Occupiers Leave UC Lot Voluntarily

Urban-farming activists from Occupy the Farm were gone Monday from the UC Berkeley lot in Albany that they had moved into on Saturday.

The group, which had been evicted by UC police with four arrests from the same lot after camping two nights the previous weekend, left voluntarily about 10 p.m. Sunday night, said UC Berkeley Associate Vice Chancellor Claire Holmes.

The university again plowed the field Monday, Holmes said. Campus authorities first plowed the plot on the previous Monday after evicting the protesters. The property is located at San Pablo Avenue and Monroe Street, next to the University Village housing complex for graduate student families.

Patch would like to thank reader David Sanger for posting links to his video and photo of the second plowing on the Albany Patch Facebook page. He also provided an update on the Patch "Speak Out" board.

The Occupy group had laboriously broken the hard soil and planted a variety of crop seedlings on the previous weekend. On this past weekend, they planted seeds in the ground.

On May 11, nearly 100 Occupy the Farm activists marched from City Hall to the plot, which UC Berkeley has proposed to develop as commercial retail property, anchored by Sprouts Farmers Market.

Occupy the Farm staged a three-week occupation and crop-planting a year ago on the Gill Tract agricultural research field, which is near the site occupied the past two weekends. They were evicted by campus authorities.

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