For four generations, the McClure family has carved a home out of the windswept rolling hills of the Point Reyes landscape—erecting fences, building barns, planting grass, and tending cattle—to build a dairy that provided fresh organic milk for the San Francisco Bay Area. Now, dairy cows have been banished. And there is a new plan for this landscape that will replace the Point Reyes’ historic pastoral character with a much wilder vision.
In a National Park Service announcement this week, an agreement has been reached with 12 ranches over long-disputed land use rights at the national seashore, ending years of protracted closed-door mediation. It results from a lawsuit brought against NPS by environmental groups, including the Center for Biological Diversity, the Resource Renewal Institute and Western Watersheds Project, which protested the presence of commercial ranches in a national park. Now the land will be managed not by ranchers, but by a collaboration between the National Park Service and The Nature Conservancy—with ambitious restoration plans.
“For the first time in my life, all I have is a black Labrador,” says Bob McClure, 62, who recently sold his 500 Holsteins to a Texas dairy operation in advance of the settlement and now commutes from Petaluma to maintain the old family home. “I miss the cows. Now all you hear is birds.”
On Saturday, angry community members gathered in a town hall organized by Congressman Jared Huffman, asserting that the role of the Seashore is not just to protect wilderness—but to preserve the land’s agricultural heritage, and its farmworkers, as well. With frayed nerves and frustration, speakers accused the NPS and elected officials of excluding them from the negotiation.
All dairies and most ranches to shut down
Under the plan, approximately 16,000 of 28,000 acres of former and current ranch and dairy lands in Point Reyes and the north district of Golden Gate National Recreation Area will be reclassified as a “Scenic Landscape Zone,” where commercial agriculture is banned. While some grasslands will be maintained through “targeted” grazing of beef cattle, others will mature into coastal scrub, with coyote bush, coffeeberry and dense tangles of chaparral. And many of the much-contested fences will come down. The new goal is to manage an ecosystem that allows wide-ranging species, including tule elk, to move freely across the landscape…