Putting the Breaks on Storm Water
Happy Birthday, Ag Engineering!
Quilted Heritage
Roundup
Fresh Research
Fighting Student Attrition
The First Class
Helping Families in a New Setting
Putting the
Breaks on
Storm Water
A joint project at The Arboretum between UK and Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government is demonstrating a natural approach to managing storm water.
The 4-acre project has been funded with a $500,000 grant from Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government.
It’s in the Walk across Kentucky, located near a residential area prone to flooding. “It was a win-win situation,” said Marcia Farris, director of The Arboretum.
“We were able to enhance the Arboretum exhibit and also solve a problem.”
The project includes a couple of constructed low-lying rock formations that act as speed bumps to slow down storm water so that the soil has more time to absorb it.
A nearby soil basin has been intensively planted as the second part of the project.
Last spring, staff and volunteers planted 8,000 new Kentucky native seeds and plants in the basin, including cypress trees, gamma grass, blue lobelia, cardinal flowers, and aster.
Other trees, shrubs, vines, grasses, and wildflowers in the area were dug up and stockpiled before the project began. They were replanted once the project was under way. 
All these plants are sending their roots into the soil, where they use rainwater and help slow down its accumulation. They also break up compacted soil so the water will soak in rather than run off.
The rainwater garden in the basin can be viewed from a curving wooden walkway that also protects plants and soil from compaction.
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Happy Birthday, Ag Engineering!
Graduates, faculty, and former faculty marked the 50th anniversary of Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering with a daylong celebration in August. The event included tours of the UK Animal Research Center in Woodford County and a local vineyard. The tours were followed by a dinner program on campus featuring the department’s famous rotisserie-barbecued chicken. Nearly 200 people attended the anniversary event.
The past 50 years have seen the department become a leader in tobacco mechanization, grain drying and storage, crop processing, and greenhouse design.
The department is now housed in the Charles E. Barnhart Building, known as one of the most functional and spacious agricultural engineering buildings in the nation. The department’s students routinely place in the top five in an international quarter-scale tractor design competition. Faculty research grants average $3.3 million annually, with another $4 million in collaborative grants.
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This spring, a campaign kicks off with the goal of raising $750,000 to endow scholarships and enrichment activities for students in biosystems and agricultural engineering. For more information, contact Marci Hicks, director of development, at (859) 257-7200.
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Ag Engineering, about 1960
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Quilted
Heritage
BARNS and other farm buildings have always lent beauty to the Commonweath’s landscape, and now many of them have something extra—a painted quilt block. These quilt blocks began in Ohio and first showed up here in Eastern Kentucky.
Now, quilt trails are popping up all over the state. Extension leaders and others involved in establishing them hope that these trails will take tourists off the beaten track and into rural communities. Shown here are three Madison County barns with quilt blocks. Above is Ms. Scia Scia’s Flying Diamonds, which was designed and painted by students at Mayfield Elementary in Richmond, and at left is Shaded Star.
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Roundup—
Whitney Stith ’89 (left) inducted Doug Thomas ’81 into the Chefs Hall of Fame at Roundup 2007. Mark your calendars for Roundup 2008, scheduled for Sept. 13 when UK plays Akron.
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Fresh Research
Freshness in produce comes in large part from something called green note compounds—aromatic chemical compounds found in lots of fruits and vegetables.
The flavor and fragrance industries use a natural process involving plants such as watermelon leaves and green peppers to replicate these compounds and improve foods, beverages, and perfumes.
Now, College researchers have engineered tobacco plants that can produce green note compounds 10 times more efficiently.
David Hildebrand in Plant and Soil Sciences is the principal investigator in the project. Hirotada Fukushige, Plant and Soil Sciences, and Thomas Kemp, Horticulture, are co-principal investigators.
“This improved process will mean lower commercial production costs,” Hildebrand said. The new process also means less waste because yields are higher per unit of production.
