Andy's Orchard, farmed by the Mariani family on Half Road since 1957 and known for its rare stone fruit, is winding down as a builder's-remedy subdivision moves through Santa Clara County's planning process. The retail store is expected to close by fall 2027.

At the fringe of Morgan Hill, where the subdivisions on Half Road give way to open rows, sits a 58.62-acre orchard that has outlasted almost everything around it. Andy's Orchard has grown cherries, apricots, peaches, plums and dozens of rare heirloom and hybrid varieties on the same unincorporated Santa Clara County ground since 1957. Under a proposal now moving through the county, the house, the barns, the storage shed and the trees would all be cleared for 376 homes.

The plan comes from a Southern California firm, Mana Investments, filing through a subsidiary LLC named Mana Camden Fund. It applied in August 2024 (external source, opens in a new tab) to put 300 single-family houses and 76 duplex units on the parcel at 1515 Half Road, reserving 7% for extremely low-income households, according to the Morgan Hill Times. The subdivision would be branded with the family's own name — Mariani Ranch. For now the Marianis still hold title under an option: the developer has paid to keep the land off the market during the environmental review, and the sale closes only if the project is approved.

That the application exists at all is a story about a legal window. Per the Times, it was submitted under SB 330, California's Housing Crisis Act, during a 2023–2025 stretch when Santa Clara County lacked a state-certified housing element. That lapse let developers invoke the law's "builder's remedy," which allows housing proposals to bypass local zoning while a jurisdiction is out of compliance. The land here is zoned for agriculture, which would ordinarily block a subdivision this size. The county drew more than 40 builder's-remedy filings during the gap, 28 of them still active, Green Foothills policy director Alice Kaufman told the paper.

Andy Mariani is 80. His parents farmed in Cupertino, across from what is now Apple's campus, before moving the operation south in the 1950s. He has told reporters the economics stopped working years ago — cherries, his main crop, have lost money for about a decade — and that the ring of houses now pressing his fields brings dust complaints and a warmth that denies his trees the winter chill the fruit requires. He has waved off the notion of a benefactor buying the land to keep him farming, saying it would leave him curating a kind of living museum rather than actually working it.

The New York Times carried the closure to a national audience this month. Mariani says he intends to keep farming on a smaller footprint on leased ground nearby and to run a stand at a planned Morgan Hill market. The store, by his estimate, closes around September or October of 2027 — leaving, for the moment, an orchard still in fruit and a fence line about to change.