Wealthy Marin County Cattle Ranchers Ask Congressional Republicans to Intervene on Point Reyes Settlement Deal
A couple of powerful Marin County cattle ranchers are desperate to retain their huge, hidden, multi-million dollar taxpayer subsidies — also known as corporate welfare for their multi-million dollar dairy and beef ranch operations. They have run to House Republicans for help. It’s a logical place for them to turn since they share a common philosophy: get poor and working class people to pay rich people more more millions of dollars.
The tricky part in all this is educating the public on some basic facts which the entire cow ranching industry cleverly, systematically hides from the public. This intentional deception props up an unprofitable industry, and this includes all those local, self-described “small” and organic “family farms” which you have been conditioned to think are the cream of the crop, the best of the best. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
These small “local” farms pollute the land more, contaminate pristine streams and waterways more, and emit more climate-heating methane gas than those larger, demonized so-called “factory farms.” The larger operations are actually more efficient at the filthy, polluting business of making milk and “beef” products.
WATCH April 22nd, 2025 Sky-Jack Podcast on this issue.
With special guest Jim Coda, retired 30-year federal attorney, including for the U.S. Interior Dept., handling its National Park Service cases:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI0RjdVm2xE
It’s a centuries-old practice: fleecing the poor and working class, via taxes and with cow farms, multi-million dollar government subsidies, to give even more millions to the millions. Money makes money; it’s the golden rule.
At Point Reyes, the beef ranchers and dairy “farmers” pay about 7¢ on the dollar for heavily taxpayer subsided federal leases for their public park lands.
These politically powerful Marin ranchers, led by outspoken spokesmen Albert Straus of the beloved Straus Family Creamery of west Marin County, CA, and Bill Niman of the industry famous “natural” and “grass-fed” beef Niman Ranch, are already successful in their lobbying effort. In response to their ranchers’ plea (letter), the Republicans running the House Natural Resources Committee have opened an “investigation” into that hard-won legal settlement that all its willing participants wanted and signed. The signatories included 12 of 14 cattle ranchers, the 3 environmental orgs that sued the National Park Service (NPS) for allowing so much manure pollution to egregiously degrade Point Reyes National Seashore, the NPS itself, and The Nature Conservancy (TNC), which has pledged a reported $30-$40 million dollars to pay ranchers to relinquish their park leases.
This is the January 2025 settlement deal that was the culmination of an almost 3-year-long lawsuit brought by those three environmental organizations that sued the National Park Service for allowing its tenant ranchers — they merely lease public land at Point Reyes, because they sold the land to the federal government decades ago — to pollute the park with millions of pounds of cow manure and urine, especially its streams and waterways which all ultimately drain into the Pacific Ocean on a protected coastline.
The ranchers would love the Republicans, under Dear Leader Trump, to somehow tank the deal. And since the Trump Adminstration is already ignoring federal court orders — and a Supreme Court ruling — they are the perfect rule-breakers to break this deal, by hook or more likely, by crook. Because… who’s gonna stop ’em?
Put another, stranger way: the well-connected Straus & Niman cow boys hope to prevent the Point Reyes National Seashore ranchers who signed the settlement deal from finalizing the deal and getting million dollar payouts in exchange for moving their dairy & beef cow operations out of Point Reyes.
Meaning, the two famous cow boys, Niman & Straus, apparently don’t even care what the Point Reyes ranchers might actually want. They’d like to blow up the deal for everyone and turn back the clock, to the time before activists and citizens outed the ranchers for just this type of political corruption, for their enviable welfare leases, and for their constant (manure & methane) pollution of a publicly owned national park.
It’s a match made in heaven; between entitled, deceitful local dairy and beef ranchers, and Congressional Republicans who are supplicant to the Trump Administration, which in turn is aggressively dismantling all democratic institutions of government, academia, the arts — really, all of what’s called our “civil” society. You know, the evil “Deep State” that keeps your retirement and Medicare checks coming, and public schools open to educate Americans. THOSE evil people.
For Marin County ranchers, this is just the latest desperate attempt to screw the public by having them continue to finance these “historic” businesses which are the greatest source of Point Reyes ecological damage. (Thousands of dairy and beef cows actively desiccate, pulverize, and contaminate Point Reyes National Park land.)
All the while, the well greased public relations machine of Big Beef and Big Dairy keep telling the public that they are hard-working “stewards of the land.” They’re not.
READ MORE about the cattle ranching scam.
WATCH April 22nd, 2025 Sky-Jack Podcast on this issue.
With special guest Jim Coda, retired 30-year federal attorney, including for the U.S. Interior Dept., handling its National Park Service cases:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI0RjdVm2xE