For generations of Cal Poly agriculture students, some of the university’s most important classrooms haven’t had walls.
Their classrooms are the lemon groves and crop fields stretching along the western edge of campus, where students can walk out of a lecture and, within minutes, find themselves laying irrigation pipe, planting crops, driving tractors, studying pests, or harvesting what they grew.
Now, some of that land could become something very different.
Cal Poly is exploring a mixed-use development on agricultural land near Highland Drive that could bring housing, a hotel and conference center, senior living, restaurants, retail, and other amenities to what the university is calling the West Campus District.
The concept is preliminary, and Cal Poly told New Times that no decisions have been made. But the land being considered for development isn’t vacant or unused. It includes Class 1 prime farmland that has served as a hands-on laboratory for generations of students.
“This is a resource. Not for Cal Poly alone, but for agriculture as an industry and California as a whole,” retired plant sciences professor David Headrick told New Times.
Headrick taught at Cal Poly for 29 years, specializing in insect pest management and biological control. He said what makes the land special is a combination of what grows there, the soil, and where it sits.
Cal Poly’s 2035 Master Plan acknowledges the area as prime farmland. Class 1 land represents some of the highest-quality agricultural soil—topsoil that develops on a geological timeline of about 1 inch every 1,000 years.
Once developed, Headrick said, that resource can’t simply be regenerated.
“Once you build on it, you never get it back,” he wrote in an Aug. 10 post on his California Insect Science website.
Cal Poly is one of four California State University campuses with agricultural programs, alongside Chico State, Fresno State, and Cal Poly Pomona. Headrick said what distinguishes the San Luis Obispo campus is that students can walk from the academic core to working agricultural fields in about 10 minutes.
At other campuses, accessing farmland can require transportation that cuts into lab time.
Headrick spent nearly three decades making that walk with his students. Cal Poly agriculture alumna Danilu Jelderks remembers experiencing the same progression from the student side.
“From the time I started at Cal Poly, I was 18, all the way till I graduated, I worked on the farmlands there at school,” she said.
Students learned about agriculture in class and then went outside to practice it. As freshmen, Jelderks said, they picked up sprinkler pipe and laid it in the fields. By senior year, they were driving tractors while younger students loaded the trailers.
“We got to do everything,” she said, “from planting the crops, to taking care of them, fertilizing them, watering them, and then all the way to harvest.”
The experience carried directly into her career. Jelderks now owns a consulting firm specializing in agricultural water quality compliance, and her first job after graduation was as an agronomist.
“When I showed up for my first day at work as an agronomist, I had already been taught how to drive tractors and plant the crops and irrigate,” she said. “It’s different than learning in a textbook.”
The current proposal revives a development proposal that Headrick and other members of Cal Poly’s agricultural community thought had been settled a decade ago.
In 2015, Cal Poly President Jeffrey Armstrong’s administration considered building on agricultural land near the western entrance to campus, including placing a hotel near the lemon orchard at Highway 1 and Highland Drive.
“The pushback from students, alums, and industry partners was swift, loud and sustained,” Headrick recalled.
The development did not move forward. Cal Poly subsequently developed its Master Plan 2035, finalized in 2020, which was intended to guide campus development through 2035. The plan identified approximately 250 acres of prime farmland that were explicitly excluded from further development—the current land included.
“So here we are 10 years later,” Headrick said, “and he is doing the same thing.”
This time, the university is framing development of the area as an expansion of the same “learn by doing” philosophy the existing fields support.
A May 12 Cal Poly presentation describes the West Campus District as a new gateway to campus and a “transformative vision” for a community built around agriculture, research, industry, and housing.
“The site’s current role as a living classroom—home to lemon groves and active fields—is not just history, but an opportunity to create a bustling neighborhood, interwoven with industry partnerships and activation,” the presentation states.
That “bustling neighborhood” could include housing for students, faculty, staff, and alumni; senior living; research and development space for ag-tech companies; a hotel and conference center; retail and dining; child care and elder care; and parks and trails. Development is estimated to cost more than $880 million, according to the presentation.
Cal Poly argues those uses could create new learn by doing opportunities, with students living alongside researchers and industry partners, and ag-tech companies working near the university’s agricultural and research operations.
School spokesperson Keegan Koberl told New Times that the university has spent the past year discussing possibilities with students, alumni, and others across the campus community, with additional conversations planned.
“At this time, no decisions have been made,” Koberl said.
He also said any eventual proposal would preserve the university’s agricultural teaching capacity.
“There would be no net loss of agricultural land used for student learning—in fact, the university would provide more agricultural land than it does today,” Koberl said.
The university did not specify where that additional agricultural land would be located, whether it would also be prime farmland, or how much of the existing fields and orchards near Highland Drive could be developed. Koberl said Cal Poly does not anticipate making any final decisions before fall 2026 at the earliest.
The proposal also wouldn’t go through San Luis Obispo County’s normal land-use permitting process.
“The county does not have land-use or permitting authority over Cal Poly’s proposal because the project is proposed on land owned by the state of California,” county Planning and Building Deputy Director Mark LaRue told New Times.
If the project fell within the county’s jurisdiction, LaRue said, individual plans would need to be evaluated in depth to determine the appropriate processing path, “including CEQA applicability.” But the county could still comment and work with Cal Poly as the concept develops.
For Jelderks, what stands to be lost is less abstract.
The fields gave her the chance to make mistakes, operate equipment, manage crops, and learn the physical work of agriculture before an employer depended on her to know how to do it.
“Without the farmland being there, it would have been so hard to excel in our careers after school,” she said. “Everybody that I talked to now, as colleagues, they had similar experiences at Cal Poly, and it was just really impactful during our time there.” ∆
Reach Staff Writer Chloë Hodge at chodge@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Aug 20-27, 2026.
