In Betty Nunes’s dining room, with its flax-colored walls and sunflower-patterned curtains, two motifs dominate. One is the Holstein cow, depicted in small figurines and black-and-white artwork showcasing the breed’s distinctive spotted markings. The other is a collection of sweeping aerial photographs of her family’s 866-acre dairy farm, perched at the far edge of the Point Reyes peninsula.
“I always thought it looked like a village,” said Betty, 86, gazing fondly at an image of narrow cattle roads snaking through verdant pastures dotted with outbuildings, barns and dwellings.
Six years ago, her grandson William took over the operation. He was just 22 at the time, and it was exactly 100 years since his great-great grandfather had bought the land.
William now runs the dairy alongside his sister, Lianne Nunes-Taverna, marking the fifth generation of the family to tend the herd. A team of four employees—Hector, Miguel, Lupe and Eduardo—helps keep the farm running.
Their day revolves around the steady drone of milking machines, which hum to life twice a day, first in the predawn hours from 2:30 to 6:30 a.m. and again 12 hours later. When visitors ask Betty how she manages to sleep through the persistent thrum, she laughs.
“How would I sleep without it?” she asks. After all, it’s been her life’s soundtrack for over 60 years.
The peninsula’s mild climate, fog-nourished grasslands and proximity to San Francisco—once the capital of California’s Gold Rush fervor—made it the state’s premier dairy region in the 19th century. In the decades that followed, Marin County became one of the most densely worked and productive dairy regions in the nation, home to some 330 farms that anchored the local economy and shaped its identity for more than 150 years.
But that longstanding tradition is poised to change. For the first time since Point Reyes was declared the birthplace of the state’s dairy trade, the peninsula is on the verge of seeing its dairies vanish altogether.
The Nunes dairy—along with 11 other operations in the Point Reyes National Seashore—was ensnared in a 2022 lawsuit brought by three environmental groups claiming the National Park Service had violated federal law by allowing commercial agriculture within the park’s boundaries.
After lengthy negotiations, all but two ranching families have accepted buyouts from the Nature Conservancy in exchange for relinquishing their leases. The park’s 18,000 acres of active ranchland will shrink by 88 percent, to just 2,200 acres.
U.S. Representative Jared Huffman, who helped bring the Nature Conservancy into settlement discussions in 2022, said the buyouts only highlight deeper forces undermining the economics of dairying in Marin. Rep. Huffman, a Democrat, backed legislation seven years ago guaranteeing 20-year leases for these ranches and dairies, yet he now feels resigned about their future in the North Bay.
“Dairies are not leaving because a big bad government pushed them out or evil environmentalists came along or because the Nature Conservancy brought its checkbook and gave them an offer they couldn’t refuse,” he said. “It’s a combination of many things, including economics and the fact that some of these families don’t have kids interested in continuing the business.”
The environmental groups behind the lawsuit share this view, insisting that their legal challenge was simply the straw that broke the camel’s back.
“Even before the recent lawsuit, drought and economic realities forced the seashore’s largest dairy to close,” Jeff Miller of the Center for Biological Diversity, Chance Cutrano of Resource Renewal Institute and Erik Molvar of Western Watersheds Project wrote in a recent letter posted online. “The rest faced enormous costs to modernize operations and comply with water-quality, environmental and public health standards.”
Against this backdrop, William Nunes stands out as a refutation, representing the next generation’s resolve to keep the family business alive—if not here, then somewhere else. In the coming months, he and his crew will dismantle the loafing barn, spread the last of the manure and clear out each building, including the rough-hewn main house with its square build and white stucco walls where Betty has lived for decades. She has already begun sorting through boxes of dairy records meticulously maintained since the 1940s.
Once their work is done, the Nunes family and their employees will leave A Ranch. Betty will move back to her childhood home in Chileno Valley and Lianne, who lives in Petaluma, will continue to work in organic certification.
William plans to relocate before next winter, hoping to find nearby farmland so he can continue dairying, though he concedes he may have to go as far as Washington State. “The opportunities just don’t exist here,” he said.
