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
