By Nanette Asimov

ALBANY — Occupy the Farm protesters agreed Saturday to end their three-week encampment on UC Berkeley property in Albany, but rebuffed an invitation from the university to discuss how area can be used for both urban farming and for research.

Instead, the several dozen protesters set up ladders to scale the fence UC had erected around the area along San Pablo Avenue known as the Gill Tract and said they will continue to tend the vegetables and fruit trees they’ve planted on two of the five disputed acres.

As a result, the UC Regents said they won’t drop the civil lawsuit they filed Wednesday accusing 13 protesters of trespassing.

“The fact that they are insisting on maintaining their ability to have free and unfettered access to our property does not even come close to meeting our minimal conditions,” said UC Berkeley spokesman Dan Mogulof. “All they needed to do was agree to work with us to coordinate activities.”

The regents had said they would drop their suit if the protesters quit trespassing and joined in a discussion Saturday about how to use the land for both urban farming and for the plant research faculty members are planning for the site.

“It’s a brass-tacks meeting,” Mogulof said.

But what might seem a no-brainer to the public was regarded by protesters as a cynical move on UC Berkeley’s part. Protesters said they have tried for years to work out a compromise with the university over the Gill Tract but have always been disappointed.

“I’m sorry, but there have been proposals coming from the community for 15 years — from coalitions, local residents, professors and students — and all have been rejected wholesale by the university,” said Anya Kamenskaya, a 2009 graduate of UC Berkeley in conservation.

Most recently, she and another student asked UC if they could use a portion of the area as a garden for nearby Ocean View Elementary School.

“We went through six months of deliberation with them and it finally got canceled,” Kamenskaya said. “The only reason they are considering doing urban gardening now is that we finally just started a farm.”

There’s some truth to that.

In an open letter published Friday on the UC Berkeley website, campus officials acknowledged that the Occupiers’ actions “helped to raise the public profile of urban agriculture and generate constructive conversation about its value.” Their tactics, which “we abhor,” nevertheless “sharpened the college’s focus” on existing plans for the area to be used for urban farming, according to the letter from Provost George Breslauer and Vice Chancellor John Wilton.

The letter said two seats would be reserved for Occupy the Farm at Saturday’s meeting, chaired by Keith Gilless, dean of Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources. Other attendees were not named.

But the letter said the meeting would “tackle the details of how the Gill Tract will be shared by our researchers and urban agriculture, and how the effort will be supported, coordinated and sustained under the university’s supervision.”

The meeting’s location and even its agenda were kept secret to avoid a large protest, Mogulof said. Only one reporter, from the online news outlet Albany Patch, was allowed to attend.

“They’re basically saying, if you give everything up you can come to our super special secret meeting, where we’ll talk about what we’ll talk about,” said Gopal Dayeneni, an Oakland resident who is named in the regents’ lawsuit.

He also offered a practical reason for boycotting the meeting. The regents’ suit also names 150 John Doe defendants, “which means we can’t go to the meeting without having what we say be used against us,”

Dayeneni said. “So the first order of business would have to be dropping the lawsuit.”

Instead, Dayeneni said the protesters were hosting their own meeting Saturday at 5 p.m. No conditions are required for attendance.

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