The Farm at Stonehill

The Farm at Stonehill is an initiative of the May School of Arts and Sciences and seeks to live out the college’s mission by:  

1. Helping those in need, providing access to fresh, nutritious, locally grown food to area food pantries, meal providers, health clinics, and resource centers.
2. Enriching Stonehill academic and service endeavors by engaging in environmental, social and food justice.

Farm Overview

Grown from a desire to address food insecurity in our communities, The Farm at Stonehill was created in 2011 after former Vice President for Mission and faculty, Paul DaPonte, was inspired following a day of service in our neighboring city, Brockton, MA. He and several Stonehill students accompanied residents with limited access to healthy food and fresh produce, and a desire to help address food insecurity was born.

The Farm yields 10,000 to 12,000 lbs. of fresh, organic produce each year on nearly 2 acres of land. Many varieties of vegetables, fruits, and flowers are grown at the Farm and include popular items like potatoes, onions, beans, greens, strawberries, basil and sunflowers. Vegetable varieties are chosen based on nutritional value and popularity among recipients, who are surveyed each season.

For the first five seasons, the entire harvest was donated to four community partners: My Brother's Keeper; The Table at Father Bill's & MainSpring; the Old Colony Y’s David Jon Louison Center, and The Easton Food Pantry. The Mobile Market was launched in 2016 in partnership with Brockton Neighborhood Health Center (BNHC). The partnership with BNHC further allows The Farm at Stonehill to live our mission of helping those in need and offer access to nutrition with fresh, seasonal produce. We are now utilizing the Mobile Market as a tool to bring access to nutrition to food apartheid areas of our community. 

Reflections On Our 13th Season

The summer of 2023 was a wet one! This attracted some unwanted pest challenges causing a decrease in yield. However, it also brought learning experiences and educational opportunities to our students and me!

We dug deep into integrated pest management techniques as we tried our best to farm with nature. By design, the farm’s raised bed and minimal tillage system helped us stay above any flooding. Standing water helped with irrigation, while also changing the typical summer growing environment. Some vegetables loved it (our beans, onions, corn and eggplant), while others suffered a bit (potatoes and tomatoes).

With the summer heat, we enjoyed a bumper crop of eggplant this season! It was a huge hit at our food pantry outlets and weekly Mobile Market adventures! Special thanks to Tam Pham, (Env Studies ‘23) for giving them extra care through some trying moments of the season. Despite some extreme weather, my second season on the Farm felt like a win. I felt and realized that we were growing much more than produce. We are growing a revolution of community-based intelligence, hope, and a thriving local food system. Year after year, we learn and grow as our favorite crop to cultivate is HOPE for healthy relationships with our partners and funders as your support for the work we do for our community is invaluable.

Growing Infrastructure

The summer of 2023 was another building year. We are incorporating laying hens to the farm for multiple benefits! These resilient ladies bring not only a sustainable protein source with their eggs, they consume food waste from the dining commons as well as feed us with their quirky humor and their nitrogen-rich manure for onsite fertilizer, helping us close an important nutrient loop for The Farm. 

We added five more beehives with the help of our beekeeper, Kevin O’Donnell, and newest apprentice Brother James with a mid-August harvest and honey sales of nearly 200 lbs! Our honey sells as a fundraiser for The Farm through The Skyhawk Shop in The Thomas and Donna May School of Arts & Sciences and through our farm’s online store.

Finally, our Seed Library lives on thanks to the work of former Farm student employee and assistant manager Celia Dolan ’19 who took on this project during the Farm’s 3rd year. Saving seeds is a cultural form of heritage and vital for our farm's continued growth.

Growing Intelligence

This summer we enjoyed the collective knowledge of five students. Students who work on The Farm and with our Mobile Market do more than grow and sell fresh, organic produce. They grow intelligence, friendships and community while serving folks of all ages. 

Together we supported and helped one another through the best and worst of days. We set morning intentions and enjoyed completing our days with a reflection of what we learned, experienced, and felt.

Growing Community

The Farm at Stonehill continues to serve as both a gathering space for staff, students, faculty, and community partners, as well as a means for Stonehill to reach deeper into our community to serve those in need. Highlighted below are just a few of the ways that the Farm at Stonehill grew community in 2023:

• The Farm welcomed alumni, parents and families for annual Homecoming Weekend Farm Tours.
• We welcomed nearly all FYE (First Year Experience) classes for an introduction to the Farm. Led by Director of First-Year Experience and Leadership Development Father Tim Mouton, C.S.C. and several staff and adjunct faculty, FYE came across the street for a farm experience! 

