At Point Reyes Town Hall, Ranchers Say Goodbye: "It's Our Existence. It's Our Identity. And We Have to Walk Away from It."

Ranchers mourn the forced demise of 150 years of ranching on Point Reyes after years of persecution from special interest groups, politicians, and agencies result in closure of 12 ranches.

Author note: Because of the gag order in place, the ranchers of Point Reyes were not able to speak to me for this story.

From her farm and dairy in Sonoma County, Kathy Tresch wasn’t sure she had it in her attend the Point Reyes Town Hall.

She has been through this before, standing witness to loss in the green backyard of the California Bay Area. Twice, her farm has almost been taken from her. She wondered if the mood at the Dance Palace on tiny, windswept Point Reyes that Saturday morning would be triumphant, as representatives from the environmental groups that sued the farmers out of their homes gathered to gloat.

After all, this was to be a Town Hall in name only. The activists had already won. The politicians hovering around the proceedings for the past few years had taken no community input at any time. They had not asked Marin County neighbors how they felt about the forced removal and continuous government persecution of the farmers. Now, with the papers were signed and the ranchers vanquished, Congressman Jared Huffman decided to invite the community for a “discussion.”

Kathy went; she always does.

Congressman Jared Huffman organized a “Town Hall” on Point Reyes once the decision to remove ranchers had already been finalized.

The Dance Palace has a capacity of 190. Young families gathered, and elderly men and women, the grandchildren of Swiss and Azorean immigrants, part of an agricultural tradition on Point Reyes older than the state of California itself. Ghosts of a community soon lost, they are dressed in winter layers, wearing muck boots. It’s rainy season and cows have to be fed, even on the day of your own funeral.

They filled the room. They filled the standing area around the room. They filled the lawn outside.

Point Reyes Town Hall. Photo courtesy Kathy Tresch

Kathy said the mood was sorrowful, angry.

“It was one of the most powerful meetings I’ve ever attended. The support for the ranchers was overwhelming.”

She filmed parts of the meeting on her phone, including an impromptu speech by Kevin Lunny, one of the ranchers being forced from the point. Several times throughout his speech, attendees stood up and cheered.

He talked about how the first lawsuit against the ranchers resulted in a “robust document”—a thorough environmental review that concluded the ranchers should receive renewed 20-year leases.

“We know how to conserve natural resources and produce food cooperatively, they’re not mutually exclusive,” Kevin said. “We told the Park Service, we’ll support you, we’ll work with you. We will meet this higher bar of natural resource conservation. We will show that it can be done right, let’s do this. And the plaintiffs sued again on that plan, because they didn’t like the outcome. They demanded and required to do a higher level NEPA review.”

As he began to describe the mediation process, he paused. “I have very strict guardrails and a muzzle on what I can and can’t say, and I think everybody knows that,” he said. “It became an untenable situation.”

Staring down the barrel of crushing litigation, the ranchers decided to take the buyout offered by The Nature Conservancy.

“We saw that as a solution, and we entered into this shaking hands with The Nature Conservancy and appreciating this, and at the same time, having the deepest sorrow you could ever imagine. I couldn’t even tell my dad about this. He’s 94 years old, he lives next door on the ranch, still helps with the cows, and I had to tell him we decided that we’re gonna have to leave. It’s unimaginable. It’s unimaginable how we sit there and we talk to our own children and our grandchildren who love these cows and love the ranch, it’s who we are. It’s our existence. It’s our identity. And we have to walk away from it. It’s enormously emotional. I see that this could have ended differently. I know it could have ended differently. But we had the wrong people in the room making decisions and everybody else not allowed in. It’s sad to see such a profound change in our community with almost zero community input.”

Point Reyes rancher Kevin Lunny

Kevin turned to Marin County District Supervisor Dennis Rodoni sitting next to him.

“That first lawsuit, [Supervisor] Steve Kinsey stepped up and said, ‘I’m gonna intervene.’ And he did,” Kevin said. “We had the county of Marin there arguing for us. And 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.”

The audience clapped.

Kevin closed by pointing out that the mediation had not resulted in a compromise. The only sacrifices made were on the part of the ranchers, who lost everything.

“We give up our home, our identity,” Kevin said. “There was a give on the ranchers’ side, and I want to hear about the give on the plaintiffs’ side.”

Point Reyes. By King of Hearts - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

“I expected to hear people celebrating that the dairies were gone, the elk had free rein, they got their victory,” Kathy tells me. “I didn’t hear that. Not one bit. If there were people who felt that way, I think they read the room and saw their opinion was not going to be popular.”

A native of Sonoma County, Kathy knows all too well the lecherous eye of Silicon Valley’s young money tech elite and the calvary of deep-pocketed environmental activists whose actions seem to often align with billionaire interests.

One of the ranchers who did not join the lawsuit also spoke. Dave Evans is staying on Point Reyes, but doesn’t know what that means or what his future looks like.

“He was in tears,” Kathy says. “All his neighbors are gone.”