Ed Kee came and gave a guest lecture to our Intro to Ag class. Mr. Kee being former Delaware Secretary of Ag gave us a lot of important information in his lecture. Mr. Kee spoke about the amount of processors in Delaware decreased over the years; he discussed also how many challenges were involved in the industry which included, promoting the best technology and connecting farmers with different market opportunities. Mr. Kee talked about the different “Mega Trends” in the industry which involved a shift in economic and trade flows, climate change, rapid urbanization, demographic and consumption changes and technology consumption.

Mr. Kee talked about how canning food has been around for years, in 1842 the first canning facility in Baltimore. Canning he said was “a new revolutionary technology”.      In 1889 there were 49 processing facilities in Delaware today we have 2 of those remaining facilities. This data is relatively the same as MD,VA and NJ. With the canning industry in Delaware allowed the Agricultural industry to basically grow 10x more, this system allows our foods to stay preserved for the long road to being put into a grocery store.

I learned a lot from Mr. Kee`s presentation and I thank him for taking the time to do the lecture for our class!