Palo Alto group buys Coyote Valley farmland in San Jose for $5.3 million

The Big Picture
A new land deal continues to solidify the long-term direction of Coyote Valley as protected open space rather than future development land. The Peninsula Open Space Trust acquired a 71-acre farm for $5.3 million that had been in the same family since the 1950s and had previously been considered for uses like a battery storage facility. The property will ultimately be owned and managed by the Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority, while continuing agricultural operations through an existing tenant.

This purchase is part of a much larger, coordinated effort. Over the past decade, POST and public agencies have spent more than $120 million assembling thousands of acres across the valley, including recent high-profile acquisitions like Mead Ranch. Piece by piece, these transactions are creating a contiguous landscape of protected farmland, habitat, and open space that is increasingly difficult to unwind or repurpose.

Why it Matters
The implications go well beyond a single 71-acre site. Each acquisition like this reduces the remaining inventory of privately held, developable land in Coyote Valley and reinforces a clear policy trajectory: this area is being taken off the table for urban-scale development. That has direct consequences for competing land uses, particularly infrastructure projects such as battery storage, which now face a shrinking pool of politically and environmentally viable sites.

At the same time, the deal advances several overlapping public policy goals. It preserves prime farmland in one of the last agricultural areas in San Jose, strengthens a critical wildlife corridor connecting the Santa Cruz Mountains to the Diablo Range, and supports the valley’s role as a natural floodplain that protects downstream urban areas. The cumulative effect is that Coyote Valley is no longer just an open space vision, it is becoming a locked-in land use reality backed by significant capital and institutional control.