Occupy the Farm - Hearts Face the Sun

a piece i wrote for the slingshot magazine.  it was necessarily edited for space concerns, but i wanted to offer this version as a more holistic representation of my and others experience with the farm last year, as we prepare to return to the land this coming weekend.

Occupy the Farm - Hearts Face the Sun

By David Grefrath

“Tell me what I should do

to keep the sun out of your coat,

to find a way to obey the wind

to find the pomegranate on

the other side of the revolution.” ~Nathalie Handal

On April 22nd, 2012, around 200 people gathered under the banner "Free the Land" and stood at the locked east fence of a plot of land in Albany, California named 'The Gill Tract'. Some in the crowd thought they knew what was going to happen, some were surprised that no cops had been seen yet, but what was to transpire was a shock to everyone.

Gopal Dayaneni stood on a truck and held a tomato plant in his hand. He said that he was going to go onto the land, beyond the locked gate, and that he was going to plant that tomato. The lock was cut and 200 radical and activist human beings walked onto the last 7 acres of undeveloped farmland in the East Bay. No sirens, no cops. The activists-turned-farmers began to hand weed and pile stringy Mustard Greens that had gone to seed. Soon rototillers & compost would be unloaded and begin to till the Earth; soon over 10,000 plants would be brought to the field to be laid in soil to grow and by the end of the day those 200 human beings would have taken part in one of the most successful direct-actions of a generation, Occupy the Farm. Their actions were the direct result of over five months of clandestine planning, a decade and a half of public struggle over the fate of the land and several lifetimes’ worth of dreams.  Late in the afternoon, Pancho Steirle climbed to the top of a redwood tree near the south fence and fastened a flag at the top of the tree. The flag has a single image on it, one of the planet Earth.

By way of a short form of history, Edward Gill sold 104 acres of farm land to the University of California Regents in 1929.  There has been speculation that the deed stated that the land be used for agricultural research in perpetuity, but the foundation for such claims remains unproven. What is known is that for about 40 years, between the 1950s and the end of the 1990s, the Gill Tract was a stage for some of the most dynamic agricultural research on the planet. In a time when use of DDT was a mainstay in farming practices, the faculty at UC Berkeley used bugs to eat other bugs and were able to severely diminish the amount of poison that was applied to both food & land, a practice known as ‘Biological Control’. After 1998 though, Novartis began funding research, and UC focus shifted from Biological Control towards gene-isolation, patent-track research. Since then, almost all research on-site has been 'gene isolation' related research, which has almost no applicability other than Genetically Modified Organisms.  The UC owns over 150 GMO patents, patents which earned about $155 million for the UC in 2011.

Despite this, the UC Regents had, for years, been working with plans to 'develop' the last bit of the Gill Tract farmland from an area of pre-GMO research to a Whole Foods and for-profit senior living center, ostensibly for those suffering from Alzheimer’s and other severe ailments, with apartments starting at $4,000 a month. Certainly people need groceries. Certainly our elderly need a place where they are cared for. That day in April though, watching the wild turkeys running through the fields, the deer graze among the eucalyptus, the question that the activists and radicals asked was, 'Is this the place for it?'

Between 1998 & 2012, The UC Regents had courted counter-proposals for use of the land, the two major ones being the Bay-Area Center for Urban Agriculture (BACUA), and Village Creek Farm and Garden. Both were holistic responses, providing room for research and public involvement. Both had significant backing from the community, local NGOs and from researchers at the UC-Berkeley Campus. Both went through years of vetting and support gathering, only to be told, at the threshold of approval, that their efforts were unnecessary, and that the UC Regents were going to proceed with development plans to turn the area into a glorified strip mall. When a woman who had been working through official channels for over a decade to save the Gill Tract found out that we were going to occupy, she was overwhelmed with tears of joy.

On that day in April though, I was just amazed that we had got onto the Gill Tract, amazed that we had lasted into the afternoon without police arriving, and as the sun set to the west, with migrating geese circling overhead, we looked at a full acre which over 200 people had worked to weed and till that day; about half of which was already planted with tomatoes, cucumbers, pumpkins, zucchini and patty-pan squash.  Food Not Bombs cooked a meal for everyone and we called a general assembly underneath 'the big-top'. We each shared our names and some of the story of how we got there. I said that the organizers had a number of contingency plans.  These plans ranged from 'What if the cops block the gate?' to 'What if the DA calls out mutual aid, and several hundred riot cops arrive, and rain down tear-gas, concussion grenades and rubber bullets?”  In the wake of the kettling at “Moving Day” Occupation the prior January 2012, where over 300 people were subject to random arrest, these were not idle concerns. Still many knew the risks, or thought they knew them, and they were there, had signed up for the farm, had signed up to be at constant risk of arrest, risk of detainment, and for some like Pancho, risk of deportation due to lack of official citizenship. That first night, I told everyone I was still working on a plan that said, "If everything goes golden..."

