The Tomales Bay Dairies and the Land Beneath Them

The pastoral landscape along Tomales Bay is among the most photographed in California. White farmhouses on headlands, dairy cattle in meadows that run down to the water, fog moving through in the mornings. It looks timeless. The history beneath it is anything but.

This was Coast Miwok territory. Before the Spanish missions reorganized the region in the late eighteenth century, before the Mexican ranchos that followed, and before the American settlers who came after those, this bay and the land around it was the heart of a Coast Miwok world that had persisted for thousands of years.

From the eighteen sixties onward, Swiss-Italian and Portuguese dairy families acquired land on the Point Reyes peninsula and along the Tomales Bay shore, building the agricultural economy that produced the landscape you see today. When Congress established Point Reyes National Seashore in nineteen sixty-two, those dairies were already there. The NPS created a system of long-term leases that allowed the farming families to continue operating inside the park boundaries, some of those leases running for decades.

A two thousand twenty-one NPS decision instead authorized the ranching families to keep operating under leases of up to twenty years, and allowed the park to reduce the tule elk herd to limit competition with cattle, putting agricultural heritage directly against ecological restoration goals. Environmental and animal welfare groups opposed that plan and sued to stop it. Litigation followed in the years after the decision. Mediation followed. A settlement was eventually reached that would phase out the remaining dairies and ranches with compensation.

The land was Coast Miwok territory before it was dairy land. It was dairy land before it was a national park. Each layer of that history is still here, in the pastures, the farmhouses, and the fog.