Maverick rancher Bill Niman and his wife, environmental lawyer Nicolette Hahn Niman, have plunged headfirst into a legal battle over the future of ranching in the Point Reyes National Seashore.
Late last month, the couple, who run 117 cows on their 500-acre ranch at the park’s southernmost edge, sued the National Park Service over its plan to rezone more than 28,000 acres of historic ranchlands.
“This could be a model urban fringe park,” Mr. Niman said on a recent afternoon in Bolinas, strolling past a limestone icon of St. Anthony—the patron saint of lost things—who stands sentinel at the entrance to the modest ranch house he has occupied since the late ’70s. “We could show how cattle can be raised alongside thriving wildlife communities.”
Their lawsuit comes on the heels of a settlement between the park service, environmental groups and ranchers that will end most agriculture in the seashore in the coming year. The Niman ranch is one of two operations that did not intervene in the lawsuit three environmental organizations brought in 2022 to challenge the park’s general management plan amendment, which would have offered 20-year ranch leases.
Among the settlement’s stipulations was a voluntary buyout of those leases from 11 longtime ranching families. The lands will be reclassified as a “scenic landscape zone,” but according to the Nimans, the park service ignored an alternative: offering leases to new ranchers, an option that Congress explicitly allowed under a 1978 amendment to the park’s founding legislation.
For years, the Nimans stayed on the sidelines of the settlement negotiations while the parties wrestled over how best to manage the peninsula’s pastoral expanse. “We kept wondering why the park wasn’t pouring all this time, money and effort into advancing good land-management practices,” Ms. Hahn Niman said.
Now, after years outside the fray, the couple has decided to act.
“Previously, we felt that the park was trying to balance interests and make sure that ecological issues were attended to while ensuring the continuation of ranching in the park,” Mr. Niman said. “But in recent years, they’ve thrown up their hands and decided agriculture isn’t worth preserving.”
Their lawsuit alleges that the park service violated numerous laws—including the National Environmental Policy Act and California’s 1972 Coastal Act and 1976 Tule Elk Preservation Act—in changing its general management plan as part of the settlement.
“This entire process was done in secret, without public notice or comment,” said the couple’s attorney, Peter Prows. “If you’re doing something behind closed doors, it usually means you’re doing something wrong.”
Under NEPA, any major federal action “significantly affecting the quality of the human environment” requires a thorough environmental impact statement, which the Nimans say never took place when the park agreed to a settlement that excluded agriculture.
“NEPA is not just about what impacts the birds and the bees, it’s concerned with the effects on people, on ranchers,” said attorney Nicholas Yost, who led the drafting of NEPA regulations during the Carter administration.
The park service has insisted that its plan falls within the spectrum of alternatives analyzed in its 2020 environmental review of the general management plan amendment, which contemplated both no-dairying and no-ranching scenarios.
“Yes, they went through a NEPA process,” Mr. Yost said. “But it was arguably a questionable one that did not consider the alternative the Nimans have raised.”
The couple’s lawsuit asks the court to overrule the park service’s decision and send the issue to the Secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum, who, by law, is authorized to continue or cease agriculture in the park.
For five decades, Mr. Niman has led a peripatetic existence, traveling everywhere from Tasmania to Alberta, spreading the gospel that agriculture that is good for animals and the land yields the finest-tasting meat. Ms. Hahn Niman has written extensively on the subject, authoring books that advocate for sustainable food production and animal welfare.
In the wake of the settlement, Mr. Niman met with the park’s superintendent, Anne Altman, and range manager Dylan Voeller to propose a new vision for Point Reyes, emphasizing his desire to use the best grazing practices, mow brush and clear invasive species. “Over 2 million people visit this park each year,” Mr. Niman told them. “Let them witness this as a model of thoughtful pastoral agriculture in the United States.”
But according to the Nimans, park officials reacted with the same indifference they’ve encountered for years.