On the third day, the UC response on the radio was that they were to arrive at the Gill Tract that afternoon and begin negotiations. The organizers continued integrating people's concerns and prepared to meet, but the only negotiations that commenced was that the UC Regents turned off the water to the site. Two aspects they didn't take into consideration are that the City of Albany’s plant storage site is also at the Gill Tract. Their move to dry out the Farm was also drying out about 150 bare root trees that were due to go to residents of Richmond & Albany as part of a free fruit tree planting program. Their move also turned off a fire hydrant at the West end of the site, a move which infuriated the local fire department.

And then something unexpected happened. The farm continued thriving. 3 storage tanks were offered by supporters of the farm, each tank holding 255 gallons. Members of Occupy the Farm volunteered their pickups and gas to carry the tanks.  Private citizens of Albany and the East Bay volunteered to provide water from their own homes. And so a move by the UC Regents designed to weaken the Farm ended up showing even greater community resiliency, as day after day, truckload after truckload of water was unloaded, and plant after plant was hand-watered by people defying the University's Police daily warnings of arrests. Also in the first few days, curiously, the Albany Police stated they would not interfere with Occupy the Farm, leaving the policing to the University of California's private Police force.

In the first week, we held a number of community forums to discuss the future of the land. It had been known that the UC researchers operated on year to year leases from the Regents for their work, making many current and former researchers anxious about their continued ability to keep their research going.  At our first community forum, researcher Damon Lisch, who conducted research on the Gill Tract, bravely attended and said, 'if work equals ownership, then I own this land and you all are on top of my work. I can't tell you how upsetting it is for me to have you here.' During the first few days, Occupy the Farm didn't have a mandate from the organizers or those involved as to what we should do, vis a vis researchers. We were working with a consensus model, and Damon Lisch had concerns to keep his livelihood and his research going. Even as many in the group worked to reverse a perception of being ‘anti-research’, it was a reality that Damon Lisch and his research is deeply upsetting to some members of Occupy the Farm, who see it supporting GMO science  This in turn could be seen as a major contributor to the suicides of over 270,000 farmers in India.  The story goes that in that land, many are swindled to buy GM cotton seeds, often the only ones available in seed stores, and subsequently get tangled in a downward debt spiral.  When the crops inevitably fail owing to a lack of irrigated watering this then ends in the degradation of the soil and all too often to the massive number of farmer suicide.  No one thing is a sole cause of this, but the presence of GM seeds seems to be a major driving force.  In addition, GMO plants have a history of wreaking havoc environmentally, in the form of topsoil erosion, groundwater poisoning and ocean hypoxification. Yet all that is far from the Gill Tract, and there the group worked towards consensus and set aside two and a half acres of the west field for Lisch and 3 other researchers, all of whom perform genetic isolation work with corn genes. Additionally, a professor and researcher who was involved with the 1998 Bay Area Center for Urban Agriculture (BACUA) proposal, Miguel Altieri, had his farmland set aside. Altieri has informed many students through the years about the history of the Gill Tract and had watched in vain as the University of California Regents continued to push to transform the Gill Tract from a place where things grow to a place where things are sold. Altieri particular research has involved dry farming, a rather miraculous practice where many crops can be grown using only natural rainfall.

So the occupation continued. Each day the Police arrived and read a statement to people planting a row of chard or with a wheelbarrow of compost.  Each day Food not Bombs made 3 meals.  Each day we held a general assembly to discuss concerns.  There were festivals held at the end of the first week and another for Beltaine.  As time passed though, tensions grew between the police and protesters. The motto of the farm, "Farmland is for Farming" was more than a slogan to the organizers and to those who worked the land, it was also a way to manifest genuine non-violent resistance for a group of human beings who had seen pickets and marches lead to little genuine change, save discouragement and disillusion. It was also a way to harness the message of the Occupy Movement and to involve people directly in building solutions based on resilience as we practiced dismantling the dying structures around us. BACUA & the Village Creek Farm & Garden had tried official channels and had failed. Occupy the Farm seemed to be finally both inclusively addressing concerns, as well as preserving the land.

The UC Regents called for a meeting to negotiate. Organizers from Occupy the Farm sent a half dozen people to attend, along with Dan Siegel, the lawyer who had battled the UC during the fight for People's Park, and who had been representing the Farm since before the activists arrived at the Gill Tract. The meeting contained little of note. The regents demanded that the organizers disband the farm; the Farm organizers demanded the Regents preserve the land in perpetuity for agriculture. The only genuine effect to come out of the meeting was that two days later, the UC Regents filed a lawsuit against all persons who stated they had attended the meeting, suing both them and 150 "John and Jane Does" for destruction of property, as well as remuneration for the ongoing policing efforts, with an estimated total cost of over a million dollars.

