Occupy the Farm returns to UC Berkeley land

It was three days short of a year since UC Berkeley campus cops evicted Occupy the Farm from their three-week takeover [previously] of the university-owned Gill Tract in nearby Albany when protesters returned to their occupation today.

From vlogger Em Raguso:

Judith Scherr reports for the Oakland Tribune:

Chanting “Whose farm? Our farm!” some 150 people marched from Albany City Hall to a weed-strewn plot of University of California-owned land where they yanked out 3-foot-tall weeds and planted squash and tomato seedlings.

>snip<

Protesters want the Gill Tract to become an urban farm, while the university said it uses the land for agricultural research. A development is planned for an area adjacent to the land which has not been agriculturally zoned in decades, university officials have said.

As protesters entered the area Saturday, bringing with them two chickens, three goats and a rabbit, police informed them via bullhorn that they were trespassing and subject to arrest. As of late Saturday afternoon, no arrests had been made.

Read the rest.

And from the Occupy the Farm website, a report on today’s action:

Three days after UC Berkeley’s new development proposal on the Gill Tract was voted down at the City of Albany’s Planning and Zoning Commission meeting on May 8th, the organizing group Occupy the Farm has again taken a stand for public education and urban agriculture, setting down roots on the hotly contested land.

“People have been fighting to preserve this land for farming for decades, because they recognize that because this is UC land, all residents of the East Bay have a stake and a say in what happens to this public resource,” said Lesley Haddock, a third year student in UC Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources. “After fifteen years of trying to work through UC’s undemocratic process, public protest is our last option.”

Since 1997, coalitions of local residents, non-profits, and UC students and faculty have brought forth proposals to the UC administration for the creation of a sustainable urban agriculture curriculum on the entire Gill Tract. Administrators consistently rejected these proposals, and have been accused of not giving the proposals due consideration.

“Today we’re planting on the site of the proposed commercial development because we want to remind people what they will lose if a chain store and parking lot get built here,” stated Ashoka Finley, urban farmer and UC alum. “The UC, Albany even, could be on the cutting edge of participatory, community-based urban ag research, and they’re just throwing that opportunity away.”

Building on Occupy the Farm’s action in April-May 2012, today’s protest was focused on community education around food production . Farmers and activists were seen planting vegetables together, watering crops and passing out free plant starts to passers-by. There was a range of educational activities, including a seed-ball making workshop organized by a seven year-old. The young girl stated, “I just wanted to do it at a time when I knew a lot of kids would show up.”

As one of the last large plots of fertile agricultural soil left in the East Bay, the Gill Tract holds great potential for shifting our communities towards self-sufficiency through large-scale urban agriculture education. Occupy the Farm will be working all weekend to turn the south plot of the Gill Tract from an empty lot into an urban farm and community asset.

For more visuals and interviews, see this brief clip from ABC News 7 in San Francisco.

And here’s a report from the Daily Californian on the 14 May 2012 police raid ending the last occupation:

 

Another kind of austerity yields joy, community

Here’s a remarkable video from *faircompanies, a Spanish website focused on voluntary simplicity and sustainable living.

It’s the story that might be called Occupy Lakabe, the saga of the occupation of an abandoned village in the hills of Northern Spain that began three decades ago and has blossomed into a exemplary community, showing that a different way of living is not only possible but desirable.

The program notes from *faircompanies:

Medieval Spanish ghost town now self-sufficient ecovillage

It’s a utopian fantasy- discover a ghost town and rebuild it in line with your ideals-, but in Spain where there are nearly 3000 abandoned villages (most dating back to the Middle Ages), some big dreamers have spent the past 3 decades doing just that.

There are now a few dozen “ecoaldeas” – ecovillages – in Spain, most buil[t] from the ashes of former Medieval towns. One of the first towns to be rediscovered was a tiny hamlet in the mountains of northern Navarra.

It was rediscovered in 1980 by a group of people living nearby who had lost their goats and “when they found their goats, they found Lakabe”, explains Mauge Cañada, one of the early pioneers in the repopulation of the town.

The new inhabitants were all urbanites with no knowledge of country life so no one expected them to stay long. At first, the homes weren’t habitable so they lived 14 in a large room. Slowly they began to rebuild the homes and the gardens.

When they first began to rebuild, there was no road up to the town so horses were used to carry construction materials up the mountain. There was no electricity either so they lived with candles and oil lamps.

After a few years, they erected a windmill by hand, carrying the iron structure up the hill themselves. “Even though it seems tough and in some ways it was, but you realize you’re not as limited as you think,” says Mauge. “There are a lot of things people think they can’t do without a lot of money and there’s never been money here.”

In the early years, they generated income by selling some of their harvest and working odd jobs like using their newfound construction experience to rebuild roofs outside town. Later they rebuilt the village bakery and sold bread to the outside world.

Their organic sourdough breads now sell so well that today they can get by without looking for work outside town, but it helps that they keep their costs at a minimum as a way of life. “There’s an austerity that’s part of the desire of people who come here,” explains Mauge. “There’s not a desire for consumption to consume. We try to live with what there is.”

Today, the town generates all its own energy with the windmill, solar panels and a water turbine. It also has a wait list of people who’d like to move in, but Mauge says the answer is not for people to join what they have created, but to try to emulate them somewhere else.

“If you set your mind to it and there’s a group of people who want to do it, physically they can do it, economically they can do it. What right now is more difficult is being willing to suffer hardship or difficulties or… these days people have a lot of trouble living in situations of shortage or what is seen as shortage but it isn’t.”

From our own experience going back a few decades, we can say that we lived life at its fullest when we had the least cash and the most friends, all working toward common goals.

Austerity’s getting a bad rap these days, because the term has been coopted by economists to signify the sacrifice of the common good for the sake of private profits.

For Buckminster Fuller the desideratum was synergistic emphemeralization, which he defined as the art of doing more with less. With human communities, the process occurs when we rely more on community and less on commodity, finding the infinite variety of richness that comes from interaction with others in pursuit of common, mutually enriching goals.

So our hat’s off to the people of Lakabe for giving us a glimpse of what’s possible now.

Agrofuel roundup I: Scams, schemes, dreams

It’s been a while since we’ve covered the agrofuel scene, that wondrous playground of billionaires, Al Gore, and UC Berkeley millionaire patent-mongering profs.

There’s a whole lot to report, but we’ll start with one of the sweetest scams ever, in which a clever Canadian figured out how to make millions off Uncle Sugar simply by shipping trains full of agrodiesel south across the border, then bringing them right back to Canada without ever unloading a drop.

Then we’ll look at the latest news from BP and the university it owns right here in Berkeley.

In a second part we’ll give you a brief update on one of Berkeley’s agrofuel startups that isn’t and the fate of another partnership spearheaded by the same prof who launched the startup.

