From Lab to Farm to Table
Charles River Campus Innovation partner Prospect Growth provides freshly picked corn to students
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NEWTON, Mass. – For new students on the Charles River Campus of UMass Amherst (CRC), one of their first tastes of the semester came straight from a field where agricultural innovation is taking root.
During a welcome barbecue for students moving in for the fall semester, first-year students and their families enjoyed fresh sweet corn harvested as part of an ongoing agricultural collaboration between Prospect Growth, UMass Extension and UMass Amherst faculty.
Prospect Growth, a CRC Innovation Space partner, is developing more efficient fertilizers through material engineering at the nanoscale. The company’s work is focused on helping growers improve nutrient delivery, increase farm profitability and reduce nutrient inputs.
As members of the CRC Innovation Space, Prospect Growth were able to apply their fertilizer to a corn crop at the UMass Crop and Animal Research and Education Farm in South Deerfield, Mass., and provided a portion of the resulting harvest to UMass Dining to serve at the move-in event.
“Our team at Prospect Growth spends a good bit of our time tucked away in the lab at the Charles River Campus or at our field sites, so we don’t often get the chance to connect in this way with the broader CRC community,” says Johanna Hunt, Plant Science & Local Partnerships Lead at Prospect Growth. “It was pretty special to see the sweet corn we’d spent the season working with in our field trial end up on students’ plates.”
That spirit of collaboration is at the heart of the CRC dining experience, which has contributed to UMass being recognized as No. 1 for exceptional campus dining for the 10th consecutive year.
“Being ranked No. 1 for ten years running isn’t about any single dish. It’s about a mindset. Finding a way to be included in the campus’ partnership with Prospect Growth is exactly that mindset in action,” said Bill Slavin, the Director of Dining and Hospitality at CRC. “Seeing new students and their parents grabbing an ear between hauling boxes into their residence halls– that’s the moment it all clicks. It’s a small thing, but it’s the kind of small thing that makes our community feel taken care of on an otherwise overwhelming day.”
The CRC collaboration with Prospect Growth also serves as an example of why UMass is a global leader in agricultural and food science research and innovation. UMass recently announced a $120 million Future of Food Initiative to explore interdisciplinary solutions to challenges facing the global food system.
The journey of Prospect Growth’s corn – from co-working lab space at the CRC, to UMass fields in South Deerfield, to a meal shared by the CRC community — offered a tangible (and edible) opportunity for students to connect UMass research and industry collaboration to real world outcomes.