Still the farm persevered. Over the 3 weeks of occupation 80 rows of vegetables were planted, a permaculture Children's garden, the Ladybug Patch, was started across the street from Ocean View Elementary School, with many of the schoolchildren visiting the garden. A group of researchers who had been kicked off the land by the UC & Novartis in 1998 hosted a 'Return of the Seeds', which then restarted a seed-saving garden with the descendants of plants which had last been on the land more than a decade before.

As time passed, the Police stepped up visibility and farmers continued watering and planting. On Monday May 14th though, early in the morning, over 80 riot police from 5 precincts were dispatched to the Gill Tract. 7 were arrested, and the farm, in effect, went into hibernation. The UC Regents plowed under 40 rows of crops, the Ladybug patch and the seed saving library. Shortly afterwards, researchers began planting their spring crop of inedible corn. Curiously, UC Administration chose not to plow 40 rows of crops, much of the first day’s worth of planting.

Beginning in July 2012, organizers from Occupy the Farm began clandestine harvests of produce from the remaining plants, each event having an accompanying police presence. 8 harvests were held before the end of the growing season, which yielded a total of over one ton worth of produce. This produce was given away at free farm stands in Albany, Richmond and West Oakland, many areas which have a profound lack of available fresh vegetables. Also in July, the Albany City Council approved the Whole Foods development project and it’s accompanying Environmental Impact Report, a report which stated, among other things, that there is 'no prime or important farmland' at the Gill Tract. A group of Albany Residents formed the Albany Farm Alliance and gathered 1400 signatures in an effort to rescind the decision. The next month, in August, the million-dollar lawsuit filed by the UC Regents against the Farm Organizers was dropped. In September, the UC announced that the Northern portion of the Gill Tract was now to be managed by the College of Natural Resources for a period of 10 years, a move which put the Northern portion of the Gill Tract beyond the risk of development. Two days later a Whole Foods Corporate Spokesperson announced that due to delays, Whole Foods was no longer seeking to build a store at the Gill Tract.

Before the occupation, many of the organizers had thought that any of these outcomes were nearly impossible.  Yet organizers continued mobilizing around the land.  Sighting the Albany City Council's continued desire to have a development project on the site, Eric Larsen of the Albany Farm Alliance filed a lawsuit on behalf what is widely viewed as a highly deficient EIR, which will be heard in June 2013. As the Fall descended in 2012, the radical farmers planted an autumn crop of kale, collards & chard, intercropped with nitrogen fixing fava beans. The UC administration plowed under the fall crops in November. Even still, many of the plants that never made it to the farm were distributed to community gardens in the bay area. In December, Occupy the Farm took a series of clandestine soil samples taken on the south-side of the Gill Tract in an effort to highlight the lack of a genuine bioremediation program at the UC as well as continued lack of public access. Bioremediation remains one of the main stumbling blocks for groups, particularly in poor areas, to starting urban gardens and farms. Will the UC begin to use its public mandate as a land-grant institution to serve the needs of the East Bay and broader community?  Occupy the Farm continues to push for integration of public and private spaces for growing food and for the reconsideration of private property in an era where the commons are being continually turned into private profit.  Soon we will likely need public spaces, orchards, public food forests and communal spaces for planting more than we today realize.

January marked the publicly lauded 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's "I Have a Dream" speech. I'd like to use this forum to speak on a slightly different topic and highlight another anniversary as well. February marked the 40th anniversary of the Wounded Knee Occupation on Pine Ridge Sioux Indian Reservation. If the former event highlighted the possibilities of integration, the latter showed both just how far we remain from achieving justice and the need for a diversity of tactics in attempting remedy for unjust situations. We live in an era where autonomous zones serve as the incubation areas for the world that we all must lift our hands to create. From the endurance of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, to the ingenuity at Gaviotas in Columbia, from spontaneous community building to save land at La ZAD in France to the beautiful, varied insistence of the Arab Spring, Idle No More and the Tar-Sands Blockade, to each and every border between each and every land, we must all begin to share and integrate lessons of DIY resistance and liberation. We are in an era as well of one of the most rapid extinctions of species in the history of the planet. If you are reading this, you are still among the living, and you have a duty to both the ancestors and the unborn to find your gift as a human being, and to use that gift in service of life, life which has surrounded and supported you from the first electric explosion in the womb and which will continue to surround and to support you beyond the time of your last breath. If all that seems like a lot, out on the farm the geese are returning, and the winter continues to soften the soil with rain. We breathe, and each breath fills our heart with gratitude for life.  As a movement, the earth our drum, we hold dirt stained hands, turn towards the sun, and begin another season.

~updated Summer 2013