Gabriel Romo remembers summers growing up on the Point Reyes peninsula as a time of boundless adventure: catching frogs, swimming in Tomales Bay, running barefoot through rippling grassland, and, on fogless nights, lying rapt under the stars. Days stretched before him and his older brother, Eduardo, as they roamed the landscape with the kind of freedom only childhood offers. Without cell service or wifi, their parents didn’t need to ask twice for them to stay out of the house—the boys happily vanished into the wild, where time seemed to bend in deference to nature’s rhythms.

“People would tell me how lucky I was to grow up here,” Gabriel, now 26, said last week after getting off from his job at the Point Reyes Station Wells Fargo, where he has worked for the past six years. “One day, I decided to believe them—so I opened my eyes and realized I was living in paradise.”

Gabriel and Eduardo are two of approximately 150 individuals, all of them Latino, who have built their lives in the farmworker housing scattered across the Point Reyes National Seashore, their homes and livelihoods entwined with the area’s cattle operations. Now, they find themselves caught in the crosshairs of a bitter legal battle over the future of ranching within the federally managed parkland—a fight that, until recently, overlooked the voices of those living closest to it.

“To not even be considered in all this,” Gabriel said, “It’s like, ‘Oh, you’re fine to clean our houses, and you’re fine to tend to us in the service industry, but f–k off otherwise.’” 

In the past week, residents like the Romos have begun to mobilize. Many attended a meeting at the Point Reyes Community Presbyterian Church on Monday to hear about the closed-door settlement talks that seek to resolve a 2022 lawsuit targeting ranching in the seashore. 

Last Friday, a lawyer filed a motion to intervene in the negotiations on behalf of eight unnamed agricultural workers, marking a significant step toward securing their place at the table. The petition reflects mounting concern that 75 ranch workers will be displaced if ranching is phased out.

The relief they seek is simple: housing. 

“For every ranch that closes, I want to preserve its housing forever. Not for a little while. Not for six months. Forever,” said the workers’ pro bono attorney, Andrew Giacomini, a partner at the San Francisco law firm Hanson Bridgett. 

For years, Mr. Giacomini quietly fielded calls from friends like Albert Straus, whose creamery uses milk from two dairies in the seashore, but he said he struggled to find the “bandwidth to take on another project” amid a busy litigation schedule—until now. 

Mr. Giacomini lives in the San Geronimo Valley and belongs to one of West Marin’s most influential political families. His father, Gary Giacomini, served as Marin’s Fourth District supervisor for 24 years and is known for staunchly defending the preservation of the county’s ranchlands. His grandfather, Noel Giacomini, was county clerk, and his cousins—Waldo, Bobby, Ralph, Ralph Jr., Toby and Toby Jr.—are all ranchers. 

“I didn’t want to be an adversary to the ranchers—they have enough of those,” he said. “So I identified a way that I could get involved with agricultural workers without working against the ranchers.”

In legal terms, intervention refers to the involvement of a third party—one not originally named in a lawsuit—that has a vested interest in its outcome. A few months after the lawsuit was filed in 2022, two groups of ranchers did exactly that, contending that their interests diverged from those of the National Park Service.

The agricultural workers’ motion—which the Romos were not part of—argues that the settlement’s outcome will directly impact their lives and livelihoods. These workers live on the ranches in question, and, according to the motion, their priority is securing a future there, whether or not the land remains in agricultural use.

If the motion to intervene is granted, the workers would formally join the lawsuit as defendants, gaining the ability to negotiate and present their arguments.

The farmworkers who filed the petition have chosen to remain anonymous, citing fears of losing their jobs, retaliatory deportation and harassment from “extremists.” Some are undocumented or have undocumented family members, and their anxiety around deportation is intensified by the fact that one of the defendants in the suit is a federal agency. They also are fearful of “physical harm to them, their families, and children,” the motion reads, “if they are associated with any opposition to the environmental concerns expressed by the plaintiffs,” citing incidents of harassment and intimidation experienced by the ranchers.

