POINT REYES NATIONAL SEASHORE, California — Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a wellness influencer and a pioneering dairy farmer joined forces earlier this year to upend a landmark deal that stopped most cattle operations at this park north of San Francisco.
In January, a decadelong fight over whether cattle nurtured or damaged a pastoral park on the Pacific Ocean appeared to close with a settlement that retired most of the cattle ranches and dairy farms. Now, even as barns come down and families move away, a small group of ranchers aligned with Kennedy is urging the Trump administration to again rewrite the Point Reyes story and order the National Park Service to re-embrace the region’s ranching roots.
“It was the first glimmer of hope that I had that we could do something,” said Albert Straus, a dairyman in the region who first helped get Kennedy involved.
Point Reyes National Seashore lies on the coast north of the Golden Gate Bridge, where the skies are often moody and overcast, and the people in Marin and Sonoma counties vote blue far more often than red. Eclectic beach towns nestle in the inlets and bays, with restaurants that boast of locally sourced food. Some elementary school students drink local organic milk, and tule elk roam the seashore’s steep slopes.
Environmental groups for years said the cattle polluted the land and the seashore should be managed instead for indigenous wild elk, as well as for visitors from the Bay Area’s bustling cities. Ranchers whose families worked the land for generations countered that their operations represented the best kind of agriculture: small farms raising cattle that grazed the coastal grasslands.
Years of lobbying and litigation ended in the last days of the Biden administration, when the Nature Conservancy helped broker an estimated $40 million deal between 11 of the farming families, environmental groups and the National Park Service to phase out most ranching and dairy farming in Point Reyes.
But within weeks, Kennedy quietly launched an effort to thwart it, according to three people who spoke with the health secretary and other members of the administration. The Point Reyes cattle debate seems tailor-made for Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda — which in part emphasizes small farms and weaning people off processed foods — while pitting him against former allies in the environmental community.
Kennedy has told people he’s enlisted Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who dispatched Wyoming lawyer and Interior political appointee Karen Budd-Falen to broker a Point Reyes solution. A member of Budd-Falen’s team has recently visited Point Reyes and spoken with local ranchers, according to three people familiar with the meetings.
What the Trump administration could pull off isn’t clear. Interior, which oversees the National Park Service, declined to comment. The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to multiple requests for comment on Kennedy’s involvement.
Most of the ranchers in the settlement have closed their operations and moved away or are in the process of doing so. They’ve also taken payments and signed an agreement to leave.
When Republicans on the House Natural Resources Committee in April launched a probe into the settlement, seven of the participating ranchers and dairy farmers sent a letter to lawmakers asking them to back down. They called the agreement the only “viable option” after years of litigation and uncertainty.
But one of those ranchers, Kevin Lunny, said he hopes the Trump administration will provide a new generation of ranchers a fresh start in Point Reyes. Lunny’s grandfather bought a dairy in Point Reyes in 1947. After agreeing to the settlement in January, Lunny and his family moved to a property outside of Sacramento with just a handful of cows as a memento of their ranching past.
“It’s OK if we’re gone,” he said in an interview. “We made a decision, and we have to live with it, and it’s sad. We would love to think that we could be there, but someone should be there.”
Rep. Jared Huffman, the ranking Democratic member of the House Natural Resources Committee, whose district includes Marin County, said he doubted the administration would succeed in solving what’s long been a thorny legal dispute. A former environmental lawyer, Huffman said he wasn’t pleased that the Trump administration was weighing changes to a hard-won and difficult agreement.
“At the end of the day, you’re going to probably land back on something just like this settlement,” he said in an August interview. “The question is, will these poor ranching families that have been put through the ringer be collateral damage?”
A new lawsuit
On a recent summer morning, rancher Bill Niman navigated his new electric Rivian truck onto the shoulder of a winding road just outside of Bolinas, at the far southern tip of the Point Reyes peninsula. He pointed to a steep slope, bordered by towering eucalyptus trees, where the dark green shrubs that flourish along the cool Northern California coast crowded out patches of golden grasses.
“That’s what we’re afraid of, and that’s what’s going to happen,” he said in a slightly hoarse voice.
The Niman family is one of two cattle operations left at Point Reyes. They sued the National Park Service in the wake of the settlement announcement. The only other ranchers outside the group settlement, David Evans and his wife Claire Herminjard, also joined the lawsuit.
