More Options for Pierce Farm

Preserve the farm or pave it over?

Last year’s contentious debate over what to do with Pierce College’s 240-acre farm always came down to this polarized choice.

Farm backers saw the site, on the corner of DeSoto Avenue and Victory Boulevard, as a last vestige of the San Fernando Valley’s agricultural past. That the Valley’s citrus groves are gone and suburbs now ring the Woodland Hills college seemed all the more reason to maintain a working farm for urban schoolchildren to visit, not to mention a rare spot of open space for all Valley residents to enjoy.

Development backers saw the farm as a costly exercise in nostalgia. Enrollment in agriculture classes had dwindled. Meanwhile, the two-year community college was running an operating deficit and needed money to support its other academic programs and upgrade sagging facilities. To ignore the college’s prime asset and its potential to generate needed income seemed irresponsible.

So, preserve it or pave it?

Given the college’s dire circumstances, The Times supported what we saw as a compromise recommended by a campus committee to build a golf course on part of the farm, along with new facilities that could be used to modernize Pierce’s agricultural programs.

Other proposals, including one to develop a hotel and convention center, would have generated more money than a golf course but at the expense of the school’s traditions and the surrounding community’s goodwill.

Goodwill, however, proved elusive. Neighboring homeowners, environmentalists and others under the “Save the Farm” banner fought the golf course. The Los Angeles Community College District Board of Trustees backed down. Caught between the either-or forces of preservation and development, the future of the farm was left in limbo.

Enter newly elected trustees, a new district chancellor, a new president--and a new range of options for what to do about the farm.

From the start, Pierce’s new president, Rocky Young, wanted to rephrase the choices. He called for a longer view, a campus master plan that spells out where Pierce wants to go and how best to get there.

He spent his first six months in office laying the groundwork for a planning session to which he invited 40 agricultural experts. The group will issue a report with suggestions for the farm, and Young hopes to have a working plan in place by February, the first step toward the overall master plan.

Young believes, as do the experts he’s consulted, that there’s a future for agriculture, even in Los Angeles, and future jobs for Pierce agriculture graduates. Among the options discussed for the farm: making Pierce an agricultural laboratory for cutting-edge farming techniques like bioengineering or organic farming, adding biotechnology as a field of study and concentrating on agriculture’s service end, such as marketing, quality control and distribution.

Young wants to preserve the farm but not as a museum. Rather than a throwback to the past, he wants it to be a farm of the future.

Can he achieve this? Besides a new board and a new chancellor, Young has the advantage of an improved fiscal situation eased by stable enrollment and additional state funding.

He also brings a talent for working with the community, honed during his years at Santa Monica College.

Such skills will be needed. In a telephone interview, Young cautioned that although Pierce is no longer facing a crisis, it needs to generate income to invest in its future. Developing a plan for agriculture and an overall campus plan does not preclude some development of some farmland. Even the farm itself--the farm of the future--may not look the way it’s always looked.

But he believes that a thoughtful discussion will build consensus on what’s best for Pierce and best for its students.

We welcome his efforts to take the farm into the future--and look forward to an open-minded debate on the options when the plan is presented next year.