Mr. Giacomini, who also sits on the board of the Marin Agricultural Land Trust and is one of the founding members of the Committee for Housing Agricultural Workers and Their Families, insists that the intervention isn’t meant to derail the settlement talks. “We’re focused on life after any of these settlements happen,” he told the Light. 

The 2022 lawsuit, filed by the Center for Biological Diversity, the Resource Renewal Institute and the Western Watersheds Project, alleges that ranching in the park disrupts ecosystems and pollutes watersheds, violating the Clean Water Act. They contend that ranching is incompatible with the preservation of public lands and must be phased out. 

But for Eduardo Romo, now 28 and working as an arborist, the lawsuit threatens far more than cattle operations. “The plaintiffs don’t understand the consequences of their actions,” he said. “They’re removing a piece of our community, and all the people that live out here on these dairies are just an afterthought. We’re just disregarded, told we don’t really matter. The elk seem to matter more.” 

The legal battle has dragged on for nearly three years, with the latest extension—its ninth so far—pushing the stay on litigation from this Friday to Nov. 22. Meanwhile, the park service is continuing to issue month-by-month lease extensions for the ranches and dairies, according to park spokeswoman Melanie Gunn. Strict gag orders and non-disclosure agreements bind all parties to the negotiations, including the environmental organizations, the ranchers, the park service and The Nature Conservancy, which intervened to facilitate the settlement. 

But speculation swirls that the negotiations could result in the closure of the seashore’s four remaining dairies and 17 beef cattle operations, along with the affordable housing they provide. 

The ripple effects of such closures would extend beyond farmworkers, impacting an entire community housed there and affecting many of the people who keep West Marin running—its bankers, health care providers, servers, cooks, gardeners, construction workers and housekeepers.

“There’s a common assumption that if you live on a ranch, you must work in agriculture,” said Cassandra Benjamin, the lead author of a recent report on West Marin’s housing landscape. “But our study clearly demonstrated that many people living on ranches work in other industries. They are essential workers here, but they are not necessarily milking cows.”  

Of the 68 households interviewed in the study, only 54 percent had a family member who worked on a ranch, dairy or farm.

“If they close all the ranches and evict all the people, it’s going to impact the schools, the town, the businesses—everything,” said Margarita Isais, who cleans houses in Inverness and Point Reyes Station. Her husband, Juan Carlos, works as the foreman at Kehoe Dairy, where they live. “In reality, we’re the ones who make things go around here. It’s like a domino effect.”

Gabriel and Eduardo Romo’s family has experienced the precarity of ranch life firsthand. For more than 25 years, they lived in a modest home on the McClure Dairy on the Historic I Ranch, once the largest dairy on the peninsula. Like many others in the area, the Romos’ parents emigrated from Jalostotitlán, a farming town northeast of Guadalajara, lured by word-of-mouth promises of steady work. But in 2021, a prolonged drought forced the dairy to close, leaving eight families, including the Romos, without jobs.

While their parents relocated, with their father finding work at Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese Company, Gabriel and Eduardo asked ranch owner Bob McClure if they could stay. They offered to pay rent and help maintain the property. Mr. McClure agreed, and today the brothers remain in the house they grew up in, surrounded by familiar fields and pastures. Their sister, Yezenia Hernandez, lives next door with her husband and four sons, who attend West Marin School.

Mr. McClure still pastures cattle and rents housing to about 30 residents, including former employees and their families. Without these homes, many would be forced to leave the area, Eduardo said.

The park service generally razes buildings on public land as soon as they are vacated, erasing any visible traces of prior use, to restore the landscape to a more “natural” state, said Dewey Livingston, a former historian for the National Park Service. Even if buildings are old, decay abets destruction—maintaining buildings is costly, and dilapidated ones pose potential safety and legal hazards. 

Mr. Livingston has documented at least 129 houses that have either been removed or abandoned in the seashore and the Olema Valley lands of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area since 1962. 

In recent years, however, the ranches were listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the country’s official inventory of properties deemed worthy of preservation for historical, architectural, archeological or cultural value. While this listing doesn’t outright protect properties from demolition or alteration, it introduces additional bureaucratic barriers to doing so legally.

