Extra

Local filmmaker and activist Todd Darling has made a delightful, instructive and inspiring film about people power, food and land rights, and the accelerating privatization of the University of California. Occupy the Farm is a real-life, live-action political tract in which Ground Zero is the Gill Tract—once the largest expanse of open agricultural land in the East Bay. The film's run at the UA Theatres has been extended for a second week. It will be screening several times a day through November 20. If you can't catch it on the big screen be sure to look for it on DVD. 

Occupy the Farm quickly makes the point that UC's founding mission—as a public, land-grant educational resource for the citizens of the state—has become corrupted by an expanding corporate agenda. Only a fragment of the 104 acres of farmland acquired in 1928 remains as open space. With half of the original Gill Tract land now occupied by University Village, a determined struggle has been raging over the fate of 20 contested acres located west of San Pablo Avenue on the El Cerrito-Richmond border. 

Local residents, university graduates and young activist farmers (may of the Occupiers turn out to be "all of the above") want the land preserved as a public resource, dedicated to raising food and raising consciousness about human ties to the land. 

The Gill Tract contains "some of the best soil in the East Bay," says Occupy The Farm (OTF) spokesperson (and Cal student) Lesley Haddock. "If it was used for food production, it could serve people all over the East Bay, people who don't have access to clean, non-GMO food." The University's Capital Projects (read: "real estate and commercial development") program wants to sell the land to private developers who would build a housing complex, a big-box supermarket and parking for 11,000 cars a day. 

(In an attempt to appease back-to-the-land advocates, UC announced the store would be a Whole Foods outlet. As Albany resident and retired UC electrical engineer Ed Fields put it: "I thought it was outrageous… to bring in corporate natural food trucked halfway across the country.") 

Land for People or Profit? 

Farming the land was once an integral part of the university's founding charter to teach and expand the skills of agriculture. That land-based ethic remains prominently engraved on the face of UC's Hilgard Hall: "To Rescue for Human Society the Native Values of Rural Life." 

In the Sixties, residents of University Village were able to farm a portion of the Tract to produce food for personal consumption. In the 1990, UC instituted an annual farming fee of $10 for Village residents. 

Since 1997, UC has been besieged by community activists—and by members of its own academic team—to drop plans for commercial development and dedicate the land to the pursuit of agroecology and "food sovereignty." After 16 frustrating years of UC administrative stonewalling, the community decided to act. Activists first occupied the land on April 22, 2012— Earth Day—and were violently evicted by the police. 

On May 11, 2013, the activists returned to the land and embarked on a more organized and effective occupation. During the weeks that followed, they managed to plant thousands of vegetable seedlings. After being routed from the land once again, they returned to the fenced-in farm months later, broke through the locked gates and harvested several tons of fresh squash, tomatoes and other produce that they donated to the community. 

The activists we meet onscreen in Occupy the Farm are impressive lot. To a man-and-a-woman, they are idealistic, dedicated, visionary, eloquent, well organized and charismatically indomitable. 

The New FSM: The Free Squash Movement 

These mostly young revolutionaries are activists in the finest sense of the Free Speech Movement. Like the students of the FSM, they stood up against an implacable institution and forced indifferent administrators to reconsider where they wanted to stand on the fulcrum that teeters between Private Power and Peoples' Rights. 

As Occupy the Farm documents, the Free Squash Movement activists did not plunge willy-nilly into a fanciful short-term escapade of rebellion. Recalling earlier attempts to save the Gill Tract from development, the activists knew what they were up against. Like the student organizers of the FSM, they were dogged and strategic: they planned ahead. Months before they carried their spades and hoes onto the Gill Tract, they had arranged with an organic farmer in Santa Cruz to grow 15,000 seedlings they hoped to plant in the university's soil. 

Before undertaking action they built up a wide base of support. They reached out to the off-campus community. They were willing to put in long hours hashing out strategy and goals. They operated by consensus. They were willing to get their hands dirty. 

"We challenged every [environmental impact review], challenged the zoning," retired teacher and Occupier Jackie Hermes-Fletcher recalls. "We fought really hard. We worked with Berkeley students, we got supporters elected to the City Council, we got the school district to pass a resolution." And the Occupiers filed two lawsuits, bringing UC's development engines to a screeching halt. 

"Whose Farm? Our Farm!" 

On the day of the planned occupation, a large crowd of occupiers arrived fully equipped with banners, leaflets, gardening tools, hoses and wheelbarrows. Some even showed up pushing gas-powered roto-tillers. In the first day on the land they weeded, turned over and planted an acre with rows of bright green seedlings. When the University shut off all water to the site on the third day of the occupation, the upstart farmers turned to their friends in neighborhood. Scores of homeowners responded by turning on their faucets to help fill 3,000-gallon water tanks that were driven to the site by pickup trucks. 

When the University blockaded the entrance used to deliver the water to the crops, the occupiers responded by decanting the water into hundreds of plastic containers that were laboriously hefted over the wire fencing and lugged to the rows of thirsty plants. 

The Occupiers are almost saintly in their response to the water shut-off. One young Richmond volunteer remarks how "the University's action forced us… No, not 'forced' … challenged us to find new solutions." Another occupier rolls up her sleeves and notes that the shut-off forced an entire First-World neighborhood to discover an experience that is a fundamental daily experience for 80 percent of the planet's people: "Hauling water." 