The future is uncertain for the dairy’s four employees, who did not wish to speak with the Light for this story.
On a recent afternoon, as William paused from scraping a sludgy layer of manure from the loafing barn into an earthen storage basin, he spoke of his 2-year-old daughter, Charlotte, who sees him off each morning with a determined “Daddy, go dairy.” His wife, Riley, is eight months pregnant. Lianne and her husband, Bobby, also juggle a toddler and an infant.
Lianne has taken to carrying a camera wherever she goes, trying to document their life on the farm before it’s over. On this afternoon, she snapped a photo of her brother hauling an armful of hay, illuminated by a narrow beam of sunlight pouring in through a barn window.
“My daughter could be the sixth generation,” William mused as he scooped alfalfa, almond hulls, grain hay, corn and protein pellets into the mixer on the back of his truck. The swirling particles of feed floated in a golden haze, settling on every surface. “I want to give her the same opportunities that I’ve had—and all our predecessors had.”
Joseph V. Mendoza, William’s great-great-grandfather, was 16 when he landed in Point Reyes from Terceira, one of the nine islands in the Azores archipelago, in 1899. Terceira is known for its rolling emerald pastures and a bovine population that rivals its human one.
Joseph joined a tenant-farmer system propelled by immigrant labor—Irish, Swiss Italian, and Azorean—and spent 20 years moving from farm to farm before overseeing a dairy on N Ranch, where he met and married another Azorean immigrant, Zena Martins. By 1919, he had saved enough to purchase A and B Ranches.
Their two children, Joseph Jr. and Tessie, carried on the dairying tradition, with Tessie’s descendants—including Betty’s husband, George, their son, Tim, and now, William and Lianne—remaining at A Ranch, and Joseph Jr.’s branch running B Ranch.
“When you’re born into a dairy family, that line of succession is almost automatic,” Betty explained.
When Betty joined the family, Point Reyes National Seashore was still just an idea floating around Washington. John F. Kennedy would eventually sign the bill creating the park in 1962, though the process proceeded in fits and starts, with Congress and the National Park Service debating funding through the late 1950s and early 1960s.
From the outset, “agriculture was not on the top of anybody’s mind among the park’s founders, except as a potential obstacle or something to be kind of reluctantly integrated,” said author John Hart, who has chronicled the park’s origins.
During congressional hearings, a fiery Zena appeared before the Senate. “We worked awfully hard,” she declared. “Every bit of that land was acquired by the sweat of the brow. If they take my ranches for defense, well, you have to sacrifice. But for recreation?”
In 1962, faced with anemic funding that couldn’t buy out all the landowners, Congress crafted a compromise: ranches would remain operational in a designated “pastoral zone.” So long as families like the Nuneses continued to farm, the government wouldn’t invoke its power of eminent domain.
But that arrangement shifted in the 1970s, when Congress finally appropriated the money to finish the park. Ranchers got federal payouts, granting them the right to stay on as operators for a set time—most commonly 20 or 30 years. After that, standard leases would take effect, issued at the discretion of the Secretary of the Interior.
During those early debates over creating the seashore, some locals feared that if ranching vanished from the peninsula, it would gut Marin County’s agricultural economy. Many dairies were already shuttering. In 1950, the county had roughly 200 of them; by 1972, fewer than 100 dairies were left.
Many operations both on and off the Point had closed or switched to beef cattle, driven by stricter regulations on manure runoff that required expensive infrastructure. Meanwhile, a group of environmentalists worked with Representative Phillip Burton to insert a ranch-friendly provision into the seashore’s legislation.
“It wasn’t seen as controversial,” recalled conservationist Burr Heneman, who was involved in those efforts. At the time, operating a dairy under a federal lease was viewed as less risky than being left to the whims of the free market and private land developers.
Still, the struggle between agricultural tradition and public parkland was never fully settled. As Zena presciently told the U.S. Senate in 1961: “I am faced with the possibility of losing everything that I have worked for.”
Decades later, her great-great grandson stands on the same precipice, but gazing from a new vantage point.
