Commentary

Cow Palace is dead — and now we know the U.S. government helped pull the trigger.

On Sept. 12, 2024, while dairy farmers across Washington were just scraping by under the crushing weight of inflation, regulations and activist-driven lawsuits, the Department of Justice was busy hosting a secret virtual meeting titled U.S. v. Cow Palace et al Coordination. Not a hearing. Not a trial. A coordination meeting.

Who was invited? Not the farmers. Not the people whose livelihoods were on the line. No, this cozy little huddle included DOJ lawyers, several officials from EPA Region 10, radical environmental attorney Charlie Tebbutt and his associate Jon Frohnmayer, and activists from the Center for Food Safety and Water and Environmental Technologies — known allies in the ongoing war against family farms.

Let’s call this what it is: a coordinated assault by our own government and ideological extremists to bring down one of Washington state’s most iconic dairies.

And it worked. Cow Palace is now closing. After surviving for over half a century — through wars, droughts, recessions and market crashes — it couldn’t survive the U.S. Department of Justice and Environmental Protection Agency.

The people behind that Microsoft Teams call should be ashamed. But shame requires a conscience — and clearly, that’s in short supply among those who believe a “just” outcome means bankrupting a multigenerational family farm to score points with anti-agriculture donors.

Now, Cow Palace is selling off its entire herd in what was billed as the world’s largest dairy auction. It’s not just a farm liquidation — it’s a funeral. A forced extinction. And the fingerprints of Charlie Tebbutt, the EPA, and the DOJ are all over the body.

Let’s stop and ask the question every American should be asking: Is this normal? Is it standard legal procedure for U.S. government agencies to meet privately with one side of a case to “coordinate” strategy? Absolutely not! That kind of closed-door collusion is not just unusual—it’s inappropriate, unethical and potentially illegal. This wasn’t an oversight. It was orchestration.

So why did it happen?

The answer becomes clearer when you realize that Cow Palace and other farms like it were following the rules. They were operating under state CAFO permits built on federal standards. They were meeting the expectations laid out by the very agencies now joining hands with activists to destroy them. But that’s not enough for Charlie Tebbutt and his allies. According to them, compliance with the rules is no longer sufficient. They are now demanding impossible standards, moving the goalposts with every passing year, until farms are forced to close their doors in exhaustion, confusion, or financial ruin.

This is not about environmental protection. It’s about elimination.

Where was the transparency? Where was the science? Where was even a pretense of fairness?

The public has been told this is about “protecting groundwater.” Let’s be honest — the real agenda is the eradication of large-scale animal agriculture in this state. The people in that meeting don’t want to improve dairies. They want to eliminate them. They don’t want to regulate — they want to destroy.

And now the cowards in government are not just enabling it — they’re coordinating it.

To be crystal clear: the government has no business teaming up with activists whose sole mission is to end farming as we know it. Imagine the outcry if the DOJ held a secret coordination call with Big Oil executives to plan enforcement actions against solar energy companies. The double standard is staggering.

This isn’t environmen

tal justice. It’s political warfare. And the casualties are the families who rise at 4 a.m. to milk cows, who have sacrificed everything to feed this state and this country.

If you’re a farmer, this is a five-alarm fire. If you’re a consumer who values affordable, local food, this is your wake-up call.

Cow Palace is gone. But the blueprint used to take them out is still on the table. And unless we expose this corruption and stop this agenda in its tracks, more farms will fall. That secret “coordination” meeting wasn’t the end. It was the beginning.

This document is proof: our government is no longer neutral. It is complicit. And it just helped kill a dairy.

The question now is — who’s next?

Ben Tindall is executive director of Save Family Farming.