The police response begins almost pleasantly, with calm and often smiling officers urging the trespassing farmers to "please vacate the land." At one point, a younger security guard blocking at the main gate, raises his uniformed fist in a clenched salute of solidarity. "These are really great people," he tells the camera. 

Inevitably, the Establishment turns to the Dark Side and we are confronted with the familiar spectacle of a battalion of armed-for-war Robocops lined up to crackdown on a few dozen unarmed, peace-loving visionaries. (As a bonus, we also get to revisit videotapes of the police brutality inflicted on Occupy protesters—including students and some faculty members—on the steps of Sproul Hall.) 

One of Occupy the Farm's many sit-up-in-your-seat-and-cheer moments comes after the police have occupied the land. With armed cops deployed on the vacated farmland, the dispossessed farmers are forced to watch their seedlings withering away under the sun. Until one young man clambers over the chain-link fence and begs to have a large plastic water-jug passed over the fence. 

Off he goes, racing down one row after another, pouring water over the greens as the cops try to cut him off. Finally out of water, he makes a beeline for the fence and scrambles over the top to the safety of the sidewalk with the police just a few steps behind him. 

The Rise of the Corporate University 

Not every member of the community was comfortable with the occupation. At one of the public meetings with local residents, Darling's camera captures one neighbor who objects to the activists' tactics. "You can't just go around breaking the law," he argues. "What if I decided I wanted to go into my neighbor's yard and plant a garden?" 

At first, this sounds like a reasonable complaint but, on reflection, the criticism is misdirected. This wasn't an instance of one neighbor acting alone to encroach upon the territory of another homeowner. Instead, it was a case of a large community—a band of "landless" individuals united by the collective goal of challenging a powerful land-owning hierarchy. And (as often happens) "the law," in this case, was written to protect the physical assets of the propertied class, not the rights of individuals or the aspirations of the community. 

Occupy the Farm underscores the commercial nature of the modern University by including interviews with of several UC administrators whose work focuses not on education but rather on "Capital Projects." From collaborations with the Pentagon to build atomic weapons to billion-dollar contacts that have opened the campus to corporate behemoths like Bechtle and Monsanto, the modern university has become precisely the corporate handmaiden that the FMS's Mario Savio railed against. 

As governmental support for vital social services has withered over the years, it's not just healthcare, Social Security, and Post Office buildings that are at risk. Public universities and community colleges have been slowly starved of funds and driven into the clutches of the market economy. Driven to replace lost public funding with corporate donations, entire buildings have been installed on the UC campus to conduct the business of Fortune 500 corporations. Outside corporations now greatly influence the nature and direction of academic research. In 1998, UC announced a $25 million deal with Novartis to launch a program in agricultural biotechnology. (Not exactly a manifestation of the "Native Values of Rural Life.") And, in exchange for $500 million over ten years, the UC Regents welcomed BP (formerly British Petroleum) to establish an Energy Biosciences Institute on the Berkeley campus. The San Francisco Chronicle hailed this is as “by far the largest alliance ever between industry and academia.” 

Epilogue 

By the end of the film, OTF has managed to win some concessions from the University. The land has been transferred from the University's Capital Projects division and placed under the supervision of the College of Natural Resources. The administration had to back-paddle further after an OTF letter-writing campaign convinced Whole Foods to disassociate itself from the plan to pave over fertile farmlands with a parking lot. The University is still determined pave over the southern portion of the Tract and remains on track to develop the northern portion. (UC has announced a potential replacement for Whole Foods. As a result, there is now a campaign to convince the Sprouts food chain not to build a new store on the Tract's remaining open space. (See www.BoycottSprouts.com.) 

Meanwhile, a portion of the land on the northern end of the Tract remains open to public farming and is currently under cultivation. UC Professor of Agroecology Miguel Altieri argues that expanding farming at the Gill Tract—and in vacant lots throughout Alameda and Contra Costa counties—could "make a huge difference in solving food security problems in low-income neighborhoods of the East Bay." In Cuba, 30 percent of Havana's food is grown in the city's neighborhood gardens. The Bay Area, by contrast, imports 3,000 tons of food each day—food that travels an average distance of 1,000 miles. 

A 2009 report identified 1,200 acres of vacant public land in Oakland. According to OTF: "If only half of this land were cultivated using intensive ecological farming methods that we are testing at Gill Tract, we estimate that these 'commons' could contribute about 15,000 tons of vegetables to the local food system." That's enough vegetables to feed 150,000 people for a year. 

Altieri hopes to turn 1.5 acres of the Gill Tract into a living lab for urban farming that would educate and employ local youth and he is working to implement a Berkeley Food Institute that would help speed the transition from "industrialized, consolidated, homogenized" food systems to organic farming systems that are sustainable, diverse and just. 

The Occupiers' goal remains unchanged: A 20-acre public farm that serves as both a working farm that produces free fresh food for local communities and as a research hub to promote the transition to the creation of local, low-impact sustainable food systems. 

"This film documents the beginning of a new phase of struggle for public access to the Gill Tract," says Occupier Lesley Haddock. "We hope that this premiere will inspire more people in our community to join the effort to stop this development and for others to take action in their own neighborhoods to reclaim land for public benefit." 

For More Information: occupythefarm.org