Canadian newsies investigate

The Canadian scam, which appears to have been perfectly legal, was first reported 3 December by John Nicol and Dave Seglins, a pair of intrepid journalists for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

In their first story, the reporters cited reports that the tasnkers made their down-and-back trips between 15 and 28 June 2010, earning CN Rail a potential $23.6 million [Canadian] in charges.

From their report:

“In 25 years, I’d never done anything like it,” one railway worker told CBC News on the condition he not be named for fear he might be fired. “The clerk told me it was some kind of money grab. We just did what we were told.”

>snip<

According to internal CN records, Train 503 shipped the biodiesel to Port Huron, Mich., from Sarnia, Ont.; Train 504 brought them back. The number of cars on the train would remain mostly the same, but cars were added and removed, between 68 and 89 cars at a time. As soon as the paperwork and car shuffling was completed, the trains made the return trip.

“This unit train will move at least once daily to Port Huron starting on Tuesday, June 18,” said an email written by Teresa Edwards, CN’s manager of transportation for Port Huron/Sarnia.

It will “clear customs and return to Sarnia. If we can get in more flips back and forth we will attempt to do so. Each move per car across the border is revenue generated for Sarnia/Port Huron.

“It will be the same cars flipping back and forth and the product will stay on the car.”

Damned fishy, right?

Why the hell would a company send a total of 1,984 tank cars full of fuel into the U.S., then bring them back without ever unloading them?

The reporters were back with a second story on the 20th, and it’s just as sordid as you might imagine.

They note:

It turns out the shipments were part of a deal by a Toronto-based company, which made several million dollars importing and exporting the fuel to exploit a loophole in a U.S. green energy program.

>snip<

Bioversel Trading hired CN Rail to import tanker loads of biodiesel to the U.S. to generate RINs, which are valuable in the U.S. because of a “greening” policy regulating the petroleum industry. The EPA’s “Renewable Fuel Standard” mandate that oil companies bring a certain amount of renewable fuel to market, quotas they can achieve through blending biofuel with fossil fuel or by purchasing RINs as offsets.

Because RINs can be generated through import, the 12 trainloads that crossed into Michigan would have contained enough biodiesel to create close to 12 million RINs. In the summer of 2010, biodiesel RINs were selling for 50 cents each, but the price soon fluctuated to more than $1 per credit.

Once “imported” to a company capable of generating RINs, ownership of the biodiesel was transferred to Bioversel’s American partner company, Verdeo, and then exported back to Canada. RINs must be “retired” once the fuel is exported from the U.S., but Bioversel says Verdeo retired ethanol RINs, worth pennies, instead of the more valuable biodiesel RINs. Bioversel claims this was all perfectly legal.

However, one of the companies Bioversel approached to be the ‘importer of record’—Northern Biodiesel Inc. of Ontario, N.Y. — discovered that the same fuel was going back and forth across the border and the same gallons were being used to repeatedly generate new RINs under their company’s name. The company called the EPA and also sent a letter that would become an open letter to the biodiesel industry, accusing Bioversel of “trying to perpetrate a fraud against NBI and the Renewable Fuel Standard program.”

And what was the result? Were the whistleblowers rewarded for their virtuous reporting of their inadvertent involvement in a potential ripoff of American taxpayers?

Yeah, right.

The CBC reports:

Northern Biodiesel insisted the RINs issued were not valid because it had never received any bills of lading or chemical analysis reports from Verdeo, and thus Northern Biodiesel never reported/certified them with the EPA. However, millions of these RINs were sold in its name.

As a result, Northern Biodiesel RINs became tainted within the industry and [company owner Bob] Bechtold said that put him out of business.

“That was about the dumbest thing we ever did,” said Bechtold about the letter and coming forward to the EPA. “We thought we were saving the industry, doing good to protect the industry, but it ended up being the kiss of death for us, because we are no longer able to participate in the field.”

Why are we not surprised?

BP turning sour on cellulosic?

One of the most prominent names in Berkeley campus politics has been BP, once known as the Anglo Iranian Oil Company.

The oil giant’s $500 million Energy Biosciences Institute [EBI] effort to create next generation fuels at th Helios lab at UC Berkeley was the largest corporate funding ever on an American college campus, and the subject of some intense faculty politics after the school’s administration accepted the cash without the requisite consultation with the academic senate [which eventually voted an ex post facto approval].

The research, conducted in a purpose-built taxpayer-funded lab complex in downtown Berkeley, with the corporation occupying most of the space for its own proprietary research and the rest of the complex protected from prying eyes by campus security.

While the research has been going on for the past five years, one thing that hasn’t happened is the development of the technology for production of cost-effective internal combustion fuels from plant cellulose, the widely truumpeted goal of most of the research.

Chris Somerville, the multimillionaire bioentrepreneur who heads the Energy Biosciences Institute [EBI], admitted as much in an interview published earlier this month on the EBI website:

[I]t is probably premature to build a biorefinery for production of lignocellulosic fuels. Academic work in the field has not yet converged to an optimal process. As I said, we think that such an optimized process will be continuous. When we get to a situation where academic studies have converged on the most efficient process and predict economic feasibility without subsidies, then it will be appropriate to start building biorefineries. Some companies appear to have started building lignocellulosic fuel biorefineries because they have adequate confidence in their own technologies, they want to capture possible business advantages of being early movers, and (because of) pressure from the government to get on with it in order to preserve the subsidies that are currently available for advanced biofuels. I cannot evaluate the merit of these possible motivations.  However, based on technical progress in the field, I remain very optimistic that we will eventually have a very large industry based on lignocellulose feedstocks.

Somerville has a habit of omitting inconvenient truths, as we learned early on when covering the birth of the EBI for the late Berkeley Daily Planet.

Back when he was selling campus colleagues and the community on the BP grant, he repeatedly claimed that the crops used for the new miracle fuels would be grown only on marginal land east of the Mississippi.

Chris Somerville

That was at best a gross distortion. First, the “marginal lands” were those which had been taken out of production under the federal Conservation Reserve Program, which was created to end farming on lands susceptible to catastrophic erosion. Lobbyists for Big Agra and Big Oil managed to get a law passed that removed the protection if the land is used for growing fuel crops — thus gutting a program created to head off a return of the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s.

The land also provides critical habitat for threatened and endangered wildlife

Edible City: Remarkable film about city farming

From director Andrew Hasse, a delightful documentary on the urban agriculture movement, focusing mainly on what’s happening along the eastern side of San Francisco Bay.

Local readers will see a lot of familiar faces, including UC Berkeley’s Miguel Altieri, the last remaining faculty member from the university’s now-gutted agroecology program, Jason Harvey of the Oakland Food Collective, Eric Holt-Gimenez, Willow Rosenthal of Oakland’s City Slicker Farms, educator Joy Moore of Berkeley Alternative High School, Leon Davis of the Hope Collaborative, permaculture specialist Brock Dolman, and more. Altieri also addresses the short-lived occupation of the university’s Gill Tract in Albany.