“We’re not litigious people,” Mr. Niman insisted, “but we saw no alternative.”
Park officials did not respond to requests for comment, but the Nimans stressed that their long relationship with their federal landlords has generally been amicable—and that suing them was a move they took only after the park offered them a new lease that would have made “continued ranching economically difficult if not entirely nonviable.”
“I had a mentor who told me that suing someone is never a good experience, even if you win,” Ms. Hahn Niman said. “But in working for environmental groups, I’ve also seen firsthand how lawsuits have the power to force people to do the right thing.”
Early one cloudless morning, the sweet smell of eucalyptus mixed with the wet loam of early spring as Mr. Niman and his farm manager and business partner, Mauricio Cuevas, moved cattle from one grassy paddock to another even lusher one, thick with a mix of rye, clover and alfilaria.
As a teenager, Mr. Cuevas left Michoacán, where his father had a pig farm with 300 sows, for the Central Valley town of Turlock. He worked as a chicken catcher, quietly wrangling birds by hand under cover of night to take them to slaughter.
It was there, amid that vast agricultural ecosystem, that he first heard Bill Niman’s name—and word that he was on the lookout for help running his chicken and turkey operation. “They said he was like the rockstar of the meat industry,” Mr. Cuevas recalled.
Before long, he and his wife, Rosa, and their two children were moving in next door to the Nimans. “For some reason, he picked me,” Mr. Cuevas said.
Mr. Niman shook his head at the notion of “some reason.” “Mauricio is an animal whisperer, there’s no question,” he said.
Mr. Cuevas shrugged. “I just listen, and they tell me what they want,” he said. As he walked deeper into the pasture, the cows followed; when he stopped, they stopped.
“You need to want them to thrive, and a lot of people don’t possess that,” Mr. Niman said.
Both men have a watchful calm about them that seems to go hand in hand with good animal husbandry.
As Mr. Niman surveyed the grazing land, he noted one of the park service’s more frustrating requirements: the standard for residual dry matter—the blanket of plant material that must remain on the ground at the start of each growing season.
“It’s entirely at odds with the best grazing practices we know today,” he said. “You want the animals to eat everything; otherwise, you’re left with the plants the cattle don’t like, and eventually that’s all that will grow back.”
In the past, the Nimans have asked to use electrified fencing, which would allow for tighter herd rotation and longer rest periods for each paddock—methods believed to improve grassland health. It’s a common tool in regenerative grazing but one prohibited in the park.
To Mr. Niman, these restrictions illustrate a style of management often at odds with the land’s actual needs and rhythms.
Unlike many other ranchers on Point Reyes, Mr. Niman’s family roots don’t run deep in the park. As his wife puts it, he is a “Jewish, city-bred Democrat” who got his start stocking shelves and ringing up customers in the Minneapolis grocery store owned by his Russian-immigrant father. “Everything I know today, I learned one step at a time, starting there,” Mr. Niman said.
Unburdened by the weight of tradition, he has kept what seems useful and left the rest behind.
Ms. Hahn Niman, raised in Kalamazoo, Mich., spent 33 years as a vegetarian and was fighting factory farming as senior attorney for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s environmental organization, the Waterkeeper Alliance, when she met Bill in the early aughts.
Together, they form a different kind of “American Gothic.”
After earning an anthropology degree from the University of Minnesota, Mr. Niman headed west to California’s San Joaquin Valley to avoid the draft by teaching in a federally designated poverty area. He found himself in a conservative, racially segregated cotton-farming town that bristled at outsiders. “It was a great time to be a liberal activist trying to make the world better,” he recalled, “but the local power structure wasn’t thrilled that 20 troublemakers suddenly dropped into town.”
After a detour in Berkeley to get his teaching certificate, he drifted to Bolinas, which by the late ’60s was becoming a hub for a countercultural movement taking a rural turn. Treatises like “Silent Spring” and “Diet for a Small Planet” had galvanized those determined to return to the land and reclaim food production from corporate agribusiness. “I joined this group of people here that was trying to get off the grid and raise their own food,” he said.
