Emma Prusch was a dairy farmer who spent her life on the land that now bears her name. When she died in 1962, she bequeathed her 87-acre farm to the City of San Jose with the stipulation that it remain a working farm and be open to the public. Over the following decades, roughly 28 acres were taken for Interstate 280 and 11 more converted to a youth sports field, leaving the 47 acres that the park occupies today. The city honored her wish, transforming the property into a unique urban park that combines agricultural education with public recreation. The farm maintains chickens, goats, sheep, and other livestock, along with heritage fruit orchards, community gardens, and a rare fruit orchard that preserves varieties once common in the valley.

The park preserves more than a farm; it preserves a way of life. The Santa Clara Valley's transformation from agricultural powerhouse to technology capital happened within a single generation. Orchards were bulldozed for housing tracts and industrial parks. Canneries closed as the fruit supply disappeared. The Valley of Heart's Delight became a phrase used only in historical contexts. Emma Prusch Farm Park holds a fragment of that earlier landscape, its fruit trees and barns and livestock pens surrounded on all sides by the suburban sprawl of east San Jose. School groups visit to learn where food comes from, and families come on weekends to walk among animals and gardens.

The park includes a large barn, community garden plots, picnic areas, and open fields. A 4-H program operates on-site, teaching agricultural skills to young people in a city where most residents have no direct connection to farming. The rare fruit orchard contains heritage varieties of trees that were once the economic foundation of the valley, preserving genetic material and cultural memory in equal measure. That a working farm continues to operate in one of the most urbanized and expensive metropolitan areas in the United States is itself a kind of statement, one that Emma Prusch made implicitly when she decided that her land should remain what it had always been.