Message to the Occupy the Farm folk.

Don't fence us in.

Because when you trespass on another person's land and claim it as your own, you leave the rest of us law-abiding folk with very few options.

The property owners can ask police to throw you off the land, they can throw you off themselves or present a legal argument to have you removed and barred from ever returning.

UC Berkeley officials chose option three earlier this week, filing a lawsuit seeking an injunction to have more than a dozen protesters removed from the university's Gill Tract, a 10-acre research farm just off San Pablo Avenue in Albany.

The group cut through a secured gate to enter the property in mid-April and has been squatting on the land since. Protesters have planted vegetables on 2 acres of land being readied for a corn crop used in biofuel research.

Unfortunately, their claim to the land and the reasons they've cited for their actions are as empty as the section of field they have commandeered.

As usual, the protesters cast their actions as heroic. In this particular case, they claim their presence prevents the university from transforming fertile urban farmland to the site of the next Whole Foods Market or, God forbid, some type of human dwelling. Anya Kamenskaya, who spoke for the protesters, said the group occupied the land as a last resort after 15 years of debate over its future.

"It's not that those avenues haven't been tried," she said. The group has succeeded in part by raising the debate around urban farming, but "our ultimate goal is to preserve the entirety of Gill Tract," Kamenskaya said.

George Chuck, a U.S. Department of Agriculture researcher whose work is literally grounded on those same 2 acres, sees it much differently.

Chuck, whose work is affiliated with UC Berkeley, said protesters have claimed the site might be used for a new Whole Foods Market but plans for that development are adjacent to the farm, on land that's already been developed.

Some protesters, Chuck said, claim research at the Gill Tract is funded by large oil and other corporate concerns. But it just ain't so.

Chuck's research is funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy - and it's far more important to society than anything the protesters are trying to do.

For the past decade, he's worked on mapping corn genes to identify which ones produce energy. His work adding corn genes to switchgrass has more than doubled the yield of biofuels produced by the hybrid crop. His findings were published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

That research, which has the potential to increase alternative fuel sources sounds more important than the desires of two dozen or so people growing 2 acres worth of anything.

"What's worse is that when I tried talking to (some of) these guys, they just started spouting slogans someone else told them," Chuck said.

And as far as the group's efforts to grow crops on land Chuck said is not yet ready for planting, "They have no idea what they're doing," he said.

Since protesters arrived, they've managed to destroy a fruit tree that was the subject of a research project, created a waste pile, built a rickety chicken coop and left the gate open allowing wild turkeys to escape or be killed by predators that entered the unlocked facility, he added.

University officials turned up the heat on Thursday, sealing off the only two entrances to the research farm and barring anyone else from entering the facility, said Dan Mogulof, a university spokesman.

But until the case sees the inside of a courtroom, Mogulof said, the university's offer to protesters still stands.

"If they voluntarily dismantle the encampment and leave, we have determined there is enough room for research and urban farming (at the Gill Tract) and they are welcome to have a seat at the table," he said. "But we cannot allow one group to dictate the terms to everybody else."