In an August email to the Light, park spokeswoman Melanie Gunn noted that the park service is only allowed to rent its buildings to its own employees. “As a result, if ranchers decide to discontinue operations for any reason, all occupants (ranchers and their families and ranch workers and their families) will not be able to continue to live in the park,” she wrote. 

Yet due to the historic designation of the ranches, federal preservation laws offer an exception: the park service could lease these buildings to non-employees, provided they take on the responsibility of maintaining the structures.

A blending of values

When the 71,000-acre Point Reyes National Seashore was established in 1962 on some of the country’s most fertile coastal farmland, it was envisioned as an experiment in blending protected wilderness with the region’s agrarian roots. 

At the height of the dairies, in the 20th century, dozens of farms blanketed the peninsula. This agricultural boom was set in motion decades earlier, in 1857, when two San Francisco lawyers, brothers Oscar and James Shafter, seized an opportunity presented by legal battles between Mexican rancheros who owned the land and Gold Rush squatters that moved in after the Mexican-American war. For $87,400, the Shafters acquired most of the peninsula and began leasing plots to tenant ranchers—many of whose descendants still run farms on the land today.

By 1960, the peninsula was home to 25 dairy and beef ranches. Those businesses supported 7,000 dairy cows, or 20 percent of Marin County’s total dairy herd, and 3,500 beef cattle, representing 90 percent of the county’s beef stock.

Central to the park’s original design was a 21,000-acre pastoral zone, carefully delineated to accommodate the ranches, alongside an expansive wilderness area. To secure political backing for the seashore, the original Point Reyes Act prohibited the use of eminent domain to acquire agricultural land, provided it continued to serve agricultural purposes.

“Point Reyes was created with an explicit commitment to retain active agricultural uses,” said Laura Watt, professor emerita at Sonoma State University and author of “The Paradox of Preservation: Wilderness and Working Landscapes at Point Reyes National Seashore.” “Without the political backing that came with that promise, the seashore might never have happened.” 

In the decade following the park’s creation, ranchers ended up selling their land to the federal government for substantial sums under the assumption that they could lease it back—an arrangement they believed would continue indefinitely. Most farmers signed 20-year or 25-year “reservation of occupancy and use” agreements, contracts that allowed continued ranching while transferring ownership to the park service.

By the early 1990s, nearly all these R.O.U.s had expired, except for two that lingered into the 2000s. With little public attention, the seashore’s superintendent at the time, John Sansing, converted these agreements into leases and permits. Currently, the grazing provisions of Point Reyes leases charge $7 per animal unit (defined as a cow and a calf) per month, a rate that the nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility argues is far below market value.

But Jim Coda, a retired assistant U.S. attorney who represented the park service in the 1970s and 1980s, argues that the ranchers misunderstood the nature of these arrangements. “There’s no legal basis to claim that Congress intended that ranching would go on forever,” he said. “It’s not written into any legislation.”  

Mr. Coda points to a 1978 amendment to the original Point Reyes legislation as evidence that ranching on federal land is discretionary, not guaranteed. “Where appropriate in the discretion of the Secretary, he or she may lease federally owned land… which has been acquired… and which was agricultural land prior to its acquisition.”

Dr. Watt points to the same legislation that the plaintiffs reference in their lawsuit, the Organic Act of 1916, which governs the National Park Service. “The park service doesn’t only have the legal obligation to protect natural resources,” she said. “It also has the legal obligation to protect cultural and historic resources.”

Congressional hearings in March 1961 reflected these complexities. During the debates over the seashore’s creation, then-Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall acknowledged the importance of ranching in shaping the peninsula. “The bills recognize that a substantial portion of the proposed seashore is now used for ranching purposes,” he testified. “To preserve the pastoral scene in this zone, the Secretary is authorized to acquire land subject to such continued use and occupancy…[to] accomplish this preservation objective.” 

Secretary Udall’s testimony made clear that agriculture was not merely allowed but should actively be preserved for historic and cultural purposes. He reassured ranchers that the proposed legislation included “reasonable safeguards” for the continuation of agricultural operations compatible with public enjoyment of the park.  

