From farming, locally to growing, globally
Story by Ellen Ternes
In the shadow of the gleaming Comcast Center and down the street from the modern Plant Sciences building and the state-of-the-art Kim Engineering Building, you can still hear the cows mooing in the early morning quiet.
Tucked beneath the high-rise dorms in the Centreville complex, the university farm is easy to miss. If your routes don’t take you to that end of campus, you could spend an entire undergraduate career at Maryland and never see the horses, sheep and cows that live in the barn.
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Maryland Cooperative Extension Highlights
- 1917
- Establish community kitchens … During the
influenza epidemic, Hagerstown kitchen is
converted into Emergency Diet Kitchen, to
feed hundreds of influenza patients.
- 1928
- Demonstrate ways to use electricity on the farm.
Ramp up nutrition education after first military draft rejects a large percentage of men for poor nutrition.
- 1950
- Conduct series of television programs for
rural and urban audiences
- 1954
- Hurricane Hazel destroys 700 tobacco barns
and 2,000 poultry houses. Extension engineers
show better construction methods to help
avoid future losses.
- 1983
- Introduce crime prevention program for
disadvantaged youth
- 2006
- Dozens of programs, including Small and
Beginning Farmers program; Maryland Home
and Garden Information Center
(www.hgic.umd.edu); nutrition education for
low-income families; 1,600 Maryland youth
in 4-H after-school programs.
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Operated by the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, the farm is the one place on campus where students in animal science classes can still get hands-on experience with livestock. Perhaps the important thing to understand about this small farm is that just about everything the University of Maryland has become grew out of something very much like these five acres.
In 1856, when the Maryland Agricultural College—MAC—was chartered on property belonging to Charles Calvert, there was nothing but farm. The whole reason for starting the private college was to give sons of well-heeled landowners a place to learn the science of farming. When MAC became a land grant institution in 1864, something big changed—the school welcomed students (still all men) from all walks of life. And one of the school’s new missions was to use the institution’s knowledge to help improve life for citizens of Maryland.
In 1864, when more than two-thirds of Maryland was agrarian, that meant mostly teaching people new and better ways to feed their families. MAC remained heavily agricultural for many years—the “cow college” in College Park. But by the time MAC became the University of Maryland in 1920, and since then, American life has gone through several sea-changes—transformation of agriculture into an industry, space travel, the computer, globalization, the Internet, genetics. It would never again be just life on the farm.
Living up to its land grant mission to make life better for the citizens of Maryland meant that the university would have to expand from its agricultural roots. As the university grew into a leading research institution, the College of Agriculture grew with it.
Today, the reach of the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources spans from a single molecule in a lab to a community in Western Maryland to the Chesapeake Bay watershed to food production in China.
“We used to serve a certain percent of the population,” says Cheng-i Wei, who took over as dean of the college in September. “That’s expanded to the whole population. We are still doing traditional agriculture, but the new agriculture now extends to healthy humans, a healthy environment and a healthy economy.”
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