Hasse’s done an excellent job of exploring a very important response to the global economic crisis, a way to reclaim some of our independence as citizens and communities. And note the job on the faces of the young people as they participate in growing food to feed themselves and their families.

The film’s website is here.

Engineering our food to make us fatter, sick

Stephan Guyenet, a University of Washington neurobiologist who studies the neurobiology of body fat regulation and blogs at Whole Health Source, examines the way the corporate food complex has engineered the stuff we eat in ways that make us fatter and sicker in this TEDXHarvardLaw talk.

The program notes:

The United States has experienced a major health transition in the last 150 years, which has included an increase in the prevalence of obesity, diabetes and coronary heart disease. As these conditions are heavily influenced by food choices, it is important to understand how the American diet has changed over this time period. This talk will describe qualitative and quantitative changes in American food habits that may be relevant to modern disease patterns.

We’d only add that another key factor involved in the obesity epidemic is the plastic used to package and serve our food. Ample scientific evidence, establishes that plastic-packaged food contains leached chemicals resembling estrogens — hormones inclining us toward obesity and a whole host of other bodily and behavioral changes, as well as outbursts of political idiocy.

Massive drought sparks food shortage, riot fears

Here in the U.S., it’s the driest year in the last half-century and the hottest year ever recorded, a double whammy that’s leading to widespread crop failure and raising the specter, when combined with crops shortages in other countries, of massive unrest in the world’s poorer lands.

Dry weather is also cutting down on harvests in Africa, as the U.N.  International Strategy for Disaster Reduction reports:

More than two-thirds of Africa’s population lives in rural areas and depend on rain-fed agriculture and pasture, making them highly vulnerable to bouts of extreme dry weather, says ARC, noting that there have been 132 recorded droughts in sub-Saharan Africa since 1990.

This year, drought is causing a crisis in the Sahel, affecting an estimated 18 million people in Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal and Sudan. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization says overall Sahelian cereal production is 26 per cent lower than last year, with countries like Chad losing as much as half its cereal crops.

Only a year ago, drought in the Horn of Africa led to a severe food crisis for 10 million people in Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and Uganda. Britain’s Department for International Development, a major aid provider, says one year after famine was declared 2.5 million people in Somalia — the hardest hit country in the region — are still at risk of chronic food shortages.

Read the rest.

And then there’s the Indian subcontinent, where Agence France-Presse reports that the annual monsoon rains arrived late this summer, and they’ve been yielding much less moisture:

The much-romanticised annual downpour that normally sweeps in at the start of June in the far south of the country is a lifeline for. . .about two thirds of the 1.2-billion population who depend on agriculture for their incomes.

But the rains have been so poor that some farmers have decided not to sow crops, spelling more bad news for a slowing economy buffeted by its worst power crisis this week following massive blackouts.

>snip<

Haryana, along with neighbouring Punjab state, is known as the “bread basket” of India, the source of over 60 per cent of food grains such as wheat, maize, rice and pulses that are grown annually.

It has been one of the worst affected this year with 65 per cent less rain than the long-term average, according to the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) in New Delhi.

Nation-wide, the monsoon has been more than 20 per cent below its average, sparking fears of drought among farmers who remember vividly the failure of 2009, when India suffered its worst drought in nearly four decades.

Read the rest.

The grim news from close to home

The situation has reached extreme levels here in the U.S., breadbasket to the world. Hardest hit has been corn, where demand is driven not only by livestock and human consumption but by the federal ethanol mandate.

Here’s a status report on the drought from Bloomberg’s Brian K. Sullivan:

The two worst levels of drought now grip nearly one-fourth of the lower 48 states, the U.S. Drought Monitor reported.

About 24.1 percent of the region was suffering extreme or exceptional drought in the week ended Aug. 7, up from 22.3 percent in the previous period and 18.3 percent last year, according to the monitor, based in Lincoln, Nebraska.

While there has been some improvement in drought conditions in the Midwest, that wasn’t the case in the Great Plains, Mark Svoboda of the National Drought Mitigation Center in Lincoln said in an accompanying analysis.

>snip<

The drought has helped push corn prices to a record. World food prices have surged 6.2 percent as dryness has also gripped Russia and below-average monsoon rains fell in India.

The primary corn and soybean agriculture areas in the U.S. had their sixth-driest April-July growing season in records dating back to 1895, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said yesterday.

Read the rest.

For an idea of the extent of the crisis, here’s the latest edition of the U.S. Drought Monitor:

Heat wave breaks all previous records

By itself, drought would be bad enough, but then there’s record-breaking heat engulfing the American grain belt.

From Sam Nelson and Deborah Zabarenko of Reuters:

In the throes of a historic drought in the United States, a government agency said on Wednesday that it broke a heat record in July that had stood since the devastating Dust Bowl summer of 1936.

Reeling from widespread crop damage in July, Midwest farmers found some comfort on Wednesday in forecasts for rain over the next 10 days, a prospect that could take the edge off rising grain prices and concerns of food inflation worldwide.

The scorching month of July turned out to be the hottest month in the continental United States on record, beating the hottest month recorded in July 1936, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said.

The January-to-July period was also the warmest since modern record-keeping began in 1895, and the warmest 12-month period, eclipsing the last record set just a month ago. It was the fourth time in as many months that U.S. temperatures broke the hottest-12-months record, according to NOAA.

Read the rest.

More from the New York Times’ Joanna M. Foster:

“July was a pretty interesting month because there were two different things at play,” Jake Crouch, a climatologist at the agency’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., said in an interview. “We saw very warm daytime temperatures over a large part of the country related to the ongoing drought, just as in 1936. When soils are dry, especially during the summer, it drives the daytime temperatures up. But this is a very local effect.”

“On the other side, at the national level, we have also seen very warm nighttime temperatures, and that is part of a long-term trend we’ve seen across the contiguous U.S. over the past several decades,” he said. “The hotter days increase the amount of moisture the lower atmosphere can hold, and this means it doesn’t cool off as much at night anymore.”

“This clearly shows a longer-term warming trend in the U.S., not just one really hot month,” Mr. Crouch said.

Read the rest.

Global food prices edge upward, U.N. reports

UPDATE: First, a euronews video report on spiking food prices:

Next, the graphics, from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization [FAO]:

And the details:

The FAO Food Price Index (FFPI) averaged 213 points in July 2012, as much as 12 points (6 percent) up from June, but still well below the peak of 238 points reached in February 2011. The July surge of the Index followed three months of decline. The sharp rebound was mostly driven by a jump in grain and sugar prices, and more modest

Venezuela launches urban farming initiative

A fascinating report from Agence France-Presse on one nation’s efforts to reduce the price of food by opening up urban land to community farming. Providing citizens with free seeds, tools, and other materials needed to organically grow food, Venezuela is following in the footsteps of Cuba following the collapse of the Soviet Union:

And for more on the Cuban program, see here.

