The cows didn’t want to leave. Stubborn to the end, the last five bucked and writhed and bolted as Kevin Lunny, his son Patrick, and their friend Jimmy Curtis coaxed, prodded and finally muscled them into the cattle trailer.
For once, Kevin and Patrick’s preternatural sense for handling ruminants seemed to desert them. Frustrated and dazed, they watched as the cows turned and charged back down the chute, forcing them to start over.
“You guys are going to get tired of this too, you know,” Kevin muttered, smearing manure onto his jeans after shoving a particularly stubborn heifer from behind.
The scene played out as a kind of mourning rite, a rage of bereavement. In resisting the trailer, the cattle seemed to make tangible the disbelief hanging over the morning. Eventually, they gave in.
By the time the trailer door clanged shut, it was late morning on Friday and the sun was high over G Ranch in the Point Reyes National Seashore. Less than an hour before, Kevin had walked staff from the Nature Conservancy and National Park Service through the property—pastures, barns and outbuildings, and the home he’d grown up in, the house where he and his wife, Nancy, raised their three children. The team took photos, jotted down notes, recording the before and after.
“This is the only address I’ve ever had,” Kevin told Ethan Inlander of the Nature Conservancy.
Mr. Inlander, who will now have a role in overseeing the land, nodded. “I manage a 15,000-acre ranch down in San Luis Obispo County,” he said. Gesturing around him, he added, “All of this is obviously new for me—but of course I grew up coming out here.”
Standing beside a loaded moving truck, Kevin gave a last lamentation. “This whole thing is wrong,” he said in his firm yet genial way. “This is the wrong ending, but it’s the ending. This ends people’s history, their culture. This is who we are and what we are. This is a rural community that has just been eviscerated. This is a terrible ending—that we agreed to.”
But the story might not be over yet.
If the Lunnys hoped to find closure last week, they didn’t. Instead, they linger in a fog of disbelief hovering over a volatile political landscape.
The future of farming on Point Reyes is not resolved, but awaiting the rumored intervention of top Trump officials: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. According to sources, both have privately signaled support for ranching advocates challenging the Biden-era deal to phase out most agriculture in the seashore by next spring.
Representatives of Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Burgum’s offices declined to comment on matters related to Point Reyes, citing pending litigation.
For Kevin, the most outspoken rancher on the peninsula and among the first to depart, it feels like an implausible fiction.
Last Friday, he and Nancy left home for the Sierra Nevada foothills, bound for a new house, a new street and unfamiliar neighbors.
The winding path that led powerful political allies to their cause rests on an enigmatic figure: Chadwick Conover, who goes by Ceadda (pronounced KAY-duh).
As first reported by the Press Democrat last week, Mr. Conover became the improbable link between Albert Straus, founder of Straus Family Creamery, and Washington’s political elite. Desperate to halt the Nature Conservancy-brokered deal that paid 11 ranchers and dairy farmers to walk away from their multigenerational operations, Mr. Straus turned to Mr. Conover after exhausting other options.
“Everything the Nature Conservancy, the park service, and these rewilding groups were doing was contrary to our whole way of being in West Marin,” said Mr. Straus, whose Marshall creamery buys 15 percent of its milk from two dairies in the park. Last month, one supplier, Jarrod Mendoza of B Ranch, sold 175 cows, downsizing to a small herd of 20.
For months, Mr. Straus had been penning op-eds, lobbying politicians on both sides of the aisle and calling on staffers connected to the G.O.P.-controlled House Natural Resources Committee, which in April launched an investigation into the settlement.
But Mr. Straus felt like he was getting nowhere—at least not anywhere fast enough. That changed when his friend Neka Pasquale, founder of the organic food company Urban Remedy, introduced him to Mr. Conover.
Ms. Pasquale first met Mr. Conover in 2014 at her Mill Valley store, where they bonded over a shared philosophy of living in harmony with nature. When she learned of the conservancy’s buyout plan at a fundraiser in Ross attended by the upper crust of Bay Area entrepreneurs, tech executives, venture capitalists and investors, she was incensed.
“It really pissed me off to be sitting in a room of extremely wealthy people who aren’t from here and wanted to make decisions for a community they’re not part of,” said Ms. Pasquale, who lives in Lagunitas and attended the event with her boyfriend, Steve Simon, managing member of Simon Equity Partners. “There was no discussion of the impact that this would have on the community—its culture, its schools.”
By late January, Mr. Conover and Mr. Straus were in regular contact. On the surface, it was an unlikely match: Mr. Straus, the 70-year-old Democrat and pioneering dairyman; Mr. Conover, a 39-year-old conservative adventurer with a laid-back charisma, a kind of societal buccaneer.
“You have to be sort of a gnarly, hardcore dude for me to respect you,” Mr. Conover told the Light on a phone call from the Bahamas. “But Albert’s just disarming. Grandfatherly. I couldn’t help but like him. He’s not some hardcore hick Republican, and he’s not a hardcore liberal Democrat. He’s just doing what he believes in.”
As a child, Mr. Conover had admired the signature Straus glass milk bottles, with their ivory collar of cream rising to the neck. But when he first spoke with Mr. Straus, he didn’t hesitate to lay down his own principles. “I’m not getting on board with anything if it’s going to harm the wildlife,” he recalled saying. After conversations and research, he was convinced their visions aligned.
