A Southern California real estate investment firm is seeking approval to build a 376-home subdivision on the site of Andy’s Orchard, a beloved Morgan Hill fruit farm that has operated for nearly seven decades.
Mana Investments, operating through an entity called Mana Camden Fund LLC, applied in August 2024 to develop the 58.62 acre property at 1515 Half Road at the fringes of Morgan Hill in unincorporated Santa Clara County. The developer is currently conducting a state-mandated environmental study of the project plans.
The company is marketing the project as “Mariani Ranch,” a name that references the family that has farmed the land since 1957. The Mariani family currently retains ownership of the property under an option agreement in which Mana Investments has paid to hold the land while it navigates the planning process, with a full sale to close if and when the project is approved.
“They’ve given us some money to hold the land until they’re able to go through the planning process,” said Andy Mariani, 80, who has operated the orchard for decades alongside his brother. “When they feel it’s ready for development, we close the deal.”
The proposal calls for 300 single-family homes and 76 duplex units, with 7% designated as affordable to extremely low-income households. All existing structures on the property, including the house, orchard, barns and a storage shed, would be demolished.
Mariani said he expects the orchard’s retail store will remain open for at least another full year, depending on how the approval process unfolds.
“It’ll probably be September or October of next year,” that the store closes, Mariani said. “But who knows, anything can happen.”
Andy’s Orchard has been a fixture of South County agriculture for two generations, drawing customers for its specialty stone fruits including cherries, peaches, nectarines, plums and rare heirloom and hybrid varieties.
But Mariani said years of compounding pressures have made it impossible to continue.
“We really haven’t made money in cherries, our main crop, in a decade,” he said. “You just can’t keep going and losing money without making some radical changes.”
The Mariani family’s roots in the Santa Clara Valley go back further still. Andy’s parents farmed in Cupertino from 1945-1957, on land that now sits across the street from Apple’s headquarters on De Anza Boulevard. The family came to Morgan Hill as what Mariani calls “refugees” from the valley’s “Siliconization,” hoping to continue their farming lifestyle here.
Eventually, however, the trend caught up with them, and Andy’s Orchard is now surrounded on all four sides by development.
“Agriculture and urban development are not compatible,” Mariani said, describing a variety of conflicts and complaints generated when his normal operations cause problems for nearby homeowners, such as dust from equipment and smoke created when tree trimmings are burned.
“They’re going to complain, and that’s fine,” he said. “There is a fundamental incompatibility. There are going to be people that are going to say that we’re ‘selling out,’ but I don’t think that they appreciate that there is no sustainability in the farming that we’re doing.”
Mariani said that proximity has also made farming increasingly difficult in practical terms, citing restrictions on when he can spray for pests, as well as the heat island effect of surrounding pavement and infrastructure, which he said exacerbates problems with crops that require winter chill to properly develop fruit.
“If you’ve got developments all around you with pavement, chimneys, cars and streetlights, all of that raises winter temperatures,” he said. “You’re not going to get a crop.”
Mariani described watching other longtime farming families in the region reach the same conclusion before him and make the decision to sell or lease their land to fund continued farming elsewhere. He rejected suggestions that a philanthropic buyer could purchase the property and allow him to continue farming, saying it would reduce him to what he called a “caricature” of his former self.
“You become a curator of a living museum,” he said. “You’re playing the role of a farmer, but you’re not really a farmer.”
Mariani said he intends to continue farming on a smaller scale on leased land nearby, and has been invited to operate a stand at Fatoria, an upcoming farmer’s market project in Morgan Hill planned by Joe Raineri, another local farmer. Andy’s Orchard as a brand, he said, will continue in a more limited scope.
Builder’s remedy in action
The development project was submitted under SB 330, California’s Housing Crisis Act, during a two-year window between 2023 and 2025 when Santa Clara County lacked a state-certified housing element. That lapse allowed developers to invoke what is known as “Builder’s Remedy,” a legal mechanism that permits housing proposals to bypass local zoning restrictions when a jurisdiction falls out of compliance with state housing law.
Santa Clara County’s unincorporated land around Morgan Hill is zoned agricultural, which would prevent a subdivision of this scale from being approved under normal zoning rules. Because the application was submitted during the compliance gap, however, SB330 requires the county to process it.
The county received more than 40 Builder’s Remedy applications during that two-year window, according to Alice Kaufman, policy and advocacy director at Green Foothills, a nonprofit that advocates for open space and farmland protection in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties. Of those, 28 remain active in the unincorporated area.
“It was just a flood of, in my opinion, really inappropriate housing development proposals,” Kaufman said. “Most of them were on farmland, on hillsides that have trees and habitat on them, and some of them are in floodplains or wildfire hazard zones.”
Kaufman points to the Mariani Ranch proposal’s plan to manage wastewater as a major red flag. Because the site lies outside Morgan Hill city limits, it has no access to the city’s sewer system. The applicant is proposing to build an on-site wastewater treatment system to serve the development.
Kaufman said Green Foothills believes that approach is inadequate for a development of this size and may provide legal grounds for the county to reject the project outright.
“One of the very few reasons a city or county can reject a builder’s remedy project is if there are not adequate water or wastewater facilities to serve the project,” Kaufman said. “Our position is that the county should reject any project that doesn’t have access to water or sewer hookups.”
Santa Clara County is currently preparing a draft Environmental Impact Report for the project, releasing a Notice of Preparation for the document June 6. A public comment period has followed, which will close on July 6. County planners anticipate releasing the Draft EIR for 45-day public review some time in the fall.
Mariani said he hopes the public process plays out openly, even if the outcome is uncertain.
“I’d like to see an open forum on the issue myself,” he said. “I have my position, and it’s probably not a popular one among some people in Morgan Hill. But apparently there is a tremendous need for housing, and I try to look at that from a more objective standpoint.”
Comments on the EIR may be submitted to project planner Parya Seif at the Santa Clara County Department of Planning and Development in San Jose until July 6. For details on where to submit comments and to view the project plans, visit tinyurl.com/y9b434r4.
