The dust is far from settled following the announcement that six dairies and six beef ranches operating in Point Reyes National Seashore will cease operations in 15 months following a confidential legal agreement with the Nature Conservancy.
The deal announced on Jan. 8 has raised questions about the viability of Marin’s agricultural community, particularly its dairy business, and the future of agricultural workers living on the dairies and ranches, some of whom are undocumented.
“It’s like a bomb going off,” said Andrew Giacomini, a prominent West Marin lawyer who has taken legal action in an effort to protect the interests of the farmworkers. “It’s a super dark day for the West Marin agricultural community. In my view, it’s all the result of environmental terrorism.”
In 2022, the Resource Renewal Institute, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Western Watersheds Project sued the National Park Service to prevent it from implementing an amendment to its general management plan that had been approved the prior year following exhaustive public hearings.
The new plan was to allow the parks agency to issue 20-year agricultural leases to 24 ranch families for continued operations. The leases permitted residential use of park lands on 14 ranches while restricting residential occupancy to family members and workers.
The environmental groups sued to stop the National Park Service from approving the 20-year leases and instead require it to expand elk herds in the area. The ranches and dairies of the Point Reyes Seashore Ranchers Association intervened in the suit.
Later in 2022, the Nature Conservancy became involved in the negotiations between the parties, which were kept confidential.
Under the terms of the settlement, the agricultural operators will be paid for shutting down their operations inside the park and removing the people living there. The National Park Service and the Nature Conservancy announced the agreement last week but won’t disclose how much the operators are being paid.
“We’ve committed to confidentiality on that number,” said Michael Bell, the “director of protection” at the Nature Conservancy in California.
Other media outlets, without identifying their sources, have reported that the deal amounted to $40 million.
Bell said the Nature Conservancy has raised about $1 million so far to aid the farmworkers and is talking to Marin County about the possibility of a financial contribution.
Prior to last week’s announcement, Giacomini filed suit seeking to allow the farmworkers to be allowed to participate in the settlement negotiations.
U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney denied the motion, but Giacomini has appealed the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. Giacomini is also suing the National Park Service for using the settlement as a pretext for revising the “record of decision” that would have allowed the 20-year leases.
“The Park Service pretends like they had nothing to do with it, that the ranchers are just giving up their leases so there’s nothing else to study from an environmental standpoint,” Giacomini said.
“If we don’t pursue our lawsuit, if we’re unsuccessful, they will close all the housing and evict everybody who’s still there from their homes,” he said.
It has been estimated that about 90 people live inside the federal park, but Giacomini said the number could be twice that.
In its announcement, the Nature Conservancy said the settlement was based on “voluntary decisions” by the dairy and ranch owners.
Giacomini, however, said, “The park service and the environmental groups applied massive amounts of pressure that really gave the ranchers no choice.”
He said agricultural operators who participated in the deals told him that legal gag orders prevent them from talking about how they really feel about the buyouts.
Bell said the non-disclosure agreements were signed freely by everyone involved in the negotiations, including the farmers and ranchers.
“It’s what they wanted,” Bell said.
Comments made by one of the ranchers during a public forum meeting organized by Rep. Jared Huffman in Point Reyes Station on Jan. 11 seem to belie that notion.
“I have very strict guardrails and a muzzle on what I can and can’t say,” said Kevin Lunny. “I think everybody knows that.”
Nevertheless, without criticizing the Nature Conservancy, Lunny expressed his frustration and disappointment with the outcome of the negotiations. He talked about how hard it was to tell his father that he had agreed to give up their ranch.
“He’s 94 years old. He still helps with the cows,” Lunny said. “It’s unimaginable. It’s who we are, it’s our existence, it’s our identity and we have to walk away from it.”
However, Lunny said, if he and the other agricultural operators had continued to battle the well-funded environmental organizations in court without allies, “it could have ended very badly.”
Lunny noted that when environmental organizations first sued to eliminate agriculture from the seashore in 2016, Marin County intervened on behalf of the agricultural producers at the urging of Supervisor Steve Kinsey.
Speaking directly to Supervisor Dennis Rodoni, who was at the forum, Lunny said, “This time around you elected not to intervene, and I think that played a role in all this. I’m sorry to call you out on this, Dennis.”
In an email Friday, Rodoni said, “I had conversations with some of the seashore ranchers, and they requested the county not get involved and respect the mediation process. No one, NPS, or representatives of the ranchers who were in the mediation invited the county to intervene, which happened in the first litigation.”
Chance Cutrano, director of programs at the Resource Renewal Institute, also spoke at the forum. He said environmentalists were concerned about the stress that agriculture was putting on the park, “especially with the climate crisis and increasing and more severe drought conditions in West Marin.”
The settlement, however, will add stress to Marin County’s agricultural community.
“Taking a quarter of the farmland in Marin County and making it open space is gutting our farm community and food system,” said Albert Straus, founder and executive chair of the Straus Family Creamery. “It’s about a third of our Marin dairies that are to be eliminated.”
Straus Family Creamery gets 15% of its milk from two of the dairies that will be closing.
“We’re already short of organic milk,” Straus said, “and we’re losing critical mass of infrastructure for support of farms such as feed mills, mechanics and ag workers. We’re at a tipping point right now.”
