Groundbreaking for new Agricultural Learning Center

One hundred fifty years after Levi Stockbridge helped found Massachusetts Agricultural College, his descendant Kay Stockbridge will join other dignitaries in a groundbreaking ceremony and celebratory lunch from 12:30-2 p.m. on Thursday, April 25 for the campus’s new Agricultural Learning Center (ALC).
 
The 50-acre working farm will serve as an outdoor classroom for educating future farmers grounded in the latest research and farming, horticultural, nursery and landscape techniques. The Stockbridge School of Agriculture has seen an increase in enrollment in the Sustainable Food and Farming major from five students in 2003 to more than 80 today. ALC graduates will be well positioned to enhance food security, meet the challenges of climate change and help to secure a sustainable food supply for the future.
 
Speakers at the groundbreaking will include Chancellor Kumble Subbaswamy; Steven Goodwin, dean of the College of Natural Sciences; Stephen Herbert, director of the Stockbridge School’s Center for Agriculture; Rich Bonanno, president of the Massachusetts Farm Bureau Federation which pledged $500,000 to the ALC, and 88-year-old Alice Wysocki, member of the class of 1948, the first to graduate from the newly-named University of Massachusetts. Wysocki’s family owned and farmed part of the land where the new ALC is being built.
 
The midday event will feature horse-drawn cart rides around the property, which is made up of parts of four former farms. There will also be a plowing demonstration and planting an apple tree, one of 150 planned for the site to commemorate the campus’ 150th anniversary. Apples were the first crop planted on campus in 1863.
 
Other guests of honor will be Jane Adams Roys, daughter of Robert C. and Ella Adams, whose dairy farm is part of the new ALC, and Albert Potter, Jr., son of the farm’s head herdsman. As a boy he washed and filled thousands of milk bottles for the dairy.
 
Two historic buildings will be moved to the ALC site: The last campus horse barn and Blaisdell House, the original farm manager’s home. The barn will be restored as the showplace it was for the Massachusetts Agricultural College in 1894. With successful fundraising, the ALC projected opening date is fall 2014.