Hildebrand and his co-researchers have formed a startup company, Fresh Flavors and Fragrances, to spur commercialization of the research.
Funding for the work has been provided by UK’s Kentucky Tobacco Research and Development Center, the USDA, and the state’s Kentucky Commercialization Fund, which supports promising technologies developed at Kentucky’s universities.
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Fighting Student Attrition
The College has added a full-time student advising position to help keep students in school.
Jamie Dunn, who has eight years experience in student services at UK, five of them in the College of Agriculture, will hold the new post of academic advisor in the Office of Academic Programs. She will help students map out their academic coursework and support them as they navigate their way through their undergraduate years.
Dunn has been active in all facets of the College’s academic student advising during her years working in the College.
The College’s effort is part of the “war on student attrition,” as it’s been called by UK Provost Kumble Subbaswamy. It is a University-wide effort to improve retention and graduation rates. Currently, UK has a six-year graduation rate of about 60 percent. The University’s business plan for becoming a Top 20 institution has a goal of improving that rate to 72 percent by 2020.
Susan Skees is director of the Advising Resource Center.
The center has two locations, one in the Ag Science Building and the other in Erikson Hall. Dunn will work with Skees in the Ag Science Building, while Louise Gladstone, director of student services in the School of Human Environmental Sciences, and Anissa Radford, director of first-year success, will be at the Erikson Hall location. Dunn will work closely with Radford to focus on success and retention of the College’s first-year students.
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The First Class
This past fall, UK’s College of Agriculture welcomed the inaugural class to its new undergraduate degree program in equine science and management.
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QUICK FACTS:
■ 46 students enrolled this first year
■ Approximately 65 percent are from out-of-state
■ Female-to-male ratio is 21 to 2
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Students came from as far away as California. They have experience ranging from hunter/jumper events to breed-specific horse shows to the racing industry, said Bob Coleman, the program’s director.
“I came to UK for horses,” said Audrey Jarrett, an equine student from Belfast, Maine.
Said Jarrett:
“I had always known Kentucky as the ‘horse capital of the world.’ Why would I want to be anywhere else?”
The program was created as part of the University’s Equine Initiative, which began in May 2005.
It offers two separate tracks, which students will take as independent study coursework until final University approval occurs.
■ The equine science track focuses on the biological sciences and day-to-day activities of horses.
■ The equine management track focuses on the business, economics, and marketing aspects of the equine industry.
“The classes are fun, interesting, and help me not just with my degree but also my horses at home,” said Mackenzie Brewer, an equine freshman from Wolfe County.
A new teaching pavilion has been built at UK’s Maine Chance Equine Campus north of Lexington (at Maine Chance Farm) to serve the students. Plans are under way for further expansion of facilities on the farm for research as well as teaching.
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Helping Families in a New Setting
The UK Family Therapy Center has moved to new quarters in Scovell Hall.
It now has an office suite with five counseling rooms, administrative space, and a waiting room.
The center is the outreach arm of the marriage and family therapy program in Family Studies, which is part of the College’s School of Human Environmental Sciences. For 15 years, a substantial part of the center’s service has been to the Lexington-Fayette schools.
The center currently contracts for service with about 20 schools—elementary, middle, and high schools—providing each of them about five hours of counseling services a week. The school system pays for the service; it’s free to the families who are referred.
Graduate students in Family Studies who are studying to be marriage and family therapists do the counseling. They are supervised by faculty members who are themselves licensed marriage and family therapists.
“If a child is strangely depressed, is acting out, or is emotionally distraught at school, the family may be referred,” said Greg Brock, Family Studies faculty member.
“The kind of intervention we supply is really designed to change whole family systems,” Brock said.
The center is a training ground for the graduate students as well as a community service. “It gives our students a tremendous variety of problems to work with,” Brock said.
Individuals, couples, and families in the Lexington area can also use the center’s services on a sliding fee scale.
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