That dream was not so exceptional in 1971, but Mr. Niman’s success in achieving it surely is. “It was a harmonic convergence,” he said. “There was no business plan in sight.”
His venture began with 11 acres and a few hogs fed spent barley from San Francisco’s Anchor Steam Brewery. Next came six orphaned Hereford calves—a barter payment for his then-wife Amy’s tutoring services. Mr. Niman discovered he had a knack not just for raising animals, but for selling them, too.
Then, on Christmas Day 1976, Amy died in a horseback riding accident, and he threw himself deeper into the work. Not long after, he and his friend Orville Schell acquired 200 acres of pastureland.
By the late ’70s, their modest hogs-and-cattle venture had grown into a real business. Their big break came when the doyens of California cuisine—Alice Waters of Chez Panisse, Margaret Fox of Café Beaujolais, and Judy Rodgers of Zuni Café—began buying their meat. It was so good that Ms. Waters made it the first proper-noun meat on the menu at her Berkeley restaurant.
“A significant part of the pleasure of eating derives from knowing where your food comes from,” Ms. Waters said. When she travels from Berkeley to Bolinas, she takes a walk down Mesa Road, past the Niman pastures.
“In those early days, I was trying to find people who really cared. I’d walk right by the Niman cattle, and I just always felt so good that they were living there and eating those grasses,” she said.
One Chez Panisse menu noted simply, “Sirloin of beef from the Niman-Schell Ranch,” while another read, “Brine-cured loin of Niman Ranch pork with spring vegetable jardinière.”
These days, much of Chez Panisse’s beef comes from Stemple Creek Ranch, where the Nimans send their yearlings to live out the rest of their lives. “Bill is the godfather of meat,” said Loren Poncia, who runs the Tomales ranch.
In 1984, Niman and Schell sold their land to the park service in exchange for a life estate, which offered a degree of privilege compared to the 20-year or 30-year agreements that many ranchers signed when the park was formed. “We didn’t have to sell to the park, and we didn’t do it as a business opportunity,” Mr. Niman said. “We felt that mere mortals shouldn’t own land like this.”
Over the years, as neighbors began wrestling with the uncertainty of expiring leases, the Nimans continued relatively untroubled. “We never had that same level of insecurity,” Ms. Hahn Niman said. “It was never a life-or-death struggle for us.”
Mr. Niman began building his enterprise beyond Bolinas, forging a network of hundreds of small farms that raised animals without hormones or antibiotics and with plenty of space to roam. “There is a direct connection between husbandry and eating quality,” he said. To sell under his brand, pig farms were vetted with a “pork-chop test” that ensured quality: If the meat didn’t have an almost sweet roundness, it didn’t earn the label. In return, producers got a stable price, sometimes 15 or 20 percent above market rates.
The acolytes for his beef, pork and lamb amassed, and restaurants around the country listed Niman Ranch like a badge of honor. Around 2000, Chipotle, then a fledgling chain with just 50 locations, began sourcing its pork for carnitas from him; two years later, it was buying 20,000 pounds a week.
By 2007, the company had ballooned into a $65 million enterprise. But when venture-capital investors began pruning the husbandry standards on which the brand was built, Mr. Niman bowed out. “They wanted me to play Colonel Sanders,” he said.
A few years later, the brand was sold to the meat processing behemoth Perdue Farms. The Nimans then launched BN Ranch, which they later sold to the meal-kit company Blue Apron, helping to establish a supply chain for all the beef, pork, turkey and chicken shipped to thousands of customers each month.
Still, it’s these 500 acres in Bolinas that Mr. Niman knows best. There’s a particular day in July when it’s ideal to slaughter a Niman cow. It’s timed with what he calls the “money rains” of March, the only truly consequential precipitation for creating dense, protein-rich forage. “Those are the kind of things you learn from old timers,” he said.