His goal, he said, is to protect the wild while preserving human civilization.
“My idea is to have them blended together, and West Marin, in my opinion, is a beautiful example of where that can happen. What better place to show the world, ‘Hey, we have wildlife here, we have ancient trees, we have a wild coastline—and we do farming right here.’”
When considering how to get the message across, he was a pragmatist: “It’s simple: you go to the very top or you don’t go at all. If you can’t get it done at the very top, it won’t happen. So I’m not talking to congressmen or House committees. I went to the fucking top—the Secretary of the Interior and R.F.K.—because those two have the power.”
At the end of March, Mr. Conover sent a text to Mr. Kennedy: “Bobby, the Dems are forcing 12 multi-generational organic dairy farms in West Marin to shut down because ‘environmentalists’ don’t believe these small regenerative farms should be on park land.”
Mr. Kennedy, who had met Mr. Conover at a 2023 campaign fundraiser in Malibu, responded in minutes: “This is an appalling tragedy. Unfortunately, it’s all California insane state laws and policies, so there is no federal jurisdiction.”
But once Mr. Conover clarified that the land in question was a national park, Mr. Kennedy replied that he had alerted Mr. Burgum, who promised to investigate. He also asked Mr. Conover to arrange a call with Mr. Straus.
Raised in Half Moon Bay by a single mother, Mr. Conover was, by his own account, communing with redwoods before he could walk, riding bareback at 6, and encircled by great white sharks at 8. His father, who lived in Sausalito, Mill Valley, and Novato, often dreamed aloud of owning a home near Tomales Bay. After his father was found dead in a hotel room in 2021, Mr. Conover scattered his ashes near Bolinas and along the bay.
Like many conversion stories, Mr. Conover’s begins with a crisis of faith. He was kicked out of school after ninth grade and never returned. In his 20s, he was convicted of selling marijuana and assaulting an off-duty police officer. From his jail cell in Redwood City, he could see the Santa Cruz Mountains. “This is not who I am,” he remembers thinking.
In jail he read “The Count of Monte Cristo,” and its themes of transformation and reinvention struck a chord. By the time he moved to Malibu in 2018, he had adopted the name “Ceadda,” a symbolic rebirth and a practical shield against Google searches of his past.
A name, he found, could be a kind of scaffolding for one’s aspirations—a structure on which to build a self. “I came from nothing, no family, no name, no education, no generational wealth, and now have been in rooms with the most powerful people in the world,” he said.
His work is amorphous, though he describes himself as “a very solution-oriented person.” “People will approach me and say, ‘Hey, I have this problem; can you help me?’” he said.
He’s like a benevolent fixer for the well-heeled, though he bristles at that term. “It’s not like mafia shit,” he said. “It has to morally align with what I’m about in this world.”
He doesn’t use banks, gets paid in cash and pays rent the same way. He has no health insurance, drinks raw milk, eats grassfed beef and wears only natural fibers. “I’ll spend $10,000 on a suit if it’s made from sustainable, beautiful stuff,” he said.
Shortly after his conversations with Mr. Conover and Mr. Straus, Mr. Kennedy reached out to Nicolette Hahn Niman, whom he had known from when she worked as a senior attorney and he was board chairman for The Waterkeeper Alliance in New York. In the early 2000s, they traveled the country together, crusading against factory farms and promoting small-scale organic agriculture. It was during this time that she met her future husband, Bill Niman.
When the Nimans filed their lawsuit against the Interior Department and the National Park Service in March, Ms. Hahn Niman didn’t call Mr. Kennedy. “He’s constantly being asked to do things—even before he was in the position he’s in now,” she said. “I always felt like I didn’t want to use our friendship to ask for favors.”
But Mr. Kennedy called her. In a 15-minute call—“which, with him, is a very long call,” she noted—she brought him up to speed on the intractable conflict in a park that his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, authorized in 1962.
In early May, Mr. Kennedy reached out again, this time saying he planned to visit with other members of the administration “to make an announcement.” Ms. Hahn Niman offered her Bolinas ranch as a backdrop.
To Ms. Hahn Niman, it’s not surprising that West Marin ranchers have an ally in Mr. Kennedy. Long before he spoke of vaccines, 9/11, fluoride, assassinations and AIDS, he was an environmentalist and advocate for sustainable agriculture.
His “Make America Healthy Again” agenda calls for tighter pesticide regulations and greater support for regenerative agriculture. He has become a crucible for an unlikely coalition of far left- and far right-leaning homesteaders and homeschoolers, hippies and religious believers suspicious of conventional medicine and mass-produced food.
“I think we’re living in a time when a lot of the classic characterizations about what it means to be on the right or left don’t really apply anymore,” Ms. Hahn Niman said. “I don’t care what someone’s politics are—red or blue, this administration or that one. You have to have all different kinds of allies.”
In early May, Mr. Conover received another text from Mr. Kennedy. “Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and myself will come out there this month to make the announcement,” Mr. Conover said, reading from his texts over the phone. “You should tell the remaining farmers not to take the deal.”
Another text followed on May 13, saying, “We are being very aggressive about driving this quickly.”
On June 2, Mr. Conover sent a message to the Light: “I’m not sharing anymore personal correspondence between myself and the powers that be but the cavalry is on the way and that’s a promise.”