Cops clear out Gill Tract’s Occupy the Farm

Here’s a video capture via Occupy the Stream of a Livestream broadcast of the raid at 6:30 this morning by UC Berkeley and Albany police, ending with the videographer’s arrest

From the San Francisco Chronicle’s Michael Cabanatuan:

Police cleared out Monday morning the small group of protesters who had set up an urban farming camp in a patch of UC Berkeley agricultural research land in Albany.

University police officers in riot helmets gave the protesters 1o minutes to leave the Gill Tract before they marched across the fields near Marin and San Pablo avenues about 6:15 a.m. The handful of protesters who had not obeyed the police order were sent scurrying off the property and onto San Pablo, which is closed to traffic.

Two protesters were arrested for trespassing after they disobeyed police orders to leave the property, said Lt. Eric Tejada, a police spokesman.

Read the rest.

UPDATE: The latest from Occupy the Farm, posted at their blog:

Gill Tract Farm Raided, Reconverge Tomorrow 5 PM at the Albany Community Center

Well over 100 UCPD and Alameda County Sherriffs officers, armed with less-than-lethal impact-force projectiles, 36″ batons, and pepper-ball guns, arrested about five people at the Gill Tract Farm near 7 AM on Monday morning.

The Gill Tract Farmers Collective has called for a reconvergence meeting at the Albany Community Center, 1249 Marin Ave., at 5 PM tomorrow.

At the time of this post, the police officers occupying the Gill Tract escorted a large tractor onto the farmland.

UPDATE II: UC Berkeley has now released an official statement on the raid.

Here’s the opening:

Early this morning officers from the UCPD, along with personnel from other UC police departments, began taking the steps necessary for UC Berkeley to regain full control and supervision of our property in and around the Gill Tract. After weeks of patient dialogue, engagement and rejected offers of compromise, we deeply regret that the occupiers’ actions and continued insistence on free and unfettered access to what is an open-air laboratory left us no choice but to take this step. As the occupiers said in their statement rejecting our invitation to participate in efforts to sustain urban agriculture, “We’re not ceding control or supervision.”

It is no cause for celebration that the involvement of law enforcement is required to secure our fundamental property rights and protect a core value that is an indivisible part of who we are: academic freedom; the ability of our faculty and students to pursue their scientific interests without interference. We have said from the beginning that we would honor our commitment to protect the university’s rights and values.

Read the rest.

UPDATE III: Christopher Yee of the Daily Californian has the final arrest tally:

UCPD arrested 9 protesters as they retook control of UC-owned land in Albany Monday morning.

Officers from UC Berkeley and seven other UC campuses issued a dispersal order to the protesters — most of whom were outside the east gate to the land near the corner of San Pablo and Marin Avenues — at 6:15 a.m.

Two protesters were arrested after remaining on the land, known as the Gill Tract, and seven were arrested outside of the encampment’s entrances for unlawful assembly.

Read the rest.

Occupy the Farm gives up camp, farming stays

Occupy the Farm declined UC Berkeley’s for a meeting on the university’s terms, but they did give up their encampment today — but they’re not giving up their farming activities at the Cal-owned Gill Tract.

While the activists didn’t post a statement of their own at their website, they did reprint an article from Nanette Asimov of the San Francisco Chronicle:

Occupy the Farm protesters agreed Saturday to end their three-week encampment on UC Berkeley property in Albany, but rebuffed an invitation from the university to discuss how the area can be used for both urban farming and for research.

Instead, the several dozen protesters set up ladders to scale the fence UC had erected around the area along San Pablo Avenue known as the Gill Tract and said they will continue to tend the vegetables and fruit trees they’ve planted on 2 of the 5 disputed acres.

As a result, the UC regents said they won’t drop the civil lawsuit they filed Wednesday accusing 13 protesters of trespassing.

Read the rest.

More from Rick Hurd of the Contra Costa Times:

The group agreed to end their three-week encampment on the university property in Albany and dismantled much of its encampment Saturday morning, UC Berkeley spokesman Dan Mogulof said. But by 3 p.m., several people continued to use the area known as the Gill Tract and some tents remained, he said. Occupiers have said they will continue to do their own farming on the land.

Mogulof said the “window is still open” for a voluntary exit by protesters, but that they are “short on time,” because the research season begins next week.

Read the rest.

And from the Daily Californian’s Christopher Yee:

Occupy the Farm spokesperson Anya Kamenskaya said they will remove camping-related structures but continue to stay and farm the land. She said some protesters will camp outside the fence surrounding the tract though they had not yet worked out details as to how that would work.

“We’re moving our living infrastructure off-site to be painfully obvious that the issue isn’t camping,” Kamenskaya said. “The issue is farming — making sure people have access to the farm, allowing farmers and the community to come out and support us by planting and watering.”

Read the rest.

It’s an clever ploy, and it’ll be interesting to see how the university responds.

With Cal ultimatum, Gill Tract showdown looms

It’s fascinating to read the media coverage about the Occupation of UC Berkeley’s Gill Tract, the last prime piece of urban farmland along the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay and the inevitable showdown approaches between campus cops and the urban farmers now in occupation.

San Francisco Chronicle scribe Chip Johnson is abruptly dismissive of the action, declaring “their claim to the land and the reasons they’ve cited for their actions are as empty as the section of field they have commandeered.”

The whole tone of Johnson’s column won him inclusion on FreeRepublic.com.

Our sympathies are with the Occupy activists, because the issue they raise is critical: Creating educational centers to teach communities the skills of food cultivation in an era of economic uncertainty and dwindling resources.

The university contends it’s already made concessions, though experience teaches that UC Berkeley usually does only what the administrators want, and these days that’s catering to corporate needs.

Here’s the latest from Cal’s administrators, including a 10 a.m. Saturday deadline for evacuation of the tract:

On May 11 the UC Berkeley administration released the following statement concerning the Gill Tract:

After weeks of patient dialogue and rejected proposals for a peaceful resolution of the occupation, UC Berkeley will be taking the steps necessary for research to commence, and urban agriculture to continue on the Gill Tract.

On Saturday morning the dean of our College of Natural Resources, Keith Gilless, will lead a planning meeting that will tackle the details of how the Gill Tract will be shared by our researchers and urban agriculture, and how the effort will be supported, coordinated and sustained under the university’s supervision. The meeting and its agenda were developed in collaboration with the City of Albany, and participants will include appointed city officials, members of the Albany community identified by the city manager’s office, residents of University Village and UC Berkeley faculty members and students.

We are also reserving two seats at the table for representatives of the group that is still occupying our property. They have claimed that they do not want to interfere with our research and seek only to support urban agriculture. If that’s the case, we are hard-pressed to understand why the occupation needs to continue, given the fact that we are now moving forward with plans to have a portion of the land used for urban agriculture. In order to take their seat at the table, all they need to do by Saturday at 10 a.m. is pack up the encampment, leave our property and join a discussion that will advance one of their

Campus cops seal off Gill Tract Occupation

As we suspected, UC Bertkeley Police completed the second [or third] phase of their campaign against the Occupy the Farm activists now camped at the university Gill Tract.

