COLUMN ONE : Ag Schools Eroded by Suburbia : More and more students are trading in their overalls for power ties. An increasingly urban student body is making it difficult to preserve an agricultural orientation.

As suburbia creeps up to its freshly plowed borders and business students pour in, Cal Poly Pomona, Southern California’s premier agriculture school, is grappling with change that challenges the very principles on which it was founded.

Only one student in 20 studies agriculture at Cal Poly these days, and out of a student body of 19,579, only 383 are majoring in the animal science subjects that require the most land.

Meanwhile, the school’s business, agribusiness and liberal arts enrollments have boomed, creating a voracious demand on the 1,400-acre campus for new classrooms, administrative buildings and parking lots.

The result: a growing debate over how Cal Poly can meet the needs of its increasingly urban student body and preserve its agricultural orientation and open space, the school’s most precious and irreplaceable resource.

“I don’t want any more land to be taken for parking lots . . . but being a realist, I know what we’re up against,” says Hugh O. La Bounty, Cal Poly’s president, who came to the school 38 years ago when its campus sat amid ranches and farms.

Cal Poly’s predicament isn’t unique. Across the country, agriculture schools in urbanizing areas have seen campus development chip away at open space. With more and more students trading overalls for power ties, these schools realize that they must implement agricultural perestroika if they intend to survive and meet changing industry needs.

“Even the farmers aren’t sending their kids to ag school any more,” says John H. Davis, a vice president of the National Assn. of Supervisors of Agricultural Education and director of agriculture education for the state of Ohio. “It’s more into the business and marketing and the applications in those areas.”

At Cal Poly Pomona, where total agricultural enrollment has dwindled from 1,710 to 957 in the past decade, the agriculture school has responded by dropping 20 classes, merging two of 13 departments and may merge two more. The school has trimmed animal flocks and herds by one-third and eliminated its goat unit.

The school has become “a wonderful oasis in an urban jungle,” said Allen C. Christensen, dean of the School of Agriculture. It is surrounded by a freeway, a landfill, a cemetery, housing tracts, an industrial area and a junior college.

However, change is taking place on the campus, where development is expected to generate some significant environmental issues, said Wayne Russell, Cal Poly Pomona’s associate vice president for physical planning and development.

“If you make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs,” he said.

At growing numbers of schools, however, eggs and the animals that lay them have already receded into history.

Pierce College in Woodland Hills has shut down its poultry unit and campus dairy. The school is considering dismantling its agricultural school and turning some of the 250 agricultural acres into a golf course or park if enrollment doesn’t improve. In the spring semester, cows outnumbered agriculture students by 40 to 16, teachers said.

Ohio State University in Columbus recently sold more than 300 agricultural acres and is building a computer facility on a field that used to grow crops, said Davis.

Even Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and UC Davis, where agriculture students and critters have ample room to roam, are wrestling with development.

“Certainly there’s a problem with campus growth encroaching on land” used for agriculture, said Robert Fridley, associate dean of the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences at UC Davis.

Some agricultural colleges are finding it cheaper to use campus agricultural property for development, and to buy farmland in outlying areas to replace it.

UC Davis recently announced it was buying a 1,576-acre ranch 1 1/2 miles from the school, in part to replace campus agricultural land slated to be developed.

In the last 10 years, many agriculture schools across the county have suffered from the farm crisis, which pared the nation’s 2 million farms by 200,000 and led to industry consolidation as farms became larger and more mechanized.

But agriculture is a $17.7-billion industry in California, and educators say demand is booming for graduates in peripheral and high-tech fields. Cal Poly Pomona, for instance, trains 95% of its agriculture graduates in areas such as food processing, golf course management, veterinary pharmaceutical sales and horticulture therapy for emotionally disturbed and handicapped people.

“We’re telling our international ag people they’d better think about a foreign language like Japanese or Korean rather than spending most of their courses learning how to produce citrus and avocado,” Christensen said.

In Pomona, a field that used to grow grain has given way to a 400-unit, village-style apartment complex and the school expects to break ground in August for another 448-unit student housing development.

A Center for Hospitality Management, which trains students in hotel and restaurant work, has sprouted on a hill formerly dotted with cattle.

The university recently considered, then dropped--for now--plans to move its animal facilities to a smaller parcel to free the area for other uses.

“I don’t think there’s any question that the ag program has already given up a lot of land,” said La Bounty, who added that the issue of open space vs. development “troubles me.”

Cal Poly Pomona still devotes between 550 and 600 acres to its agriculture and animal programs, and there’s little danger that it will soon resemble an urban campus such as USC. Hundreds of acres of everything from apples to zucchini are maintained, along with a famed Arabian Horse Center, herds of beef cattle, poultry and a swine unit where students raise pigs from embryo to bacon and breed cows with lower levels of fat and cholesterol.

If funding permits, La Bounty said the school wants to double-deck some of its existing parking lots rather than expand into pristine lands. He pointed out proudly that Cal Poly has lost only six of the sycamore trees originally planted by W.K. Kellogg, who deeded his 813-acre horse ranch to the state in 1949, forming the nucleus of present-day Cal Poly Pomona.

However, with officials casting covetous looks at the fields and pastures, critics are beginning to sound an alarm.

“The whole school is going to be one paved parking lot unless somebody does something about it soon,” said Scott Patterson, a senior who is studying history and animal science.

Patterson said some students have written letters of complaint to the school, but no organized protests have surfaced because of fears that the administration will penalize those who speak out.

“It’s not just valuable land,” said one concerned faculty member who didn’t want his name used. “A great deal of biological teaching and research goes on there.”

Faculty members add that agriculture and livestock classes round out degrees in business and biology as well as those in animal science.

“The farm units are laboratories, and when you pave those over you destroy the lab forever,” said Leroy Davis, an agricultural economist who heads the agribusiness department at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

Others point out that Cal Poly serves as the last remaining wildlife refuge for species that have been crowded out of Pomona as suburbia encroaches.

“There’s an unusual concentration of hawks and owls on campus,” said Laszlo Szijj, a Cal Poly Pomona ornithologist. “As open space disappears, these birds are . . . beginning to get squeezed out of the area.”

Cal State officials say there are no plans to dismantle the agriculture program at Cal Poly Pomona, but agree the school faces some hard decisions in planning the future of its agriculture program.

“My guess is it will be important for the next 20 years but decreasing in importance,” said Anthony Moye, deputy vice chancellor for academic affairs and resources at California State University Office of the Chancellor.

Even officials who bemoan the loss of open space acknowledge that lack of money--not environmental protests--are proving the biggest obstacle to campus development.

“Our growth is challenged only by our ability to pay for it,” La Bounty said.

Cal Poly Pomona’s master plan calls for a number of new developments in coming years, including:

A third housing development to serve 450 students.

A 200,000-square-foot, $28-million building with an eight-story tower to house the school’s mainframe computer, with 625 individual workstations and 40 faculty offices.

A 1,200-seat auditorium.

Two, 13,000-square-foot buildings to be added to the Center for Hospitality Management, which currently enrolls 800 students.

An Institute for Regenerative Studies, where students will live, work and study, planting their own food, recycling and using solar-powered energy.

Meanwhile, with each day that passes, Cal Poly Pomona seems more and more like a landlocked green island, facing pressures from within as well as from the world of housing tracts and malls outside.

Said La Bounty, somewhat wistfully:

“We’ll never be back to the days of 1953 and the beautiful ranch that I saw when I first came here.”