On a recent afternoon, the Kehoe brothers—Tim, Tom and Michael—gathered on their ranch for their very last afternoon milking. 

Dressed in rubber boots and navy coveralls for the somber occasion, each fell into his familiar role, the choreography of decades. 

Tom readied the milking equipment, while Michael swung open the cattle gates, nudging the cows forward with quiet encouragement. Tim got to work cleaning the loafing barn and spreading fresh hay. 

For the past two years, the brothers have been slowly selling off their Holsteins and, on Tuesday, a truck arrived to take away the last 50. 

The remnants of a herd once 450 strong, the cows were bound for a mega-farm in the Texas panhandle. Soon, they will trade fog-drenched hills for the vast flatlands of the southern plains, where they will graze on nocturnal pastures under the glow of floodlights to evade searing daytime heat. 

“It’s just hard to see them go,” Tom said. 

For the first time, a murmuration of starlings drowned out the lowing of cows. 

For the Kehoe family, it’s been 103 years of twice-daily milking, barn mucking and careful husbandry on the Point Reyes peninsula. “The place is an ingrained part of who we are,” said Michael, who, at 58, is the youngest of eight siblings. 

“We’ve never missed a day of milking,” Tim said. 

Even during the ferocious storm of 1982, when the ranch was cut off by flooding and downed trees, he crossed Tomales Bay by boat to ensure the cows were milked on time. 

Now, a century and 75,190 milkings later—and after a long legal battle culminating in a settlement reached last week—the Kehoe Dairy will shutter, along with five other dairies and six ranches in the Point Reyes National Seashore.

Six other ranches in the neighboring Golden Gate National Recreation Area and two on the point will continue operating. But the settlement effectively signals the end of nearly 200 years of ranching on the peninsula, a tradition that traces back to the 1830s.

A landmark settlement 

As part of the agreement announced last Wednesday, families running beef and dairy operations in the seashore will retire their leases in exchange for undisclosed payments funded by the Nature Conservancy, a global land-conservation juggernaut. Although the financial details remain confidential, sources familiar with the negotiations say the total payout amount is an estimated $30 million to $40 million. Ranchers will receive the payments in installments as they meet the terms of their wind-down agreements. 

The departing dairies, which supply around 4,250 gallons of organic milk a day to creameries like Straus and Clover, are owned by the Kehoe, Mendoza, Nunes and Spaletta families. The Evans, Gallagher, Grossi, Lucchesi, Lunny, McClelland and McClure families run the departing beef cattle operations. Together, they make up a third of Marin dairies and account for roughly 17 percent of the county’s working lands in terms of acreage and production value.

Under the agreement, which stems from a 2022 lawsuit filed by the Resource Renewal Institute, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Western Watersheds Project, approximately 16,000 of the 28,000 acres of active ranch and dairy lands on Point Reyes and in the northern district of G.G.N.R.A. will be reclassified as a “scenic landscape zone.” The Nature Conservancy will enter into a cooperative agreement and lease option with the park to help manage that zone, while the ranches that remain will be offered 20-year leases with substantial reductions in herd size. 

While some grasslands will be maintained through targeted cattle grazing, others will evolve into dense tangles of coastal scrub and chaparral. Targeted grazing, the park’s new management plan outlines, will be used to “maintain the integrity of historic pasturelands…[and] to maintain the connection between the built environment and landscape features associated with the historic ranches.” 

The settlement will result in the departure of 80 percent of families who have lived in the region for 100 years or more, according to historian Dewey Livingston. At its peak in 1900, the peninsula was home to some 31 dairies. When the park was authorized in 1962, there were 23. Today, only four remain. 

Cow heaven 

By the time Tim, Tom and Michael’s grandfather began leasing 1,150 acres from the Shafter estate in 1922, the dairy industry was waning. Until the turn of the century, nearly every acre of non-forested land was dedicated to grazing cows and producing milk for butter destined for San Francisco. Point Reyes butter had achieved an almost mythical status. “The best in the State,” declared a journalist for Alta California in 1865. 

The first cow arrived on the peninsula in the 1830s, brought by Mexican grantees who valued the animals not for their milk, but for their hide and tallow. The thick fog and lush grass made for a land of milk and honey—“cow heaven,” as a dairyman put it.

Following the American annexation of California in 1846, Mexican land grants became ensnared in a web of disputes. Old claims were questioned, invalidated or outright seized. A frenzied land scramble ensued, and in the end, it was a lawyer, Oscar Shafter, his brother James, and his son-in-law Charles Howard who emerged victorious. 

By the 1860s, the Shafter family carved their winnings into thirds and created a patchwork of leasable ranches. There were 31 in total, 26 named for each letter of the alphabet, with A Ranch perched at the southern tip. The empire’s lifeblood was butter—sumptuous, golden and stamped into two-pound blocks bearing the esteemed “P.R.” brand—made from milk produced by herds of Devons, Jerseys, Guernseys and Holsteins. Roads were scarce, so butter traveled by water to San Francisco, where it could fetch as much as $1 a pound—equivalent to about $35 today. Until 1900, Marin reigned as the dairy capital of California, and Point Reyes was its center, fueled by the hard work of tenant farmers who hailed from Ireland, Switzerland and the Azores. With time, those families purchased the ranches.  

An experiment in preservation

Over the years, developers and land speculators sketched out subdivisions and upscale resorts. They dreamed of transforming the area into “a Jones Beach on the Pacific,” while county planners predicted that “by 1990, Tomales Bay will probably look like Malibu.” Even as far back as 1905, proposals were floated of carving 10,000 lots into the Inverness Ridge.

That Point Reyes is not a replica of Jones Beach or Malibu is owed to the relentless efforts of grassroots activists who championed the idea of a national seashore, said Paul Sadin, who wrote official histories of Point Reyes for the park service.