From their blog:

Today, May 10, 2012 at approximately noon, the UCPD closed off the last remaining pedestrian access to the Gill Tract by chaining and locking the gate at San Pablo and Marin Avenues.  For the past 24 hours, that gate had remained open, and despite a heavy police presence people had been able to enter and exit freely through it.

This represents the latest in a series of measures taken by the UC Administration to force the Farmers off of this piece of public farmland.  To date, the UCPD has cut off all water to the Gill Tract, incapacitated the fire hydrant on the land, placed concrete barriers around the land preventing vehicular access, and locked all entrances shut.  Farmers note that these actions threaten more than just their plants: that in this dry, windy weather, which poses a high fire-risk, there are no working fire hydrants on the land, and significantly restricted access points for firefighters and exits for people on the land.

Farmers are upset that the UC Administration is preventing scientists from carrying out their research on the Gill Tract.  For the second day, UC Berkeley Professor Miguel Altieri has come to the Gill Tract to attempt to plant his crops. Whereas the Gill Tract Farmers Collective has directly assisted Altieri with his planting effort, the UCPD has physically prevented him from planting his dry-farmed tomato crop, saying he has no “authorization” to do his research.  Professor Altieri says that he is “disappointed that the University has missed this opportunity to acknowledge that a coexistence of researchers and occupiers is possible, and that they have blocked access to my experimental plot.”

The university’s moving a lot faster against the activists who want to see Gill Tract preserve and transformed into demonstration teaching farm for sustainable community gardens than they did against the treesitters, in part because a lawsuit was pending against the stadium development project.

And the university added a new twist this time, lawsuits against the Occupy activists which are certain to result in large legal bills for someone, as well as civil damages.

Occupy the Farm celebrates third week

From their blog, which has more details.

UC Berkeley files suit against Occupy activists

Say what you will about UC Berkeley’s often ham-fisted and baton-armed attempts to disrupt the Occupy movement, this time they’ve pulled a really clever move.

Before sending in the boys and girls in blue to bust the Occupy the Farm folks who are camped out at the university’s Gill Tract agricultural plot, they’re sending in the lawyers first, suing 14 Occupy participants for civil and punitive damages and the university’s legal fees.

It’s a strategy that doesn’t look as bad to the camera lens, and it’s one that could cost the activists a lot more cash than he nominal sums levied for trespass convictions if they find themselves on the losing side of litigation.

Here’s the university’s press release on the litigation:

Today the University of California commenced legal action against 14 individuals alleged to have participated in the illegal occupation of the university’s Gill Tract property. This lawsuit represents an additional step that the university is taking to regain control of its property so that it can be used for agricultural research and education. At the same time, the occupiers still have the opportunity to accept a proposal that would allow for a peaceful end to the illegal encampment, resumption of research activities and the continuation of urban farming on portions of the land that will not be utilized by faculty and students.

The suit, filed in Alameda County Superior Court today, alleges that the defendants, along with other unknown individuals who are sued as “Does,” conspired to cut locks, enter the property illegally and establish an illegal encampment. It alleges that the defendants continue to trespass on the property, despite repeated warnings from the UC Police Department that their presence is illegal. The suit alleges that the defendants’ illegal occupation is preventing research and educational activities on the property and that “if defendants do not leave the property immediately, the growing season will be lost,” resulting in substantial harm to researchers, students and the university. The suit requests a court order requiring the defendants to leave the property.

The university is also seeking an award of monetary damages for costs it has or will incur as a result of the trespass and for the rental value of the land during the occupation. The university also seeks payment by the defendants of its attorney’s fees under a state law that allows it to recover fees in a lawsuit involving “trespassing on lands . . . under cultivation.”

This legal action is not the only step that the university is prepared to take to protect the rights of its researchers and students, but it is one part of our efforts to end this illegal occupation. Among other things, it is a means to ensure that the trespassers — rather than the university, students and taxpayers — will bear the substantial expenses resulting from unlawful acts.

The lawsuit itself is posted online here [PDF].

Named in the action are Occupy activists Anya Kamenskaya, Gopal Dayaneni, Devin Murphy, Stefanie Rawlings, Eric Larsen, David Grefarth, Russell Bates [Berkeley], Alexandra Cano [Berkeley], Vaden Dabney [Oakland], Erik Eisenberg [Oakland], Elizabreth Fairweather [Rancho Cucamonga], Marika Iyer, Nathan Pitts [San Ramon], Gabrielle Silverman, and Francisco Stierle [Berkeley].

UC Berkeley researcher denied opportunity to plant

Occupy the Farm hasn’t responded to the suit on their website, but they have posted other new developments, including the campus police blockade of vehicle access to the site.

In an interesting twist, the one UC Berkeley with permission to plant on the site, was told he lacked “authorization,” according to the latest bulletin:

Professor Miguel Altieri, researcher at the Gill Tract for 31 years, planned to begin planting his research plot with his students this morning. An hour before he was scheduled to begin, the UC administration barricaded the Gill Tract with concrete, metal barriers, and dozens of police who threatened farmers with “chemical agents and impact force.” In a blatant affront to academic freedom,

Campus cops move to enclose Occupy the Farm

The UC Berkeley strategy with the occupation of the university’s Gill Tract agricultural plot is beginning to look more and more like the same game plan used against the nation’s longest-ever urban tree-sit.

The tree-sit, launched on the day of the Big Game between Cal and Stanford 2 December 2006, ended on 9 September 2008.

That protest was launched to protect a grove that stood in the way of the university’s plans for a new high tech $200 million gym on the site and for renovation of California Memorial Stadium, which sits directly astride the Hayward Fault — the seismic rupture the U.S. Geological survey designates as the most likely site of the San Francisco Bay Area’s next major earthquake.

Before the final bills are paid, the total costs will run over a billion dollars.

Occupy the Farm protesters are fighting to save the East Bay’s last remaining plot of prime agricultural land from university development plans.

The tract was once home to the nation’s premiere agroecology research center, which sought to control farming pests with natural rather than chemical means.

The last agroecologist left on the site, Professor Miguel Altieri, was planting dry farming tomatoes today with the help of volunteers from the occupation.

Today was also the day UC Berkeley police closed off the site from vehicle access, the first step in a process of enclosure we suspect will follow the same basic pattern deployed against the treesitters.

In the tree-sit, as in the Gill Tract occupation, the university began by containing the site with fencing to keep out additional tree-sitters and deprive them of supplies. Only after a civil suit began challenging the university’s development plans did the campus cops finally allow the protesters to be supplied with food and water.