Wearing gumboots and a University of Michigan fleece pullover against the morning chill, the tall and lanky Niman argued that Point Reyes needs cows to keep its grasslands free of trees, shrubs, weeds and thistles.
Niman is a well-known figure in sustainable farming circles through Niman Ranch, a brand he co-founded in the 1970s that operated under an ethos of raising animals for food but with a focus on their well-being.
A son of Midwest greengrocers, Niman landed in California as a young teacher and settled in Point Reyes alongside other “new age people, freaks, hippies” who wanted to live off the land, he said.
Niman parted with his namesake business in 2007. But he has continued to raise cattle at Point Reyes with his wife Nicolette Hahn Niman.
The Nimans and the Evans family allege in their lawsuit that the park service unlawfully issued a new management plan for their operations as part of its settlement with the other ranchers.
To Jeff Miller, a senior conservation advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity, the campaign to reverse the retirement of ranching through much of the park is a bid by wealthy business owners to control public lands. The center is one of the environmental groups that sued NPS over ranching at Point Reyes and was involved in the settlement.
“It’s an attempt to torpedo the settlement agreement,” he said in an interview, “to make sure our public lands stay privatized for their personal profit.”
Hahn Niman insisted that breaking the settlement is not the end goal.
“We’re not trying to undo what’s been done as far as the buying out of the ranches,” she said. “What we feel very strongly about is that this land is meant to be in agriculture.”
It’s an old fight at this point, said Don Neubacher, who served as the superintendent of Point Reyes from 1995 until 2010 and continues to live in the area.
Public sentiment in the communities around the seashore began to shift about a decade ago, when animal rights activists and environmental groups began protesting commercial food production there.
People had mixed feelings, loyal to the ranchers and other farmers, but also supportive of managing the seashore for nature and wildlife, he said.
“It was literally tearing the communities apart out here,” Neubacher said.
Neubacher said the National Park Service likely would have lost the lawsuit against ranching operations if a settlement hadn’t been reached. The agency is strictly bound by laws that mandate care of public lands for the environment, he said, adding that ranching isn’t the top priority.
The influencer
Point Reyes may not have attracted attention from the Trump administration if it weren’t for a blue-eyed surfer named Chadwick Conover.
A conservative advocate for adventurous and healthy living, Conover’s life defies easy explanation.
Going by his chosen nickname of Ceadda, he travels often and occasionally documents his experiences around the world on social media.
Conover grew up the child of a single mom in Half Moon Bay — a small surfing community south of San Francisco — and describes himself as deeply committed to the go-your-own-way spirit of the northern coast.
“The biggest rebels and kind of outlaws were these surfing, kind of coastal people that were really off the grid of mainstream life,” he said in a phone interview. “I was influenced by that very much.”
Conover later settled in the wealthy town of Malibu, California. He built a career advising clients and friends on how to cultivate a natural and more “beautiful” lifestyle. That path would eventually overlap with Kennedy, who he met at a 2023 campaign fundraiser for Kennedy’s then-presidential bid. The former environmental lawyer, already known for his vaccine skepticism and healthy eating advocacy, ended his campaign in 2024 and endorsed Donald Trump.
Early this year, Conover got a call from a friend and proprietor of a health food store in Marin County, asking Conover to use his connections to help boost the visibility of the Point Reyes ranchers’ story.
Conover said initial skepticism gave way to respect during an introductory call with Straus, who’d established the first certified organic dairy west of the Mississippi River. Straus, who had sourced some of his milk from dairies in Point Reyes, is a vocal proponent of farming on the seashore, both as a cultural and economic engine. After talking to Straus, Conover read about the Nimans and other ranchers’ situation.
To Conover, Point Reyes was an example of how food should be cultivated. He saw the remaining ranchers as bullied by environmental groups and the National Park Service.
“How do we all, as species of this earth, coexist and thrive? In my opinion, going after small organic farms in the country is not the way to make that happen,” he said.
Conover had planned to approach Kennedy when he attended the MAHA Inaugural Ball in Washington on Jan. 20. But Kennedy was swarmed with people making requests. So, Conover left the subject for his next face-to-face opportunity. In the meantime, he heard panic and frustration from Straus back in California.
“Albert [Straus] just kept getting more desperate,” Conover recalled. “I was like, you know what? Fuck it. I gotta just text [Kennedy].”