But creating an untouched wilderness was not the objective of the 1962 law that authorized the park. Rather, it aimed to improve public access to the shoreline, prevent development and expand recreational opportunities, Mr. Sadin said. 

During the planning stages, the park service proposed recreational developments, including damming Limantour Estero to create a massive swimming pool and constructing a scenic parkway along the cliffs from Inverness to Bolinas, said Doug Nadeau, a longtime park official who authored the first general management plan for Point Reyes and G.G.N.R.A. Strong opposition ultimately thwarted many of these proposals.   

Author John Hart, who has chronicled the park’s origins, said Point Reyes was never intended to become a “Yosemite of the coast,” a pristine wilderness sealed off from human activity under glass. Instead, it was envisioned as an ambitious experiment: Could preservation thrive alongside a working landscape, where privately owned, commercially viable ranches continued to operate?

The park’s enabling legislation carved out an 18,000-acre pastoral zone within the 71,000-acre seashore, accommodating 27 dairies and cattle ranches alongside areas designated as wilderness.

Over the following decade, ranchers sold their land, often unhappily, to the federal government for million-dollar sums with the agreement to lease it back under reservations of use and occupancy. By the 1990s and 2000s, when the R.U.O.s began to expire, ranchers transitioned to short-term leases.

In 2012, then-Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar directed the park to issue 20-year permits to the ranches, and soon after, the park began developing a comprehensive management plan for the ranches.

But in 2016, three environmental groups sued the park service, arguing that it could not extend ranch leases without updating the park’s 37-year-old general management plan. The ensuing settlement led to a new general management plan in 2021, which offered ranchers 20-year leases while imposing stricter regulations on ranching practices. Within months, the groups sued again.

The experiment in land management that Point Reyes once represented—an embrace of the wild and tame, open pastures and enclosed trails—has failed. 

“It’s like Point Reyes has been the square peg going into a park system full of round holes, and they’ve now decided to knock the corners off to make it fit,” Mr. Hart said. 

Family ties 

Since 1922, four generations of the Kehoe family have lived at the historic J Ranch at the northernmost tip of Point Reyes. Today, although not for long, all three brothers are still there, along with their last remaining employee, Juan Carlos Isais, and his wife, Margarita.

When Jim Kehoe Sr. left San Francisco for Point Reyes, he joined other Irish dairymen, including his distant cousins, the Gallaghers and McClures, who would come to dominate the northern half of the peninsula. Known as “Big Jim” for his imposing 6’4” stature and trademark Stetson hat, he was a rodeo man who competed on the California circuit, performed as a trick rider at the San Francisco Pan-Pacific Exposition and even appeared in a silent cowboy film in 1919. After learning the craft of milking cows and making butter at other dairies, Jim leased his own ranch in 1922.

A natural leader, Jim was elected to the Marin County Board of Supervisors in 1940. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he lobbied to keep the family’s 1,263-acre ranch from being incorporated into the national park system. At a 1959 meeting packed with ranchers, bureaucrats and federal officials, tensions mounted, but no one was quite as vociferous as Jim. 

“Well, what the hell!” he cried. “We all have children. We require that property to make a living. We don’t want anybody to come over there and take it away from us.” 

Jim passed on not just his ranch, but also his knowledge. His son Skip learned how to dairy, then taught his eight children in their big Irish family, where it wasn’t uncommon to have 16 people sitting around the kitchen table. 

Two years after Jim’s death, the Kehoes sold the ranch to the park. They were among the last to sell, with Skip agonizing over the decision for years. 

On Monday in the milking parlor—a concrete building with 28 stalls in two parallel rows—the brothers began by squeezing a small amount of milk out of each teat to stimulate flow and flush out bacteria. Udders were then dipped in chlorohexidine, a disinfectant. 

Tim’s daughter Annie and Michael’s daughter Emily were there to help, just as they have been since they were 10 years old.  Together, they dried the udders with a rag and attached the milking claw, a cluster of four stainless-steel, rubber-lined cups that suck out the milk. The 100-year-old barn was retrofitted with the latest technology in the aughts. Meters monitor the flow of milk, which travels through hoses and pipelines to two 2,000-gallon tanks and is cooled to 36 degrees. 

When the milking was done, they removed the claw and applied iodine to disinfect once more. It used to take hours to milk the full herd. Now it’s over in 20 minutes. 

Before going organic in 2005, each Kehoe cow churned out 10 gallons of milk each day. Afterward, that amount dropped to 7 gallons, but the family embraced the shift. “Becoming organic felt like coming full circle,” Michael said. “We had spent years trying to maximize production, but transitioning to organic brought us back to what our grandpa did—utilizing the pasture and following natural cycles.”

The brothers reminisced about bygone friends and the colorful characters who shaped their lives on the point. They recalled when then-park superintendent John Sansing would come knocking on their door in the evening, with a posse of rangers in tow. “At 5 o’clock, ties would come off, and highballs would be poured,” Tim said with a smile. 

Once, when the Kehoe parents went on vacation, a rotation of rangers babysat the kids. “Back then, we had a great relationship with the park,” Michael said.

But that camaraderie curdled around the time of the first lawsuit in 2016. They hoped things would improve when the park finalized its new management plan in 2021. “We thought it was going to go through, we were going to get 20-year leases, and we were going to go on with our lives,” Tim said. 

But that vision has faded. “With the agreement signed last week, there’s no reason to keep going,” Tom said. “The parameters to continue farming and dairying out here would have been an economic killer.”  

Margins on farms like theirs are razor thin. Feeding the cows alone costs $20,000 a month, a sum they can no longer recoup.

Tomorrow at 3 a.m., Tim’s body will stir, ready for a task no longer needed. “I bet I will wake up like that for a long time,” he said.