Today the university launched a similar action, as Chris De Benedetti of the Oakland Tribune reports:

Police on Wednesday morning blocked vehicle access to a UC Berkeley-owned farm that protesters have occupied for more than two weeks.

Several officers arrived at the farm at 6 a.m. and announced they were blocking the Jackson Street entrance to the property, said Ashoka Finley, a spokesman for the group calling itself “Occupy the Farm.”

While police erected a concrete barrier at the entrance, other officers patrolled the surrounding streets in vans and motorcycles, said Finley, who teaches urban agriculture at Richmond High School.

“It seems like this might be a slow-motion raid,” he said. “Part of the UC tactics is to flex their muscle.”

No arrests have been made and none of the protesters have been removed, UC Berkeley police Lt. Eric Tejada said.

Read the rest.

Aggressive law enforcement began with a flurry of trespassing citations and stay-away orders barring the protesters from campus.

A fence followed, with a long delay in action as the lawsuit played out.

Police made periodic raids inside the fence, occasionally with cherry pickers to pluck protestors from their arboreal havens.

The final action was preceded by a chainsaw squad and the cutting of 40 of the 41 trees slated for demolition, leaving the last tree housing the last four tree-sitters [click on the image to enlarge].

8 September 2008, Nikon D300, ISO 1000, 10.5mm, 1/2500 sec, f/9

One the final day, construction crews erected scaffolding around redwood as a crowd watched.

9 September 2008, Nikon D300, ISO 640, 230mm, 1/100 sec, f/10

Then-UC Berkeley Police Chief Victoria Harrison had herself delivered by crane-suspended basket to make one last demand that the tree-sitters leave.

9 September 2008, Nikon D300, ISO 400, 102mm, 1/250 sec, f/11

The last tree-sitter gave a gesture of defiance as police approached up the staircase built into the scaffolding.

9 September 2008, Nikon D300, ISO 640, 270mm, 1/1600 sec, f/10

After his surender came the inevitable perp walk.

9 September 2008, Nikon D300, ISO 400, 135mm, 1/125 sec, f/11

Once they’d surrendered, the chainsaws were out again and the tree was felled.

We suspect the university will trying a similar strategy: Completely containment followed by a police action to remove the occupation.

The barricades are up and the university is getting ready to move in. The only question is when.

Latest statements from Occupy the Farm and Cal

First the Occupy the Farm’s response to the police blockade:

At 6:30 AM this morning, several dozen UC police officers brought a bulldozer to the Gill Tract, deposited large concrete barriers at gated entrances to the Gill Tract Farm, and U-Locked the gates shut.  They threatened people with “chemical agents and impact force”, and appeared prepared to bulldoze and destroy the farm. Community members immediately mobilized to defend the farm, walking past police lines and hopping fences to get into the tract. The police since

Three pictures of an occupation, the golden hour

Some shots we took last Monday while visit the Occupy the Farm encampment as the shut began to sink in the west, adding that warmth of light that makes it what photographers call “the golden hour.” Click on any of the images to enlarge.

Time for a musical interlude. . .

30 April 2012, Nikon D300, ISO 640, 40 mm, 1/160 second, f/16

Tools and supplies laid down for the day. . .

30 April 2012, Nikon D300, ISO 640, 20 mm, 1/320 second, f/16

While the signs remain on alert. . .

30 April 2012, Nikon D300, ISO 640, 28 mm, 1/100 second, f/16

Another Cal prof weighs in on Occupy the Farm

Occupy the Farm [previously], the ongoing launched-on-Earth-Day Occupation of UC Berkeley’s Gill Tract agricultural plot, continues.

While the university had wrongly claimed the action had no support from researchers who worked at the site [Miguel Altieri], the action has also enlisted some other notable faculty support [Claudia Carr, Paul Rabinow, Laura Nader, etc.]

Now consider this excerpt of a statement by Professor Jeffrey M. Romm of Cal’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy, & Management, who specializes in natural resource and environmental policy. Posted at the Occupy the Farm website:

The current Gill Tract issue replicates the kind of problem that many college researchers have worked successfully to overcome, i.e. structural divides that prevent effective ecosystem management in large part by excluding those with the strongest motives for beneficial action. Faculty and students so involved cannot be expected to turn their backs on the core lessons of their careers. The mutual benefits of overcoming the divide and achieving cooperative relations between campus and community are so demonstrable and compelling that a number of faculty would not maintain their integrity if siding with the party that refuses opportunities for cooperation and adaptability.

The Gill Tract occupation creates a huge opportunity. After fifteen years of stonewall in the midst of sweeping social and ecological changes, the occupation should have come as no surprise to anyone. It does come at a time, though, when the university has become surrounded by community generated agricultural enterprise and has established its own capacity to respond in truly excellent fashion. The occupation has been conducted with utmost respect for the university, the community and the land. Equivalent responses by the university would produce a major step forward for everyone. The meaning and matter of Gill Tract extend throughout the Bay Area, with the potential for much more.

Read the rest.

Romm’s insights are particularly noteworthy in light of his expertise, particularly as described in this excerpt from his web page:

Distribution, Growth, and Resource ‘Sustainability’: Our group studies how the dynamics of social distribution, economic growth, and ecosystems interact and respond to alternative forms of policy and organization. These studies range through farm, village, watershed, county, state, and national to global scales of analysis. The conceptual frameworks are chosen to suit the particular problem of interest, but come primarily from political science, ecology, economics and sociology. Members of the group, although each is focused on one or several of these disciplines, develop a shared capacity in the work of all members. Specific topics have included, for example: the dynamics of irrigation, groundwater and watershed regimes (India, Samoa, Philippines, United States); regional patterns of soil enhancement, conservation and decline (Philippines, Nepal); adoption of agroforestry, social forestry and community forestry at farm, village and regional levels (India, Nepal, Bangladesh, United States); forest and land use dynamics and ecological change (Thailand, China, Vietnam, India, Sri Lanka, United States); impacts of national and state policies on resource use and environmental possibilities (Vietnam, United States, India).

In short, just the sort of guy about the right use of the last urban farmland acreage left along San Francisco Bay’s urban eastern shore.

Occupy the Farm: Urban agriculture at work

Participants in Occupy The Farm [previously], the ongoing takeover of UC Berkeley’s urban farmland, hope to see the site turned into an urban sustainable agriculture demonstration farm and learning center.

At one time, their goal would’ve been in greater harmony with the university’s use of the site.

In labs and officers long gone to the wrecking crews, scientists ran the nation’s premiere center of agroecology, the growing of crops using insects, other plants, and other non-chemical techniques to control pests and promote abundant crops.

But UC Berkeley has become Global Corporate University, more interesting in capturing corporate funds and developing profitably patentable genetically altered plants and microbes than in finding ways to feed earth’s people that enrich lives and not corporations.

In that light, we offer you three short documentaries on urban agriculture and its ability to enhance life and community.

First up, a video about a land where sustainable farms and urban gardens weren’t merely desirable. They were necessary.

