feinstein calls ranching and dairying a valuable part of Point Reyes history, and has pressed officials over the years to keep the tradition. Huffman says ranches are part of the seashore’s fabric “for generations to come.” He got a 2018 House resolution passed requiring new 20-year leases. It died in the Senate, but Huffman subsequently applauded House acceptance of a statement inserted in a 2019 spending bill that called Point Reyes ranching “important both ecologically and economically” and endorsed 20-year leases.

“Reasonable and good environmentalists can differ on this,” Huffman told Enviro News.

The Traveler’s requests to interview Huffman and Feinstein were declined by their offices.  

The nonprofit Marin Agricultural Land Trust, which preserves agricultural land and sustainable farming through conservation easements, said it “unequivocally supports sustainable farming and ranching” at the seashore. The trust’s own projects demonstrate farming can accommodate both agriculture and environmental goals, said its acting executive director, Jennifer Carlin. As to the Point Reyes environmental issues, she said, “We would hope those farmers and ranchers would employ good practices.”

Point Reyes under its new plan will have “ranch operating agreements” requiring mandatory upgrades and stewardship steps for each ranch. Ranchers who don’t sign won’t get a lease, Kenkel told the April 7 Coastal Commission meeting.

The plan also resumes water quality monitoring that was discontinued in 2013, includes a new zoning system that will “exclude cattle from priority water quality protection areas,” and promises to ensure “that more intensive ranch activities are conducted in relatively flat areas away from waterways and wetlands.”

“We are very eager to move into implementation and taking action to manage these leases and to manage the conditions on the ranches, and to improve overall park environment, resource conditions, natural and cultural, and to demonstrate that we can apply a really solid management plan and improve the conditions here at Point Reyes,” Kenkel told commissioners, who have sweeping authority over coastal resource protection.

Promises And Pollution

In April 2021, the commission had narrowly approved the management proposal but demanded that one year later officials provide water quality and climate strategies. The deadline having arrived, they sternly criticized the results during their April meeting, with Commissioner Mark Gold citing “rather astonishing” shortcomings in scope and specificity. 

Commissioner Caryl Hart lamented a newspaper report that same morning about raw sewage leaks at two ranches. “Ranchers who are asking us to trust them are literally spewing sewage out from their houses,” she said, “and presumably into the waterways and the coastal zone we are supposed to protect.” The park has said those lapses now are being addressed, along with a dump site and the bulldozing brought to light in recent months.  

The commission unanimously rejected the park’s water and climate plans that day, and Kenkel agreed that park staff will work with commission experts to produce appropriate documents by September.

A fence line delineates were cattle can, and can't go/Rita Beamish

For the climate strategy – aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, particularly methane, a potent gas emitted by cattle manure, flatulence, and belching – seashore officials said evaluations are still ongoing about what modernization steps and investments will be required of each ranch.

Greenhouse emissions were reduced by default when one dairy closed last year. The number of dairies now is capped at five, the park said, and will be reduced commensurately if any more close. Chicken operations will be reduced as well. 

The seashore calculates that greenhouse emissions from Point Reyes livestock now will be about 17 percent of Marin County’s agriculture totals, and 4.8 percent of the county’s total greenhouse gas emissions.

Economic Contributions

While much of the national seashore is designated as wilderness, the 19 beef ranches and five dairy farms are part of the county’s local food scene and the supply market for cheeses and other products. Point Reyes supports about 18 percent of the county’s $100 million gross agriculture production value, said Stefan Parnay, the county agricultural commissioner.

Agriculture overall is not a big economic sector in Marin, about 7 percent, Parnay said, but the seashore, “is still a significant economic contributor to agriculture in the county.” The Marin County Board of Supervisors in 2018 comments submitted to the park, said the seashore’s ranches “play a critical role in maintaining the viability of Marin County agricultural infrastructure and economic viability.”

Critics of ranching point out that recreational visitation to the seashore packs a $101 million punch locally. That’s what 2.3 million visitors in 2020 spent in local gateway communities, supporting 1,080 jobs, according to economic analysis by the U.S. Geological Survey and National Park Service. Point Reyes also is important to area residents who can’t get to more far-flung national parks like Yosemite in the Sierra.

The seashore has enriched, sometimes profoundly, groups of urban youth, including many from underserved communities, and residents seeking a place of solace, said Mark Bartolini, former executive director of the Point Reyes National Seashore Association, which partners with the park on preservation and education programs.

“In addition to protecting the biodiversity of a really diminishing biodiverse planet, it's giving people a space where they can go and really have life changing experiences that get them through difficult times,” he said. “So, to have a small private industry that reduces that impact, I think is probably the biggest shame about why ranching is considered in the park.”

Even still, Bartolini acknowledged a “wide variety” of opinions among board members he’d known at the association.

Part of the seashore’s allure is the chance to see Tule elk roaming the bluffs. The recovery of the large-antlered ungulates from the brink of extinction is considered one of the great California conservation victories.

Two herds roam free at Point Reyes, and are included in the new ranch management plan because they are not in the fenced 2,900-acre Tomales Point Tule Elk Reserve that’s meant to keep a third herd away from cattle pastures where ranchers say they damage fences and graze.  

The park plans to cap the free-ranging herd in the Drakes Beach area at 140 animals to keep them from disturbing ranches. That involves the possibility of killing 12 to 20 elk a year, although the park says it does not intend to do it “at this time” and is consulting about elk management with the federally recognized Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, a tribe with which the seashore has signed a partnership agreement.

At the reserve where elk are fenced on a peninsula, a federal court lawsuit by the Harvard Law School Animal Law and Policy Clinic accuses the Park Service of leaving elk to die in severe drought conditions because the fence prevented them from foraging for water and food beyond.

In 2020, 152 fenced elk died, with the herd dropping to 293 in number. Seashore officials said drought-induced “poor foliage quality,” not lack of water, was the likely cause. Still, the park announced in March it is updating its elk reserve management plan since current practice did not anticipate climate change or frequent droughts.

The drought doesn’t exempt ranchers. When their ranch ran out of water last year, the Kehoe brothers bought two trucks and hauled three to four water loads a day into the seashore for their cows.

Regarding ranchers resorting to water-hauling, the Resource Renewal Institute urged the seashore to consider that water scarcity “may be pushing hydrological systems beyond thresholds of vulnerability.”   

But Kehoe has hopes to drill a well or two to sustain the dairy through droughts. He worries the environmentalists’ pressure will never end, but still hopes his kids and nieces and nephews, with longer-term leases, will ranch at Point Reyes: “In 20 years, hopefully the perception changes -- that agriculture is a good thing.”

Rita Beamish worked for The Associated Press in Los Angeles and in Washington, D.C., where she covered the White House during the George H.W. Bush administration, as well as politics and campaigns, foreign policy, and environmental policy. She is a former adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.