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Skipjack News
| RDC In The News: Rural Development Director’s Projects Have Global Reach |
By Calum McKinney - Staff Writer - Salisbury Daily Times - June 7, 2010
SALISBURY -- Putting new satellites in orbit, building greenhouses in Jamaica, negotiating in Mexico and making orchid growing deals with Chinese companies are all part of one man's job.
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As director of the Eastern Shore's Rural Development Center, Dan Kuennan stays busy with a wildly varied mix of economic development projects. Funded by an assortment of federal and state agencies, private foundations and the Maryland Cooperative Extension, the RDC at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore assists community groups, nonprofits, local officials and private firms with plans, loans, grants, projects and programs that benefit the local economy. June marks its 20th year of operation.
"I get bored easily doing the same stuff over and over again," Kuennen said. "Being a generalist, I'm always in meetings with something different."
Recently, he returned from Mexico, where he continued talks with the Mexican government and agriculture groups about the logistics of operating a wholesale center to serve a cooperative of Hispanic businesses on Delmarva.
The driving force behind this co-op is Miguel Gutierrez, LatCoop general coordinator and owner of Salisbury's FiestaMex grocery and Mexican restaurant. He said the effort to get the project
underway coincided with the nationwide economic crisis, making it difficult to secure the loans necessary for the project to work.
In addition to securing Recovery Act funds to assist Gutierrez with the credit crunch, Kuennen has also lent a pragmatic eye to the effort Gutierrez says will benefit growers in Delmarva and Mexico.
"He is a very practical man," Gutierrez said. "He understands a lot of problems beyond the obvious. He knows exactly what we need and goes right to the point."
After meeting two years ago, Gutierrez said he has come to see Kuennen as someone with deep knowledge and a personal investment in his job. He said the several days he recently spent working with Kuennen in Mexico confirmed this.
"Now we're going to take the project and make it grow," Gutierrez said. "There are many people involved in what we are doing and we now have the right elements to get it going."
Despite the broad scope of such RDC projects, it is only a "two-man shop," with Kuennen and administrative assistant Stephanie Harmon making up the whole staff.
Another recent RDC highlight was its assistance with HawkSat-1. The first satellite to be entirely designed, developed, fabricated, tested and launched entirely from the Eastern Shore of
Maryland and Virginia, its primary task was to act as a proof of concept for the Pocomoke City-based Hawk Institute for Space Sciences.
Inspired by housing work he did with the Peace Corps in Brazil, Kuennan changed his career path from philosophy and spent 20 years working in economic development in Delaware before beginning his work at UMES. Having been involved in too many projects to list, he said the biggest change throughout his 40-year career has been the advent of widespread Internet communication.
"With experience, over time it becomes easier," Kuennan said of his complex job. "Also, back in the old days, you used a grease pencil on an overhead projector for presentations. Now there is PowerPoint and I can instantly get e-mails from across the country. ... It really expands your capability."
The now commonplace technology has allowed Kuennan to work with groups from Washington state to Jamaica with growing efficiency. Recently, Kuennan has been expanding greenhouse programs based on Delmarva's vertical integration model for chicken growers. Using this model, families use readily built greenhouses to grow flowers and vegetables for integrators who sell them to big box retailers.
"This isn't to supplant small markets," Kuennan said. "It's just one other part of the marketplace you're trying to satisfy."
With more than $100 million in flower sales, Kuennan is now working on extending the greenhouse project further into the vegetable market.
"FARMS enables growers with limited amounts of land, farming expertise and market contact to gain access to technological and managerial expertise and major markets, reducing their risk and improving profitability," Kuennen said of the award-winning project that has been taken as far as Jamaica. "A greenhouse can make a relatively small parcel of land highly productive."
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Contact Information
Dan Kuennen: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) - 410.651.6183
Daily Times Reporter: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) - 410-845-4639
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