The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil, 2006, 52:48

A movie showing the power of urban gardens and sustainable agriculture to enable a community to survive an energy collapse, as shown by the transformation of Cuban agriculture following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the loss of subsidized oil imports.

Directed by Faith Morgan and released in 2006 by The Community Solution and available for purchase here.

The program notes:

When Cuba lost access to Soviet oil in the early 1990s, the country faced an immediate crisis – feeding the population – and an ongoing challenge: how to create a new low-energy society. This film tells the story of the Cuban people’s hardship, ingenuity, and triumph over sudden adversity – through cooperation, conservation, and community.

More here.

University of Michigan-Dearborn Urban Farming Summit, 2010, 97 minutes

What would happen if a university held a public forum on urban gardens?

When the university planned this 7 April 2010 urban farming summit, they expected 50 people would sign up. The got 250 instead.

And the resulting discussion offered a look at programs underway by the American city confronted with economic collapse well before the rest of the nation.

You can skip the first thirteen minutes or so to get straight to the introductions of the members of a very interesting panel moderated by Bruce Pietrykowski, a professor of economics at the university:

• Ashley Atkinson, director of urban agriculture for the Greening of Detroit
• Oran Hesterman, CEO of Fair Food Network, a nonprofit sustainable food advocacy group
• Susan Schmidt, director of food service at The Henry Ford in Dearborn
• Kami Pothukuchi, an associate professor at Wayne state and director of SEED Wayne
• Malik Kenyatta Yakini, educator and chair of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, which runs its own urban farm

Flint Food Fighters, 2011, 26:48

Finally, a video from MSUTISM, the website for videos from faculty, students, and summer camp participants at the Department for Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media at Michigan State

The program notes:

Urban Farmers in Flint describe some of the issues they face as they endeavor to develop a sustainable economy based on agriculture. Troy Hale and Geri Alumit Zeldes co-directed and produced this magazine-style interview. Brian Kusch was the technical engineer.

UC Berkeley profs offer Gill Tract proposal

From the Occupy the Farm blog a proposal from two Cal faculty members:

How to turn the “occupy the UC Gill Tract” conflict into an opportunity for resolving key food, environmental and social problems affecting our Bay Area urban communities?

Last Updated on 30 April 2012

Published on 30 April 2012

Miguel A. Altieri

Professor of Agroecology, College of Natural Resources, UC Berkeley

And

Claudia J. Carr

Associate Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management, UC Berkeley

Dozens of advocates of community urban farming took over UC’s Gill Tract on Earth Day, April 22, establishing a camp and planting about two acres of vegetable crops. Their goal is to prevent development of this five-acre piece of land that represents one the few remaining agricultural spaces with the best (“class-one”) soil in the East Bay. This effort would allow the community to be engaged with the land, arguing that preserving it as a productive farm is consistent with public policy and the public interest. Such preservation would also honor the history of the Gill Tract, which has housed researchers who, since the 1940’s, conducted research on biological pest control, protecting California agriculture from exotic pests without the use of chemical pesticides.

To many people, the actions taken by the farm advocates are consistent with the University’s education and public mission as a Land Grant institution with a Cooperative Extension function, (the latter established in the Smith-Lever Act of 1914), to promote community involvement and initiatives in agriculture. Their actions are also consistent with California public policy as set forth in section 815, to preserve and protect open space, particularly agricultural land that has historical significance – such as the Gill Tract.

The UC Berkeley administration counters that the land being occupied is currently, and for the foreseeable future, being used as an open-air laboratory by the students and faculty of the College of Natural Resources for agricultural research. They argue that this use is part of a larger quest to provide a hungry planet with more abundant food, which will be impeded if the protest continues. (In fact, this is a poor argument, since hunger is not primarily related to production but much more to poverty and lack of access to land). Although UC’s comments about not developing the five acres may be technically correct, they may be perceived as misleading for at least three reasons:

(i) since its purchase in 1928 ( or, perhaps, its bequest to UC by the Gill family farm with the condition that it should be used forever as an agricultural research station), UC has parceled, sold off, and developed about 90% of the 104 acre plot. Can a land grant University divert agricultural land to commercial or recreational uses? Does such diversion contradict the land grant mission of a public University?

(ii) UC has transferred the land from the College of Natural Resources to UCB Capital Projects, its commercial arm which specializes in “development projects”; and

(iii) the 2004 Master Plan, jointly worked out with the Albany City Council and Planning Commission, clearly states that the land has been re-designated from “academic reserve” to “recreation and open space”  which may mean baseball and soccer fields, parks, or any number of recreational designations.

 Does such redesignation guarantee the preservation of the land for an urban agriculture center? This is an idea that several professors, students, 45 non profit organizations and community members, organized under the Bay Area Coalition for Urban Agriculture (BACUA), presented in the form of a proposal to the University in February 2000. The proposal was for the creation of the world’s first university center on sustainable urban agriculture and food systems. The purposes of the Center were to be to promote research, education, extension and outreach in the various environmental and socioeconomic dimensions of urban farming and sustainable food systems. This proposal was ignored by the University, and so was a later one, presented in 2005 by Urban Roots, to create the Village Creek Farm and Gardens, a farm that would provide Bay Area students from preschool to community college and university with an educational resource par excellence. Urban Roots argued at the time that a Center for Urban Agriculture at the Gill Tract offered UC Berkeley the opportunity to join other organizations and community members in teaching students and future urban dwellers these skills and the benefits of locally produced food. From these facts, it can be concluded that until now, the University has shown little or no interest in requests for community involvement and benefit from the exceptionally high quality lands at the Gill Tract.

Last week UC asserted in a statement: “We are passionate advocates of metropolitan agriculture projects that are well planned, sustainable and considerate of all members of our community. Representatives of the university are more than willing to meet with any interested community members to discuss proposals for metropolitan, sustainable agriculture.” The community group’s current action presents a golden opportunity for all within UC, including the newly created faculty and student based Center for Diversified Farming Systems, as well as non-profit organizations working on food justice and urban agriculture and community members, to revive the previous ideas for creating a Center for sustainable urban farming.

Why is this important as we start the second decade of the new Millennium?

The rapid urbanization that is taking place in the Bay Area goes hand in hand with a rapid increase in urban poverty and food insecurity, a situation aggravated by the economic crisis affecting California. Half a million people are at risk of hunger every month. About 38 percent of them are children, especially in summer, because low-income children who normally receive free or reduced lunches during the school year no longer have these meals. As a result, parents struggle to find the extra funds needed to provide healthy, nutritious meals for their children, even in the face of high unemployment. Many low-income urban residents in the Bay Area reside in “food deserts,” i.e. in areas having limited access to affordable and nutritious food, particularly in lower income neighborhoods and communities.

