From the Field
The Vibrant Student Community at UC Berkeley’s Oxford Tract Farm
The Oxford Tract invites students to learn, research, grow, and gain real experience on the land.
If you walk down Walnut Street in Berkeley, just north of UC Berkeley campus, a flash of blooming flowers or verdant vegetable rows might catch your eye through a vine-covered chain link fence. In the early spring, you might see a field of cover crops like mustard, legumes, radish, rye grass, and fava beans. In summer, you’ll see vines heavy with red and gold tomatoes, multicolored squash, hearty greens like kale and collards. At the height of the fall semester, you might see blooming amaranth, bright marigolds, and rows of towering heirloom corn. Most times of the year, you’ll see students — planting, weeding, watering, harvesting, and maintaining this land that has become a source of wellness and education for them.
This is the Oxford Tract farm, part of a larger facility that includes greenhouses, a lathhouse, and lab facilities. “Campus has nothing else like the Oxford Tract in such close proximity,” says BFI Faculty Director Tim Bowles. “This space is priceless in terms of its potential for experiential learning and applied research.”
As an Associate Professor of Agroecology in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, Bowles teaches ESPM 118, a course that explores a systems level approach to agroecology. Offered each fall, the course breaks its 80 students into smaller groups, each charged with about 20 feet of garden bed to design and manage their own intercropping experiment over the course of the semester.
But enrollment in ESPM 118 isn’t the only pathway for getting involved on the farm. Every fall, the student-run DeCal course “Agroecology in Action: Food Sovereignty and Land Liberation” led horticultural workshops while inviting guest speakers to discuss the social and political critical theories behind the agroecology movement. This past summer, the Agroecology Field Quarter — a summer intensive course hosted by the UC Santa Cruz Center for Agroecology — spent part of its seven-week curriculum at the Oxford Tract.
In addition to coursework, the Oxford Tract is the site of individual and lab research projects. For their dissertation, PhD candidate Coleman Rainey of the Berkeley Agroecology Lab led a no-till project to study the effects of tillage on soil communities. From 2018 to 2022, that study produced 14,000 pounds of food on around a dozen rows. Most of that food went to the Berkeley Food Network or the UC Berkeley Basic Needs Center. Students have also conducted projects on seed saving, Indigenous uses of California native plants, and others.
But students don’t need to engage in research or coursework to connect with the land at the Oxford Tract. Student groups hold open volunteer hours, when anyone can come get their hands in the soil.
After years of requesting garden space on campus, Indigenous students worked with the Native American Student Development office to form the Indigenous Community Learning Garden in 2021. Students from both the Fannie Lou Hamer Black Resource Center and the Hispanic Engineers and Scientists also each manage a plot on the farm.
The largest and most active student group at the Oxford Tract farm is Berkeley Student Farms (BSF), which started with BFI support in 2020 when campus gardens were the only spaces open to students during the height of Covid-19 lockdowns. BSF is active at gardens throughout campus, but most of its volunteers congregate a few times per week at the Oxford Tract, where they produce more than 50 percent of the produce distributed through the food pantry at the UC Berkeley Basic Needs Center.
Much of the agricultural and educational work at the Oxford Tract is coordinated by ab banks, a UC Berkeley alum who has been recognized for their commitment to community based food access and land sovereignty.
As BFI’s Agroecology and Wellness Coordinator, Banks serves as the liaison between student activities at the farm and the community. They explain their vision for the Oxford Tract simply: “People are hungry, and there’s an acre of land to grow food in the middle of Berkeley. So we’re trying to make that connection.”
One of the relationships Banks has fostered at the farm is with People’s Programs, where they serve as Farm Lead & Health and Wellness Coordinator. Volunteers from People’s Programs grow food at the Oxford Tract and distribute it to families in West Oakland. This year, People’s Programs harvested 2,000 pounds of produce at the Oxford Tract.
In 2017, when Tim Bowles arrived at UC Berkeley, the Oxford Tract didn’t host the vibrant community of students that occupies the land today. In fact, much of the research field was empty. At that time, a task force from the university had identified the Oxford Tract as a potential site for student housing. Bowles explains that at that time, university faculty used the facility primarily for one-off plant biology experiments — mostly in the greenhouses with much of the land unused. “There wasn’t a priority for applied systems level work that required a field component,” he says.
“You go out there now and every single row is full,” Bowles continued. “I’ve seen its transition into a place of research that is more systems focused, and that is more inviting and accommodating to student experiences.”
Interested in checking out the Oxford Tract and getting plugged into UC Berkeley’s farm and food systems community? Come to BFI’s next Community Showcase on October 4.