Kennedy responded swiftly and favorably, Conover said.
Conover declined to share his text messages with POLITICO’s E&E News. But he shared them with The Press Democrat, which first reported Conover and Kennedy’s support for ranching in Point Reyes. On April 15, Conover checked in with RFK via text, asking him if it was OK to talk openly about Kennedy’s support to galvanize more attention to the cause.
Kennedy texted, “feel free to share about my involvement. We are working full bore on a solution. Everyone is involved, including Doug [Burgum] and [Agriculture Secretary] Brooke Rollins and the White House,” according to The Press Democrat.
Conover and Straus both said that Burgum tapped Budd-Falen, who also worked in the first Trump administration, to find a solution for Point Reyes.
Interior declined to comment when asked in an email about Budd-Falen’s involvement. Budd-Falen, who has a long history of working on ranching issues, did not respond to an email about Point Reyes sent to her private law firm in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Conover characterized Budd-Falen’s approach, from his conversation with the lawyer, as diligent and cautious.
“She’s trying not to fuck people over on either side,” he said.
Lunny said he had spoken with Budd-Falen’s staff along with other exiting ranchers.
“They’re asking questions, and that’s OK. We’ve been used to that forever,” he said.
Lunny has his own ties to the Trump administration.
During his first term, Trump invited the rancher to a press conference at the White House in 2019 to talk about the closure of Drakes Bay Oyster Co. in 2014, which Lunny had purchased and then unsuccessfully sought to renew a long-established lease. But NPS determined that the area should be returned to a more natural state. The “oyster wars” were the first bitter fight over food production in the seashore.
Trump cited Lunny’s situation as an example of the kind of federal governance that he opposed when he signed a pair of executive orders on transparency in federal decisionmaking.
Lunny recalled telling the president that day that he feared Point Reyes ranching would likewise be stopped.
“President Trump said, ‘Kevin, we are going to keep our eye on this. We’re not going to let that happen.’ But then it happened,” Lunny said.
The Kennedy connection
The Kennedy family’s connection to Point Reyes goes back to the 1960s. President John F. Kennedy, the health secretary’s uncle, signed the law establishing Point Reyes as national seashore in 1962. Ranchers were forced to sell their land to the federal government and given long-term leases in return, though some argue the aim was for those ranches to be retired eventually.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is also the reason Bill Niman met his wife.
In the early 2000s, Nicolette Hahn Niman was an environmental lawyer working for Kennedy at the Waterkeeper’s Alliance, an advocacy group he founded in 1999 to bring together disparate organizations working on water pollution. She became involved in their litigation against concentrated livestock farming, particularly targeting hog farms in North Carolina.
But Kennedy also wanted the organization to partner with ranchers they considered to be doing a better job. They picked Niman Ranch when Bill Niman was still CEO.
Hahn Niman said she has not capitalized on her relationship to Kennedy to influence the Point Reyes dispute. It was Kennedy who called her, earlier this year, after being enlisted by Conover and Straus in the rancher’s dilemma, she said.
But she welcomed his support.
Kennedy’s alliance with the Republican president initially came as a shock to Hahn Niman, who did not vote for Trump.
But sociopolitical pivots have also happened for Hahn Niman. After marrying Niman, the former vegetarian came to believe that some agriculture has been unfairly demonized, a perspective she explored in several books, the first titled “Defending Beef: The Case for Sustainable Meat Production.”
Other Point Reyes farmers have similar views. People are too distant from the food that they eat and often villainize the people who grow or produce it, said Straus, a lifelong Democrat.
“We’re losing our community. We’re losing our farms. We’re losing our food system,” he said.
Point Reyes could be different, he said, The park could be oriented toward agriculture, with a board that includes ranchers to help oversee the seashore and even facilitate investments in infrastructure like barns and worker housing, much of which is being dismantled in the wake of the settlement deal.
Are cows good or bad for Point Reyes?
One of the ranchers’ foundational arguments is that Point Reyes needs cows to manage its grasslands.
Before European colonization, the grasslands were tended by Native American tribes through managed fires and roving elk populations. But when European settlers arrived they introduced cattle and nonnative grasses that have since become dominant in most of California’s grasslands.
