Growing up in the small town of Moultrie located in Colquitt County deep in South Georgia brought Masa Kenney into contact with an agrarian lifestyle and community. As a young teen, he spent a lot of his time involved with 4-H, FFA, and the annual Sunbelt Ag Expo. The Sunbelt Agricultural Exposition has been billed as America’s largest agricultural exposition for over 4 decades now. Many of his friends lived and worked on farms, and his summers were spent helping them pick crops and tend to cattle. Two of those summers brought him into a deeper understanding and appreciation of the science that is incorporated into agriculture when at the ages of 13 & 14 during summer break he worked in Valdosta for Funk’s G Hybrid Seed Company which conducted a selective breeding program using a technique of self-pollination to create a genetically desirable harvest. His junior and senior years in high school introduced him to a landscaping job and cultivated his love of working with Nature through the beautification of the environment. By working in this field he gained a greater respect and understanding of the symbiotic relationship that plants shared with humans, not just in the exchange of the necessary gases to survive but also the deeper effects that the environment and plants have on people and vice-versa. It was then that Masa decided that he wanted to attend one of the best agriculture universities in the nation and find a career path that involved working with plants.. With no way to pay for college, he joined the U.S. Army and opted for the Army College Fund and the G.I. Bill instead of a one-time cash enlistment bonus to pay for his college education. After a station overseas in Europe and a deployment to the Middle East for Desert Shield & Desert Storm, he went right back to his chosen career path and worked for several different landscape companies and nursery centers while attending Valdosta State College and then UGA. It was while attending classes at UGA that he was introduced to a scientific cutting edge technology in agriculture when he worked in the Horticulture Department’s Plant Tissue Culture Laboratory under Dr. Hazel Wetzstein who is one of the most well respected pioneers in her field of plant genetic research and a recent recipient of the Fellows Award. This is where Masa learned the true scientific process of cultivating plants and how we can work with plants on a genetic level to propagate exact clones from plant tissue and experiment with genetic modification techniques to produce plants that are more desirable in many aspects: higher yield, higher sugar content, resistance to drought, disease, pests, herbicides, etc. Although he had acquired a large amount of his botanical knowledge through his years of work in the industry and in the classroom, it was in that lab that he took a huge leap forward in his understanding and appreciation of Nature.

Masa Kenney graduated from the College of Agriculture and Environmental Science school of the University of Georgia with a Bachelor’s of Science in Agriculture in 1997. He has a major in Horticulture and a minor in Crop & Soils Science. While attending UGA, he was a member of the Horticulture Club and BioTechnology Journal Club. Upon graduation he went to work for a large scale landscape company in Savannah only to return six months later to the incredible city he had come to love in Athens. Here he spent the next 15 years raising a new family, starting a new landscape business, and settling into a city that his family, the Kenneys, had originated from five generations earlier. His landscape business, Lavish Landscapes, LLC, operated for over 12 years and offered services in landscape design, installation, maintenance, irrigation, hardscapes, drainage remediation, licensed chemical applications, and consultations. During this period Masa was a member of the GGIA (Georgia Green Industry Association) and one of the founding members of the original BNI...