“I used to ask, ‘Why did they sell?’” William said. “But every time I’m up on that hill and look 30 miles south to San Francisco, I’m reminded exactly why. This land could’ve turned into another San Francisco. My great-great-grandmother didn’t want that. She didn’t want to sell to the park, but she believed in protecting this place.”
Six years ago, the Nunes farm traded its Holsteins for Jerseys, a smaller, tawny breed known for its gentle disposition and milk with a high butterfat content—precisely the reason they’re favored by Straus Family Creamery, where William sends 1,500 gallons each day.
“William exemplifies a new generation of dairy farmers committed to organic practices, caring for animals and caring for the land,” said Albert Straus, the company’s founder and C.E.O. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s latest Census of Agriculture, the average American farmer is 58.1 years old. Only 9 percent of farmers are 34 or younger.
About 15 percent of Straus’s milk comes from the Point Reyes dairies run by William and his cousin, Jarrod Mendoza on B Ranch. The other remaining dairy on the peninsula—Spaletta—sells its organic milk to Clover. The Kehoe dairy closed last month.
Mr. Straus, whose operation was the first certified-organic creamery west of the Mississippi River, estimates that around 90 percent of North Bay dairies now produce organic milk, which fetches higher prices than conventional varieties. In 2023, the selling price for 100 pounds of organic milk hovered around $36.41—roughly $12 above its conventional counterpart.
Nationwide, as milk consumption is propelled downward by a proliferation of plant-based substitutes, organic milk remains a bright spot. But as of 2024, even whole milk is making a modest comeback, rising by 3.2 percent, only the second increase since the 1970s.
Last year, plant-based milk sales slipped nearly 6 percent. According to Circana, a market research firm, overall dairy milk sales rose about 2 percent last year, with raw milk consumption spiking nearly 18 percent.
Last fall, Straus’s pasteurized but unhomogenized whole milk became a viral sensation. On social media platforms, videos tagged #milktok depicted people cracking open the half-gallon bottles and scooping out the layer of cream that rises to the top. Mr. Straus said sales of those bottles increased following the surge in attention.
Yet dairy farming remains at the mercy of fickle markets, weather extremes and surplus supply. “Dairy farmers are price takers, not price makers,” said Joe Deviney, Marin’s agricultural commissioner.
Early in his tenure, William barely survived three successive years of drought, forced to grapple with feed costs that were sky high and water in perilously short supply.
“Being in this line of work, you have to be a gambler,” he said, recalling how close he came to shuttering the business. “To say I was financially stressed is an understatement.”
Marin was once a statewide dairy leader, but much of that mantle migrated east to California’s sprawling Central Valley. While dairy continues to rank among the county’s top agricultural sectors, its overall value has waned. According to Marin’s latest crop report, organic milk revenue in the county fell by nearly a third, to $21.9 million, from the previous year, as it was dethroned for the first time as the county’s top-ranked agricultural commodity.
Meanwhile, California remains America’s top milk-producing state, currently home to over 1.7 million dairy cows, the bulk of them housed on large-scale operations in the San Joaquin Valley. The state has lost three-quarters of its family-scale dairies since 2002; more than 90 percent of the remaining cows are in herds of at least 500.
Unlike the typical dairy cow that spends its life inside a concrete-floored enclosure, the Nunes farm’s 250 Jersey cows pass their days lolling around bucolic green pastures, except for a few months a year when they shelter in a well-ventilated loafing barn.
Like many of his neighbors, William has embraced regenerative grazing practices. He partitions his fields into smaller paddocks and rotates the herd to let grasslands rest and recover. Twice a day, the cows file into the milking parlor, where computer-calibrated vacuums extract several gallons of warm milk from each udder.
He knows his animals by their markings, personalities and quirks—even though only the first 100 cows bear names, courtesy of Lianne and Riley. His affection for the animals appears to be reciprocated: on a recent afternoon, a caramel-brown cow that had given birth minutes earlier poked its head through the enclosure to nuzzle his hand.
“This is Penny,” William said. Penny, with her placenta still emerging, stood next to her newborn calf, wet with birth fluids. Nearby, 17-year-old Lola, Riley’s childhood cow, lazed about.
