Fighting for the Farm

Santa Cruz Researchers Fear Planned Housing

Maria Alicia Gaura / SF Chronicle 7aug01

Santa Cruz -- Perched high above the bustle of downtown, the ocean-view fields of the Farm at the University of California Santa Cruz seem to inhabit a separate, peaceful universe.

But after savoring three decades of rural idyll, this research station for pesticide-free farming may soon be feeling the squeeze of encroaching suburbia.

University officials plan to build nearly 100 faculty homes on land adjoining the Farm, which is run by the university's Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems. And it may mean covering several acres of its organic research fields with closely spaced homes.

If the homes are built as planned, critics worry, the Farm's research could be hampered by hundreds of new neighbors complaining about dust, tractor noise and the earthy aroma of homemade compost.

And the apprentices who come from around the globe to camp near the fields and learn organic techniques might soon be listening to stereos and whizzing traffic at night, instead of the calls of hunting owls.

It's a looming culture clash in a town famous for its kaleidoscope of personalities.

"This is the story of California agriculture in microcosm," said Jim Nelson,

a UC Santa Cruz graduate who has operated his Boulder Creek organic farm, Camp Joy, for the past 30 years. "Prime agricultural soils are not protected, and when financial pressures come to bear, agriculture gets forced out by residential development."

University officials say the housing is desperately needed to retain faculty unable to afford housing in Santa Cruz County, where the average home sells for nearly $500,000. And they assured that the development will be designed to avoid the conflicts that traditionally plague the urban-rural interface.

"As a university, we have a mission to be a venue for trying out new solutions," said campus planning director Charlie Eadie. "This gives us an opportunity to be creative about these adjacency issues, to come up with something that will satisfy all parties."

Eadie's optimism is tempered by long experience in Santa Cruz, where development of any kind is sure to draw implacable opposition. The university in particular has been whipsawed by community factions demanding either that all growth stop, or that more on-campus housing be built to ease pressure on downtown.

Opponents of the housing plan worry that the wide-open fields of the Farm will be an irresistible lure to residents of the proposed high-density housing,

which includes no private yards.

But the plan has also drawn the wrath of area horticulturists, who note that the proposed housing will abut UCSC's famous Australian-themed Arboretum. Arboretum volunteer Edna Vollmer predicted that placing homes within a stone's throw of the plantings will lead to vandalism of the Arboretum's valuable collection.

"You can't have an arboretum with no walls, and no way to separate it from all that housing," Vollmer said. "There's just less space all the time."

Campus planners expect the potential for trouble will be lessened because the homes will be sold to faculty, who presumably will be respectful of the research taking place nearby. And the new development could include community gardens and orchards, intended to divert residents from trespassing on the Farm.

The three acres of cropland that the housing would displace are not part of the Farm proper, Eadie noted, but were lent to the program about 15 years ago.

Farm manager Jim Leap concurred. "When I came here, I was told not to get too attached to that parcel," Leap said. "We were just allowed to use it until housing, or whatever, came in."

While not eager to have a large new development on their borders, Farm researchers say the university has sweetened the pot by offering to replace the three acres of lost fields with as many as eight acres of new land in other locations. The Farm currently has 20 acres of dedicated land.

"Ideally, I would prefer not to have houses so close to the Farm," said Carol Shennan, director of the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems. "But there are some opportunities here.

"We would like to expand our acreage beyond what we currently have on loan, " Shennan said. "It would be good to have a larger permanently assigned acreage."

For more than three decades this modest research farm has plumbed the science of organic farming, transforming a field once dominated by hippie gardeners into the fastest-growing sector of American agriculture.

University officials, including Chancellor M.R.C. Greenwood, have said publicly that the Farm deserves room to expand.

But skeptics note that the promise of new acreage depends on the outcome of environmental studies and a vote of the UC Regents, neither of which is directly linked to the house-building plan.

"The concern at this point is that it is difficult to hold the university to promises that it makes, even promises made in earnest," said Don Burgitt, spokesman for the Organic Farming Research Foundation, an organization that funds research projects.

"We're looking for a commitment and a time line to make these areas permanently part of the Farm," Burgitt said. "It could easily not happen."

A similar housing plan, which would have carved an access road through the Arboretum, was proposed 10 years ago -- then abruptly abandoned by the university. Two years later, a campus plan was created that declared the land near the Farm and Arboretum off-limits to housing.

But that plan was quietly discarded, to the aggravation of Arboretum and Farm supporters who thought the battle over development on that site was finally over.

"They never made a real plan for the campus that they stick with," said Arboretum volunteer Marie Beckham. "The original planners here hoped to keep that area open in perpetuity."

"All these good things we want, we have to keep fighting and fighting and fighting for," said Vollmer. "You can never give up."

Even though UCSC is not subject to local planning regulation, environmental review and other planning matters will delay groundbreaking on the housing for two years, at least.

"We're dealing with tough questions here, and we still don't have all the answers," said campus planner Dean Fitch. "There's always the possibility that this project could be abandoned."