(Beth Clifton collage)
Nature Conservancy to pay ranchers $30 million to leave & take their cows with them
POINT REYES, California––As wildfires erupted in the northern and northeastern Los Angeles hills on January 8, 2025, a much more hopeful story ignited in the coastal hills north of San Francisco, in habitat not much different from that of blazing Pacific Palisades except that far more cattle live there than people.
About 5,750 cattle and about 380 people, to be as exact as possible, living and working on 24 leased ranches occupying much of the Point Reyes National Seashore and North District of the Golden Gate National Recreational Area.
The Point Reyes National Seashore and the adjacent North District of the Golden Gate National Recreational Area attract about two million visitors per year, mostly from the nearby San Francisco Bay area.
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Cattle were supposed to be gone by 1987
But it is the presence of the cattle doing most harm to the health of the resident herd of about 400 rare tule elk, federally listed as a “species of concern,” though not officially considered “threatened” or “endangered.”
The presence of the cattle has also long frustrated environmentalists concerned about the impact of cattle grazing on the nominally protected habitat.
The ranches and the estimated 500 to 600 cattle then grazing the land that the U.S. Congress in 1962 set aside as the Point Reyes National Seashore were supposed to be gone by 1987, when the ranching families’ original leases expired.
Instead, the beef ranchers and dairy farmers expanded their herds tenfold and lobbied successfully to have their leases extended time and again, including as recently as 2029.
Death of Diane Feinstein changed the dynamic
Their major political ally, however, former U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein, died on September 29, 2023.
On January 8, 2025, with the National Park Service facing multiple lawsuits brought by the Resource Renewal Institute, the Center for Biological Diversity, and the Western Watersheds Project, 12 of the Point Reyes beef ranchers and dairy farmers agreed to a reported $30 million buyout brokered by the Nature Conservancy, requiring them to retire their leases and vacate the Point Reyes National Seashore within 15 months.
“The deal to wind down ranching, which formally puts an end to the litigation, is the product of two years of closed-door mediation between the National Park Service, ranchers, and the three environmental groups,” wrote Kurtis Alexander for the San Francisco Chronicle.
“The Nature Conservancy was invited to join the discussions to help resolve the conflict,” Alexander said.
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Privately raised funds
“Under the final deal,” according to Alexander, “the Nature Conservancy will make payments to the ranchers from privately raised funds. Officials at the Nature Conservancy said they were legally bound not to discuss the amount of the settlements.
“A total of 12 agricultural leaseholders agreed to the deal,” Alexander continued, “six of whom run dairies and six of whom run beef operations.”
This, Alexander said, “will end ranching on nearly 16,000 of the 18,000 acres where ranching now occurs in the 71,000 acre park.
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Two holdouts
“Two beef operations that didn’t sign on to the deal will continue to operate, though the terms of their future remain unsettled.
“In the adjacent Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which also is operated by the National Park Service, seven beef ranches will continue to operate, each with new 20-year leases. This area, which is further inland, is generally seen as less problematic for livestock,” Alexander added.
About 80 ranch workers who will have to relocate are to receive “yet-to-be-determined compensation and housing assistance,” Alexander said.
The deal is believed to mean that the National Park Service will no longer limit the tule elk herd size and restrict herd movements.
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Fence to come down
The first big step in that direction, the National Park Service announced on December 2, 2024, was the removal of a two-mile elk-proof fence built across the Point Reyes peninsula in 1978 to keep the elk out of land grazed by cattle––and away from some of the few fresh water ponds on the peninsula, which except where the fence ran, was surrounded by salt water.
“In 2021,” recalled Tara Duggan of the San Francisco Chronicle, “when native elk struggled” amid a drought “to get enough food and water, the herd dropped from a typical size of 400 animals to 221. Park service personnel set up temporary water stations for the elk,” which are now to be removed, restoring the Point Reyes peninsula to natural conditions.
(See Dying tule elk need water now diverted to cattle; can lawyers save them?)
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850 feet of fence down before ranchers sued
“The park said droughts and climate change accelerated the need to remove the fence,” Duggan explained, “and that it collaborated with Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, which has ancestral ties to the area and partners with the National Park Service to manage the park, during the planning process.”
About 850 feet of the fence was removed before the California Cattlemen’s Association on December 6, 2024 sought a temporary restraining order that delayed the rest of the removal at least until a February 2025 hearing. The ranchers’ agreement to vacate Point Reyes, however, would appear to make the fence removal issue moot.
Presiding over the transition of Point Reyes National Seashore back to wildlife habitat will be 23-year National Park Service employee Anne Dubinsky Altman, named the new permanent superintendent of the park on September 22, 2024, after three months as interim superintendent.
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Largest surviving tule elk herd
Smaller cousins of the Rocky Mountain elk and the Roosevelt elk found farther north, tule elk were “the dominant grazers” on the Point Reyes peninsula and in the Olema Valley at the time of first non-indigenous settlement, according to National Park Service literature.
By 1874, however, tule elk were believed to have been already lost to hunting and habitat transformation, chiefly sheep grazing, except for a small herd of not more than 30 found hiding in the swampier reaches of the Henry Miller ranch, more than 300 miles south, near Bakersfield.
Miller and his heirs protected the elk and their habitat.
Eighteen tule elk were in 1974 transferred to the San Luis National Wildlife Refuge near Los Baños, southeast of San Jose. Then, in 1978, two bucks and eight does from the Los Baños herd were successfully reintroduced to Tamales Point, at the northern end of Point Reyes.
Twenty years after that, in 1998, 28 tule elk were moved a dozen miles south to Limantour Beach, completing the Point Reyes herd restoration project.
There are now 22 tule elk herds scattered throughout their original California habitat, of which the Point Reyes population is the largest.
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