• The football team came for an end-of-season volunteer service and team building!
• The Farm co-hosted events with Intercultural Affairs and the Center for Race, Ethnicity and Social Justice.
• We experienced growing community with the Brockton Neighborhood Health Clinic (BHNC) every Wednesday for $2 bags of fresh, nutritious and colorful produce through our Mobile Market. We offered a nice variety of staple crops and items to fresh at-home cooking, as well as tested the waters with uncommon items like Kohlrabi. In the beginning we had a lot of explaining to do! What is this thing? You can eat that? How do you prepare it and what does it taste like? With some funny looks, a little trust, and lots of laughs, friendships developed every week and we now have requests for this funky-looking, tasty crucifer called kohlrabi! 
• Thanks to the InnerSpark Foundation, we were able to do critical fixes to our Mobile Market van in 2023 and purchase supportive fruit and veggies from neighboring farms in our efforts to supply access to better nutrition for our communities in need.
• Farm Fridays continue to be the best way to bring a variety of volunteers to visit the Farm year-round. We open every Friday from 2-4 pm for volunteering. This time is open for students, staff and faculty to come offer their service in friendship. 
• The First Annual Harvest Party, co-hosted with the Environmental Science Department, offered a time for students to mingle, paint or carve a pumpkin and enjoy locally produced treats.

The Farm as a Classroom

The Farm service hours support learning and provide hands-on experiences as many different classes visited us this year.

• Professor Corey Dolgon’s Introduction to Sociology students volunteered on The Farm as each student in the class must choose an organization in the community, earn 15 hours of community service, present their experience and write a final paper. 
• Professor of English Sarah Graycomb’s Moreau Honors students spend a couple significant times a year volunteering on The Farm to learn skills and spend time together as an Honors program.
• Associate Professor of Communication Monique Myer’s Happiness and Communications class comes to the Farm for a tour and will spend another class harvesting and packing nearly 60 lbs. of produce for homeless shelters in the community. Together, we donated to the David Jon Louison Family Shelter and the Bolton Place Family Shelter.
• Laurie serves as both the Farm Director and Adjunct Faculty in Environmental Science Department. Her classes include Sustainable Agriculture and Principles of Environmental Science. She brings her classes to the farm often for hands-on learning and living laboratory opportunities. We also have fun making salsa, fire cider, and in the late fall, the students take soil samples and help clean up irrigation lines. 
• Professor of Religious Studies Father Stephen Wilbricht, C.S.C. brings his religious studies classes annually for a farm tour, weeding, pruning, and trellis work as we continue to improve our vineyard for small batch wine-making for Commencement Eucharist.
• Assistant Professor of Studio Arts Candice Smith-Corby's class grew flowers for natural colored dyes and garments revived with natural farm colors!

Cultivating our 14th Season in 2024

With every year, we learn from the last. The 2024 Growing season brings a planting of more perennial crops: fruit and nut trees, berries, sunchokes and asparagus. We are focusing on abundant staple crops such as potatoes, beans and onions; along with specialty items like squash, tomatoes, peppers and our love of basil, eggplant, pumpkins and even mushrooms cultivated on oak and maple logs that we acquired from fallen trees on Stonehill’s property!

We strive to maintain and support biodiversity and farm with nature as a philosophy and practice. Our goal is to understand our site entomology and provide the necessary habitat for beneficial insects, which therefore allows a natural food web to thrive with healthy ecosystem services, while remaining productive. We attract the secondary consumers, meaning the bugs that prey on the leaf-eating insects for protein. These secondary consumers are also attracted to nectar and pollen from organic, native and flowering plants.

The laying hen project serves multiple benefits and helps us close the loop in our food production system. These ladies fill their gourds with protein-rich insects and bacteria derived from pecking through dining hall food waste and neighboring fresh food vendor, Playa Bowls, pre-consumer waste. In turn, the hens gift us nitrogen-rich compost material, as well as a sustainable protein source of fresh eggs for our Mobile Market customers!

Finally, we are expanding our food waste collection in 2024 and seeking funds to establish a small pasture-raised pig operation on the Farm this season. Please reach out for more information! Email: farm@stonehill.edu

It is with deep gratitude, we thank you for your continued support and dedication to our program.