Just a few months later, in an August 1961 hearing, then-National Park Service Director Conrad Wirth further assured ranchers that they could remain on their land indefinitely. Ranch and dairy owners in the pastoral zone, he promised, could stay “for the pursuit of their present occupation as long as they wished to.”

When President John F. Kennedy signed the bill into law the following year, however, there were no clear provisions stipulating how long agriculture would be allowed to continue within the park. While the 1962 act included a clause stating, “No parcel of more than five hundred acres…shall be acquired without the consent of the owner so long as it…is used exclusively for ranching and dairying,” the legislation failed to anticipate the complexities of the leaseback agreements introduced in the 1978 amendment, which created the mechanism for the R.U.O.s to convert to permits. 

Throughout the legislative process, the proposal to establish the seashore met fierce opposition from local officials and ranchers. Among the most vocal opponents was dairyman Joe H. Mendoza, whose grandson Jarrod now operates a dairy on the Historic B Ranch. Delivering an impassioned testimony before Congress, he underscored the human hand in shaping the landscape. 

“We have some beautiful ranches out there today, and delightful and beautiful green hills you will hear described here, with dairy cattle scattered all over them,” Mr. Mendoza said. “But these are not accidents. Those green hills were made by man, tractors, and cattle. If you took man off that area and took the cattle off and took the tractors off of it that plowed those hills and reseeded the grasses and fertilized them, you would have nothing more than just an area covered with scrub brush.” 

Mr. Mendoza expressed deep frustration with how the seashore’s planning unfolded. “We were never consulted,” he testified. “It was all done from Washington. Our local county government was not consulted, or the local ranchers.”

Although the number of working ranches within the seashore has dwindled, as of 2021, its ranches and dairies accounted for nearly 20 percent—$17 million—of all gross agricultural production in Marin County. The Mendoza Dairy is one of four still in operation, along with the Nunes, Spaletta and Kehoe Dairies. Roughly 17,000 acres on the peninsula remain in grazing. All the remaining ranches operate under special-use permits, held by families that have worked these landscapes for at least four generations, and in several cases, for six.

At the core of the lawsuit are the dairies, where Holsteins, Jerseys, Guernseys and Devons produce more manure—and methane—than heifers and beef cattle. Their continuous lactation cycle demands higher feed intake, generating greater amounts of manure that threatens water quality as contaminated runoff. Dairy work is also more labor-intensive. The cows must be milked twice a day, requiring workers to live on-site to manage the demanding schedule. Over at Kehoe Dairy, Juan Carlos Isais leaves the house at 4 a.m. each morning to head to the milk parlor, and he returns again in the mid-afternoon. 

Years of litigation, negotiations and uncertainty over the future of ranching at Point Reyes have taken a visible toll. 

Tim Kehoe, who runs his family’s dairy with his two brothers, has been gradually selling off the herd. Less than a year ago, they had 500 cows; now, only 60 remain. Fewer cows mean less work, and less work means fewer jobs. One employee left in November, another in March, and a third moved away in April. Now, only Juan Carlos remains. 

Of the last group of employees, Mr. Isais was the first to arrive—and so, as his wife puts it, he will be the last to leave. In this remote landscape, housing is tied to employment, often offered as part of the job but rarely secured by formal leases. 

Ms. Isais and her infant son moved to Point Reyes from Jalostotitlán in 1997 to join her husband, who had arrived the year before. “My husband told me he wanted me to come on a Monday, and by Sunday I was on my way,” she recalled with a soft smile last Wednesday, seated in the meticulously kept living room of their home on the Historic J Ranch.

She contemplated the possibility of leaving the place she has called home for 27 years. “We left everything in Mexico to come here, and we left everything we loved,” she said. If they are forced to leave the park, it “will make everything change” again, she said.  

Standing in her driveway, Ms. Isais gazed across the road to the sun-faded pastures, their muted October hues of brown and gold stretching before her. To her left, a band of tule elk grazed on the same stretch of grass as the herd of dairy cows to her right, divided only by a low woven-wire fence. Aloud, she counted the elk in pairs, then shifted her eyes to the dwindling herd of black-and-white Holsteins.