Tule elk, which were indigenous to the area, were thought to have been hunted into near extinction in the 19th century. But a Bakersfield rancher in the late 1880s maintained a small herd, according to NPS. All of the tule elk living in California today are descended from that herd, including those reintroduced at Point Reyes in 1978.
Local scientists agree there are some conservation benefits from livestock grazing.
Grazing has been found to boost native plants in Marin County, such as purple needlegrass and clover. It keeps shrubs and trees from taking over and reduces fuels that increase wildfire risk. Cows will also eat weeds like thistles, keeping those from overtaking fields.
Bill Niman also said Point Reyes lacks predators to control the elk numbers, which could result in large die-offs during drought years.
Miller, with the Center for Biological Diversity, is more optimistic about replacing cattle with elk. Predators like mountain lions and bears would be drawn to the park by the elk numbers and can help control the population naturally, he said.
“If cattle are your tool, you’re swatting mosquitoes with a hammer,” he said. “Elk graze. Rabbits graze. Rodents graze. Cattle, when they graze, also trample and do a lot of destruction.”
The ranchers’ argument — that shrubs and invasive species will overtake the landscape without cattle — is partially embraced by the Nature Conservancy, which will help NPS transition the former ranchlands to open habitat. The group plans to continue grazing smaller herds of local cattle.
“These landscapes are complex, and they’ve evolved with disturbance,” said Rodd Kelsey, the Nature Conservancy’s California director of land. “Traditional forms of disturbance like fire, both natural and started by Indigenous folks, have largely gone away, and the elk populations are much smaller than they were historically. So, cattle grazing becomes a really important tool.”
But the vision for Point Reyes under the settlement is to prioritize wildlife and natural resources rather than maintain grass to serve cattle ranching. That means allowing shrubs to grow in some areas, because shrubs provide habitat for wildlife. Point Reyes is home to more than 50 species that are endangered, threatened or rare. In other areas, maintaining grasslands and cultivating native grasses will take priority.
The conservancy’s job is also to repair damages to the coastal ecosystem and its water quality, which environmentalists argue have been degraded by generations of cow dung and trampling herds.
“Coastal prairie is one of the most imperiled ecosystems in the world, and so we absolutely want to maintain and enhance [that],” said Kelsey.
A pastoral seashore
The ranchers who are still on the seashore say the park service contributed to ranches failing. Most ranches were kept on short-term leases, so ranchers were hesitant to make long-term investments like fencing.
“The park was sort of managing essentially for failure,” Hahn Niman said. The Nimans’ are outliers in the seashore in that they essentially hold a lifetime lease for part of their property and hold permits for the rest. The Niman ranch was added to the seashore in the 1980s and so granted a different deal than the original ranchers.
The lawsuit filed in February by the Nimans — and later joined by the Evanses — argues that the new NPS management plan for Point Reyes didn’t go through the environmental review and public vetting process required by the National Environmental Policy Act and the Administrative Procedure Act.
“It was sort of astonishing to us that this could be done this way, all behind closed doors,” Hahn Niman said. “Our feeling was, let’s see what we can do to try to force this process to be done correctly and legally. Maybe this can be improved.”
Miller, with the Center for Biological Diversity, said the ranchers are painting a picture of their situation that is overly bleak.
“The park service is not forcing them out, actually quite the opposite. They’re offering them a new long-term lease,” he said. “They’re being asked to not overgraze and not damage natural resources. And if that’s going to drive them out of business, then what’s all this talk about sustainability?”
Miller also accuses the two remaining families of seeking access to the recently vacated lands of the former ranchers. That idea is rooted in the ranchers’ lawsuit, which argues that the National Park Service should have included an alternative in its management plan for Point Reyes that contemplated letting other local ranchers lease the lands left behind by the settlement ranchers.
Hahn Niman said she wouldn’t rule out wanting to graze on those lands in the future but added the lawsuit is not rooted in a desire to expand.
Asked separately, Bill Niman and David Evans also denied the accusation.
“It’s a baseless claim,” Evans said in a phone interview.
The families are split on whether the Trump administration’s involvement will help their cause.
Niman said he is unconvinced that a Republican White House will help a handful of left-leaning voters in California.
Evans, however, is optimistic.
“Politically, I’m very hopeful,” he said. “There’s interest now, and I have faith, I really have faith, that the current administration is aligned with the needs of Point Reyes, the ranchers.”
