Fixing Up the Farm

Kelly Brown scraped peeling paint from a clapboard fence at the Pierce College farm.

Carrie Dietz rolled fresh white paint onto the smooth surface, stood back and admired her handiwork.

Tabitha Youngstrom unloaded a pickup truck carrying the picnic food she planned to feed her fellow volunteers for lunch.

The pre-veterinary students were sprucing up the farm Friday for a rally at 1 p.m. Sunday to show community support for the land which college administrators have threatened to develop.

“They say this land is unused,” said Youngstrom, co-chair of the Pierce College Student Coalition to Save the Farm. “We want to show that it is very much used, that we care about our school and that we are fighting tooth and nail to keep the farm.”

Dietz agreed: “We are cleaning up to show that agriculture is important to the students and the community.”

Students spent their own money to buy paint and other supplies to clean up the farm, Youngstrom said.

The students seemed to be taking their cue from the school’s gardeners, who for the last four years have dug into their own pockets to buy bulbs to beautify the campus.

The school’s farm is the best place for agriculture students to hone their skills, said Bill Lander, an agriculture technician and part-time animal production instructor.

“There’s only so much you can read in a textbook and do on a computer,” he said. “You need a real laboratory.”

While many of her fellow students are preparing for high-tech careers, Brown said the human touch will also play a role in the workplace of the future.

“There is no way a computer can hold a dog, give a horse an injection or help deliver a calf,” she said. “You cannot learn that in a book.”

Still, Pierce President E. Bing Inocencio has said that the college’s survival depends on making money from the land, which is a holdover from the days when the land was a complete working farm for the agricultural program.

Last month, the Los Angeles Community College District’s Board of Trustees, which oversees nine community colleges, voted to consider leasing options.

A golf course is the latest development plan for the 240-acre property. The project would pump $800,000 a year into the college’s coffers with revenues increasing by 10% every five years of a 20-year lease, supporters say.

Though the plan is backed by the Pierce governing council and most of the student body, agriculture students and the farm maintenance staff don’t want to see the farm turned into a golf course, shopping mall or office complex.

“This is what the San Fernando Valley looked like 50 years ago,” Lander said, looking across an open field at the farm. “We should preserve it, so that it’s not just a picture in a book. Personally, I don’t need every square inch of the Valley covered with asphalt and steel buildings.”