Curtis Consulting - Partnership Development

"Jennifer Curtis has an exceptional grasp of the problems facing agriculture. Her breadth of knowledge and keen insight, as well as her management, interpersonal and writing skills played a crucial role in the development of our successful, multi-million dollar, and multi-state grant proposal to address critical pest management needs in sweetpotato production. Jennifer's talents as a meeting facilitator played a key role in enabling the many, diverse project participants to reach consensus on research and outreach priorities. Without her, this project would not have been funded."

George G. Kennedy
Wm. Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor of Entomology
North Carolina State University

Jennifer Curtis has played an instrumental role in shaping our agricultural work at World Wildlife Fund. Her skills in project design and management are numerous and include quality research and documentation, thoughtful analysis and effective presentations. She is a valuable emissary for the environmental community, facilitating trust-building and direct dialogue with farmers and other agricultural stakeholders. And, on top of all that, she’s a lot of fun to work with.

Sarah Lynch
Senior Program Officer
World Wildlife Fund

Partnerships strengthen project design, increase the likelihood of funding and ensure the applicability of results. Creating and maintaining successful partnerships requires leadership, enthusiasm, patience, and a commitment to open communication and group decision-making.

Southern Sweet Potato IPM

In 2001, Gerber Products Company hired Curtis Consulting to figure out how to advance IPM in southern sweet potato production. Sweet potatoes are Gerber’s number-one-selling vegetable. Growers rely primarily on pesticides for pest control and few reduced-risk IPM alternatives are available. Curtis Consulting conducted a needs assessment and developed a partnership amongst growers, crop consultants and land grant researchers and extension personnel in Louisiana, North Carolina, Alabama and Mississippi to engage in a strategic planning process. In collaboration with North Carolina State University (NCSU) horticultural research staff, Curtis Consulting wrote a successful grant to the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency's Region 4 Agricultural Stewardship Initiative to fund the strategic planning process, the outcome of which was a ranking of the highest-priority pest problems and potential solutions. The final Strategic Plan can be found at http://pestdata.ncsu.edu/pmsp/pdf/sesweetpotato.pdf.

Gerber then hired Curtis Consulting to coordinate the development of a funding proposal to USDA’s Risk Avoidance and Mitigation Program (RAMP). Curtis Consulting worked with key personnel, growers, and industry associations to develop a cohesive research, education, and outreach, and then draft the proposal, “Development of Grower Decision-Making Tools to Reduce Risk and Enhance the Sustainability of Southern Sweet Potato Pest Management Systems.”

In June 2003, the RAMP review panel gave the proposal its highest marks, and the project was awarded $2 million for 4 years. Jennifer Curtis continues as the Project Outreach & Evaluation Coordinator. Her role is to coordinate and facilitate:

outreach to growers and others in the industry
the development of a database to house research and grower production data
meetings among investigators and cooperators, and
the development and implementation of project evaluation activities.

South Florida Agriculture & the Everglades

In 2002, Curtis Consulting was hired by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to develop a grant to the W. K. Kellogg Foundation to enable WWF to work proactively on agricultural issues in conjunction with its advocacy work on restoring Florida’s Everglades ecosystem. More specifically, the goal of the project was to establish a stakeholder process with an agricultural partner in south Florida to foster environmentally and economically viable crop production systems compatible with Everglades ecosystem restoration and protection of Florida’s sensitive marine ecosystems.

Once the funding was secured, WWF hired Curtis Consulting to co-manage the project. The first year Curtis Consulting conducted a feasibility assessment which included the development of a set of criteria to assess agricultural production systems in south Florida and their compatibility with a restored Everglades ecosystem. To view the full report see WWF South Florida Agricultural Assessment.

Based on the assessment and its recommendations, WWF decided to work with cattle ranchers north of Lake Okeechobee, a water body referred to as the heart of the Everglades ecosystem.


	Courtesy of South Florida Water Management District

The next year Curtis Consulting developed a partnership with ranchers around the common goal of improving the economic sustainability of ranching as a regional business and to provide additional water storage and phosphorous clean up to help with Everglades restoration. WWF has now formalized the partnership as the Florida Ranchlands Environmental Services Project and has secured $5 million in funds from federal, state and private sources to explore the potential to create a "market" for the state of Florida to compensate ranchers for providing water storage and phosphorous clean-up.