Event venue on the UC Santa Cruz campus, with sweeping views of the Monterey Bay and adjacent to the 30 acre Organic Farm and Garden (CASFS).
08/27/2025
We are looking forward to welcoming guests next weekend at our annual Farm to Fork dinner.
Please join us on September 6th at our annual Farm to Fork Dinner at the UCSC Farm. Enjoy a four-course meal made with ingredients from the farm and other local producers prepared by Real Good Foods Catering. Plus there will be farm tours, local food and wine, music, and dancing! Find the link to purchase tickets in the comments.
Thank you to our event sponsors! Live Earth Farm, Redtree Partners LP, Pie Ranch, TomKat Ranch Educational Foundation, Earth Electric, Orchard Keepers, Santa Cruz Community Credit Union, Companion Bakeshop, Bay Federal Credit Union, Earthbound Farm, The Penny Ice Creamery, 11th Hour Coffee.
07/18/2025
Foggy days might hide the sun, but they sure don’t dim the romance. 🌫️✨ Who knew mist could make the perfect filter? When a couple picks the right color palette, the fog doesn’t dull the vibe — it frames it. So if you're worried about the weather on your wedding day, just remember: sometimes even clouds dress up the occasion.
07/16/2025
We are OBSESSED with the sneak peak photos from We are OBSESSED with the sneak peak photos by Shannon Christerson Photography from this weekend's wedding. Can't wait to see the rest of the gallery once its ready.
Congratulations to J&A!
Coordination: Lia Adams Events
Florals: Rosalea Design
07/05/2025
✨ Get married in the Ocean View Ceremony Site on the UCSC Farm overlooking Santa Cruz and the Monterey Bay. Your guests can feel an ocean breeze while they watch you say, "I do." ✨
This weekend, we had the pleasure of hosting H&B's wedding, with the incredible photographer Ben Ingram Visuals . If you're looking for a photographer who goes above and beyond to get incredible shots like this one, Ben Ingram is the one for you. We can't wait to see the rest of the album!
Vendors:
Ben Ingram Visuals
Lia Adams Events
Alexis Party Rental
Eventscapes, Inc
Five Star Catering
Santa Cruz DJ Company
Rosalea Design
07/03/2025
El Centro's La Treinteñera Celebration in May. We love these specialty linens from Alexis Party Rental and flowers from the UCSC Farm!
Congratulations to El Centro on 30 years of excellent work at UC Santa Cruz supporting Chicanx and Latinx students!
06/12/2025
Another year, another great YEC hosted by the ! Congratulations to all of the graduating seniors, and good luck for your future endeavors! We always love working with the and , they always do such an amazing job with their events.
06/06/2025
Congratulations to all of the undergraduate students receiving awards from today! Well done this year everyone!
06/06/2025
We are so excited to once again host the annual American Indian Resource Center at UCSC YEC! And this year, we will be joined by the UCSC Women's Center
Everyone is invited to year end ceremonies hosted by the Resource Centers, starting this Friday. Come celebrate our students in culture and community! All are welcome!
05/30/2025
Join us in the Hay Barn tomorrow at 7:30pm for the .collective performance of “Elderflora: An oratorio on the life and death of a tree; The Trees are Speaking.”
Narrated in song from the perspective of the tree itself, Elderflora invites audiences on a musical journey inside the mind of a tree, experiencing its thoughts and feelings in hyperreal detail.
Created by Michael Connery, one of America’s most unique and powerful voices, performed by Connery in collaboration with The Bowerbird Collective, and award winning Australian duo, Elderflower is part Classical song cycle, part electronic soundscape, and its snatches of madrigals and hymns intersecting with mood paintings that evoke wind, rain, and light. Structured as a series of musical portraits, each movement in the oratorio represents a significant moment in the life of the tree: birth by fire, discovery of the sun, or becoming a mother.
Don’t miss this spellbinding concert event!
02/07/2025
It’s storms like these that make us remember why we only host ceremonies between June and October in our Ocean View Ceremony Site!
P.S. we have two dates left this summer!
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The Cowell Ranch Hay Barn was originally built as part of the Cowell Davis Lime Works which was a thriving lime production business operating on what is now the lower part of the UCSC campus in the 1860’s.
The Cowell Lime Works was a manufacturing complex that quarried limestone, produced lime and other limestone products, and manufactured wood barrels that enables the finished lime to be shipped all over the world.
The Hay Barn was used to store hay for the livestock that was an integral part of the ranching and lime extraction operation of the site. Located west of the blacksmith shop and north of the cooperage, it had been used as a utility and storage structure by the campus until it was condemned as unsafe and vacated. Helped by generous donors and countless hours of volunteer time, the campus was committed to restoring the hay barn, and to making it a centerpiece of the campus entry.
Beginning in 2014, the old, dilapidated Hay Barn was carefully disassembled and the pieces catalogued. In rebuilding the Hay Barn, the designers and builders replicated the original timber frame materials and construction techniques and incorporated as muchof the old materials as they could. New wood components match the original in species, design, color, texture, and other visual qualities. Santa Cruz Timber Frames were contracted for the construction, and the building was framed in one day in the spring of 2015 with the help of volunteer timber framers and other community volunteers.
The Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems (CASFS) now occupies and uses the rebuilt Hay Barn as office space, a multi-purpose gathering and interpretive space, as a gateway to the 25 acre research and teaching farm behind it and as a rental venue for large events like weddings, conferences.
For information on renting the Cowell Hay Barn, call Heidi Harris at 831/459-3762 or [email protected]
