Over 120 farmworkers are about to be jobless, thanks to the US Environmental Protection Agency’s relentless, decade-long crusade against family dairy farms in Washington’s Lower Yakima Valley.

They’re employees at Cow Palace, one of the nation’s most environmentally advanced dairy farms. But that didn’t matter to the EPA. The agency has coordinated a campaign to attack and punish this and three other family-owned dairies near Yakima. It’s targeted the family farms for over a decade, falsely blaming them for groundwater nitrate contamination to justify its aggressive litigation.

The result? Despite all the work they and their employer put in to try to satisfy the federal regulator’s demands, they’re out of jobs. Cow Palace has announced it won’t financially survive the EPA’s latest legal salvo and is closing its doors for good.

Does the EPA care? Will the EPA look these workers and their families in the eye and admit that the questionable science it used to justify these attacks–that are now costing these workers their livelihoods–has since been discredited? That a top federal expert has even labeled their science study as outright “fraudulent”? That all the costly compliance efforts forced upon these dairies as a result of that study were never truly about environmental protection, but about control, punishment, and a bureaucratic power grab?

Of the four farms originally in EPA’s crosshairs, only one now remains in business, and it faces a crushing, uphill battle against a federal agency that appears determined to regulate these family dairy farms out of existence. The price tag for the dairies’ efforts to comply with EPA demands–only to be told the work wasn’t enough–is estimated to be in the millions.

It’s not clear whether any farm could survive an onslaught like the campaign EPA has waged against these four family dairies. And the environment isn’t any better for it. Instead of protecting the land, EPA’s actions have left a trail of devastation, destroying family farms, ending hundreds of farmworker jobs, weakening local communities and creating a deep-seated distrust for government regulators who seem more intent on punishing than protecting. So what’s their endgame?

Now, most farms in the region won’t allow the EPA on their property, for fear they may be the next target of an unjustified campaign of costly, farm-killing litigation. Farms have seen what happens when the agency sets its sights on hardworking farm families.

The bottom line: These 120 workers didn’t need to lose their jobs. This innovative, multigenerational family farm didn’t need to disappear. And EPA didn’t need to wage a campaign of destruction against farms that worked diligently to comply.