Urban agriculture plays a key role in enhancing urban food security, since the costs of supplying and distributing food from rural to urban areas, or to import food for the cities, are rising continuously, thus increasing therefore urban food insecurity. Take Oakland as an example: in that city publicly owned land with productive potential totals 1,201 acres. Food production with agroecological methods at these sites could potentially produce as much as 15 to 20 percent of Oakland’s fruit and vegetable needs. But to realize this potential, UC Berkeley first needs to recognize the potential of urban agriculture to help solve problems of hunger and unemployment, and then launch a major research, education and extension program on urban agriculture that should involve local governments, urban farmers and the whole community in participatory ways, so as to address the real needs of the poor and hungry. The benefits of urban agriculture go beyond producing food: they extend to the promotion of local economic development, poverty alleviation and social inclusion of the poor — and of women, in particular. Urban agriculture also contributes to the urban ecosystem by greening the city, productively reusing urban wastes, conserving pollinators and wildlife, and saving energy involved in the transport of food (in addition to reducing greenhouse gas emissions!).

 Let us transform the conflict potentially unfolding into a positive dialogue that will lead the University to continue carrying out its major mission of working with communities to serve the needs of the people of California. What could be more important than doing this around the issue of local food production?

The Gill Tract: Pictures at an Occupation

Here’s a sampling of the sites we encountered Saturday on our visit to Occupy the Farm. Click on the images to enlarge.

A banner greets visits as they enter the site, which is located near the southwestern corner of the intersection of San Pablo and Marin avenues.

28 April 2012, Nikon D300, ISO 640, 27mm, 1/4000 sec, f7.1

Supplies and seedlings waiting to be planted.

28 April 2012, Nikon D300, ISO 640, 18mm, 1/2000 sec, f7.1

A family planting.

28 April 2012, Nikon D300, ISO 640, 24mm, 1/1600 sec, f7.1

And what’s a field without a scarecrow?

28 April 2012, Nikon D300, ISO 640, 90 mm, 1/2500 sec, f7.1

No encampment’s complete without tents.

28 April 2012, Nikon D300, ISO 640, 38mm, 1/3200 sec, f7.1

And art was on the agenda.

28 April 2012, Nikon D300, ISO 640, 20mm, 1/5000 sec, f7.1

And art requires an artist.

28 April 2012, Nikon D300, ISO 640, 20mm, 1/1600 sec, f7.1

Gathering for conversation.

28 April 2012, Nikon D300, ISO 640, 27mm, 1/4000 sec, f7.1

While others head for some eats.

28 April 2012, Nikon D300, ISO 640, 18mm, 1/640 sec, f7.1

And still others cleanup up.

28 April 2012, Nikon D300, ISO 640, 28mm, 1/1250 sec, f7.1

And what’s an occupation with a cop, in this case a UCPD officer reciting a daily ritual announcement that the occupation is illegal and subject to eviction at any moment, accompanied by arrest.

28 April 2012, Nikon D300, ISO 640, 27mm, 1/800 sec, f7.1

Occupy the Farm, nurturing sustainability

UC Berkeley’s claim that Occupy the Tract — the peaceful takeover of UC Berkeley’s Gill Tract farmland in Albany — lacked support from Cal researchers took a big hit Saturday when several of them showed up for an occupation open house.

Professor Miguel Altieri spoke at an afternoon session, offering his full support for the movement which includes many of his own students.

Altieri is an agroecologist who devotes his research to finding the most effective ways to grow crops without the use of chemicals, a movement which began in its modern form with research at the site.

We counted five other Cal faculty at the site, including two who spoke briefly during the information session held on a bright, sunny day.

Altieri said UC Berkeley faculty have been heavily involved in past efforts to save the land for sustainable urban agriculture, including the 1997 drive by Bay Area Coalition for Urban Agriculture [BACUA], which was endorsed by 45 agricultural and environmental groups including Food First, Urban Habitat Project, and Earth Island Journal.

BACUA came up with a detailed proposal for the site, which is posted online here. The university rejected it.

“We did everything the university asked us to do in developing a plan to convert the Gill Tract to a center for sustainable agriculture,” said Shyaam M. Shabaka, founder and executive director of EcoVillage Farm in nearby Richmond. “The university reneged without explanation on the day the agreement was to be finalized.”

Albany activist Michael Beer helped organize another proposal with the backing of the Albany school board to transform the tract into Village Creek Farm and Garden, a site as a site for interdisciplinary academic research, a teaching center for young people, and as a working farm to provide organic food for local consumers and restaurants.

The proposal is posted online here as a PDF.

The Gill Tract and the global land struggle

Miguel Altieri

Altieri said Occupy the Farm is part of a larger global struggle for land.

Control of the land is essential both for feeding the world sustainably and for the preservation of identities and culture.

Urban farms are critical to the struggle, he said.

“More than 30 percent of the food in the world is grown in cities,” Altieri said. He cited the case of Cuba, where urban agriculture saved the country from famine after the collapse of the Soviet Union ended the supplies of oil and other critical resources.

Now Cuban urban farms produce 15 to 20 kilograms of food per square meter annually, compared to 5 kilograms in the U.S.

Altieri’s ideal would be the transformation of the site into a teaching and outreach center. His own research on the Gill Tract has been halted for the moment since the university shut off water to the site.

A look back at the BACUA plan

Fifteen years after it was proposed, it’s worth looking back at BACUA.

Writing in Earth Island Journal in 1997. Food First Executive Director Peter Rosset described the group’s vision:

BACUA believes that the explosion in urban farming taking place throughout the world is a positive development – people taking control of the resources that they need for their own livelihoods.

In this era of privatizaton, the University’s Agricultural Research Stations are casting about for a new research mission. It is becoming increasingly common throughout the world for public institutions (and universities in particular) to form partnerships with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to share resources and promote common survival. Such a partnership at the Gill Tract, would involve university professors, researchers and students with committed NGOs, working together in a new and rapidly expanding field. (Something similar already exists at the UC Santa Cruz Agroecology Program, but this program doesn’t serve an urban region anything like the Bay Area.)

We can imagine a working community farm that would provide good jobs to local youth and quality organic food to local residents. The farm would simultaneously serve as a demonstration training site for young farmers and as a research site for the University. The farm’s greenhouses could support research directed at improving urban farming technologies while the vacant buildings could become offices shared by NGOs (ranging from urban gardening, school, and community groups, to food policy and education organizations and advocacy groups) and by university professors studying the economic, agronomic, nutritional, ecological and sociological aspects of urban agriculture.

If the potential is unlimited, the alternative is appalling. The loss of this precious of urban farmland would forfeit a once-in-a-lifetime chance to create something new, something where the total would clearly be bigger than the sum of the parts.

The creation of a unique working farm/research station would be true to the legacy of the Division of Biological Control, which over the last two decades fought the long good fight against the state’s dominant agribusiness interests and the agrochemical industry.

Read the rest.

And for a history of the Gill Tract from its pre-Columbian days to the present, see this essay by Miguel Altieri.