Maryville College and Rocky Park Farm sign a Memorandum of Understanding
Oct. 5, 2022
Out in the Friendsville community of Blount County, among the rise and fall of gentle hills that slope down toward Fort Loudoun Lake, Jim and Phyllis Kirksey maintain what can be considered Maryville College’s most picturesque learning laboratory.
Rocky Park Farm was established in 2013 as “a place where great all-natural food could be produced for the local community, and people could be taught about sustainable agriculture.” For several years now, that mission has been carried out with the assistance of MC students and faculty liaisons, and on Sept. 28, the College’s relationship with the Kirkseys was strengthened through a Memorandum of Understanding.
Seated in the shade of the farm’s produce stand, Maryville College President Dr. Bryan F. Coker and James Dulin — general manager of Metz Culinary Management at MC, the College’s food service provider — joined Jim Kirksey in signing the document, which formalizes the partnership between the three entities and outlines plans to strengthen it in the years to come.
The three men were flanked by two interns: Natalie Watts ’23 and Hayley Gorham ’22, who along with Erin Victorson ’22 and Colby Huffman ’24 continue a tradition of students who gain real-world experience in the gardens and hydroponic greenhouses of the farm.
“We learn a lot about these practices in classes, but there’s a difference in learning how and why seeds sprout and seeing and helping it happen,” said Gorham, a Biology and Environmental Studies double major with minors in Environmental Science and Sustainability Studies. “This is more community-focused and people-focused learning, and besides being an experience that could help me with a career, I’ve learned a lot that I can do on a smaller scale at my house and in my life when it comes to sustainability. It’s just knowledge you can’t get in a classroom or really even put a value on.”
Formalizing an already robust partnership
The seeds of the relationship between MC and Rocky Park Farm germinated slowly over a several-year period, added Jim Kirksey. Bruce Guillaume ’76, the founder and soon-to-retire director of Mountain Challenge on the MC campus, and his wife, Wendy Magee Guillaume ’81, live just across a spacious pasture and through a copse of trees from Rocky Park and were frequent visitors to the operation when the Kirkseys, along with agriculturist Hector Marroquin, began selling produce and inviting the public to learn more about organic gardening and sustainability.
The Guillaumes, Kirksey said, introduced them to Dr. Drew Crain, a Maryville College biology professor who saw an opportunity for students to get involved.
“I love getting my students involved in applied science projects where they can see how what they are learning in the classroom applies to the real world,” Crain said. “It doesn’t get any more applied than a garden internship at Rocky Park Farm.”
While the memorandum, according to Kirksey, formalizes the relationships between all three entities, the students who intern there have already made a difference.
“It’s a very individual experience for each student who comes out here,” he said. “We have some who have never been in this kind of environment before, and we have some who know so much they educate me. Right now, we’ve got a Biochemistry major (Huffman) who grew up on a farm. We’ve got another (Watts) who wanted to get involved because her roommate (Victorson) has been working out here for about three years. The common thread is that they’re not afraid to get their hands in the dirt, pull weeds, plant seeds and water.”
Not only do the Kirkseys farm using traditional methods, they also have hydroponic and aquaponic grow huts, Quonset-style greenhouses in which plants are rooted in either dirt or gravel (hydroponics) or directly in the water itself (aquaponics), in which tilapia, catfish and koi swim and provide natural fertilizer. Dr. Jay Clark, director of environmental and sustainability initiatives at Maryville College, acts as a liaison between the farm, MC and Metz and is in the process of applying for grant monies to build a similar working aquaponics greenhouse on the MC campus, he added.
“The practices that Jim and Phyllis and their team use for sustainable agriculture are in line with what we’re interested in doing and promoting at Maryville College,” Clark said. “This Memorandum of Understanding takes what we’ve been doing for a while now and provides us some direction for a much larger collaboration in the future.”
The reciprocity of sustainability
Under the terms of the MOU, Maryville College will continue to provide interns to Rocky Park — at least two per semester — who have an interest in sustainability and agriculture. In addition, MC will receive pre-consumer compost material (vegetable scraps) from Metz and deliver it to Rocky Park or store it temporarily in a newly constructed compost area adjacent to Crawford House. The three entities will track the amount of compostable material diverted from area landfills to use in the College’s Sustainability Tracking, Assessment and Rating System (STARS) and other sustainability assessments, and Rocky Park will commit to produce “all-natural, sustainably-grown produce to Metz for use in MC’s dining facilities.”
“Our commitment is to the natural and sustainable production of food, and we’re trying to get to where we can produce as much as Metz can use,” Kirksey said.
That’s an ambitious goal, but with the support of Metz and Maryville College, Kirksey said, “the sky is the limit.” He looks forward to collaborating with MC faculty to develop more educational programs, and to continuing the evolution of Rocky Park as a steward of natural resources. To do that, the farm needs to transition off of propane to heat its greenhouses, and already plans are under way to convert to solar in order to do so. From 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Oct. 8, Rocky Park will hold a “Fall FUNdraiser” in conjunction with MC and Metz to begin raising money for that project. Vendors, produce samples, food, live music, sustainability talks and farm tours are all on tap, and admission is a $20 donation per car.
For more information, visit www.rockyparkfarm.com.