Animal rights activists have a markedly different view of farms like this one. In their eyes, dairy farmers are cogs in an inhumane industrial food production system that consigns these docile ruminants to a lifetime of exploitation and misery.
Some of their claims, dairy farmers concede, reflect standard industry practices: cows are impregnated repeatedly by artificial insemination and have their newborns taken away at birth; female calves are confined to individual hutches and have their horn buds cauterized at just a few months old; and male calves are not so lucky, often sent off to slaughter.
“Dairies have been scrutinized the last couple of years, especially out here,” William said. “Sometimes it feels like we’re living under a microscope.”
In Point Reyes, much of that scrutiny has focused on manure and water quality. Because dairies typically manage larger cow densities, they generate more concentrated manure. Former park service attorney Jim Coda estimates that seashore ranches generate roughly 79,000 tons of manure annually based on 2022 cattle counts—twice the mass of the World War II-era aircraft carrier USS Hornet.
Dairies store their waste in lagoons, then spread it across pastures during the dry season to fertilize grass and dispose of effluent. Critics argue the practice pollutes local watersheds, but Mr. Straus counters that natural fertilizers have been unfairly maligned. “Manure and compost are the only approved fertilizers for organic,” he said. “It can be a pollutant, but it also contains the essential nutrients for the land. There’s a total lack of understanding about how this system really works.”
According to the park service’s new general management plan—released last month as part of the legal settlement—many local ranches were designed generations ago, when it was commonplace to use natural waterways as a conduit for waste disposal. Because of where the infrastructure was placed, “solutions to managing operations to meet current regulatory standards would require substantial re-engineering and new infrastructure,” the park notes.
Critics contend that the park service has long overlooked the dairies’ environmental toll, particularly after suspending water monitoring on the Pacific side of the peninsula from 2013 to 2021.
In recent years, environmental advocates uncovered numerous lease violations near ranches and dairies, revealed through clandestine photographs and private water sampling. Activists decried the buildup of debris in an old silage pit, raw sewage dumped into open cow pastures and manure ponds, and unauthorized bulldozing. In 2022, the Western Watersheds Project and the Turtle Island Restoration Network commissioned water-quality tests that showed high fecal indicator bacteria near ranches after heavy rains.
“That data was a snapshot in time,” said a staff member with San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board who discussed water testing on the condition that they not be named. “People took that report and made broad assumptions that this is what’s been happening for 10 years or 20 years or that this is going to happen in the future. They built a narrative that sounds conclusive, and it’s hard to counter.”
After the California Coastal Commission tied its approval of the park’s management plan to stricter water-quality oversight, officials reinstated regular testing in 2022.
From 1998 to 2005, park officials had recorded high bacteria levels at Kehoe Creek, Abbotts Lagoon and Drakes Estero. Ranchers responded by adopting runoff-reduction measures, including loafing barns, gutters, exclusion fences and more robust manure handling. These changes appeared to help. According to a park report, only 6 percent of samples met fecal indicator bacteria standards before 2007, whereas 38 percent met those standards from 2007 to 2013.
“I think they initially gave up testing because it was just proving that ranching was having terrible consequences on the environment,” said Mr. Coda, who does eat meat but avoids cow milk, opting instead for soy. “A hundred years from now, I don’t see dairies in the U.S. surviving.”
Over the course of running his family’s farm, William said he has managed to avoid water-quality violations. But he readily admits that running a dairy in the seashore is fraught. Short-term leases discourage hefty investments in new infrastructure, and even routine projects require park service approval, which can be a bureaucratic slog.
“This moment is bittersweet,” he said. “I know I’ll never live anywhere so beautiful. But being here in the park, you’re restricted. We look forward to relocating somewhere we can call our own, where our kids might one day take over and perhaps pass it down to their kids. I want a future for them, so that’s why we’re leaving.”
He likens the situation to a romance gone sour: “Being here has been like being in a relationship where it’s hard to see through the shit. You think you’re in love with this person but once you’re out of it, you look back and realize how glad you are to be free.”