If Loudoun County were to take human form, it may well look like Chuck Kuhn.
The founder and CEO of JK Moving Services, a passionate conservationist and active family man, Kuhn embodies the Loudoun County sales pitch. He operates his lauded, 930-employee company out of the high-tech business corridor, just minutes from the county’s economic engine – Dulles International Airport.
He then retreats home, to the county’s charming west, lush with farmland, viewsheds and effortless serenity.
“Loudoun County is a jewel,” Kuhn tells us during an interview at JK’s Sterling headquarters. “It’s a neat, diverse place. Here in eastern Loudoun, there’s tremendous development, there’s tremendous employment. It’s an active population, it’s a great business climate. When you go out to western Loudoun, west of Route 15 … it’s solitude. It’s open space, and it really to me makes it feel like I’m hours away from Washington D.C. and all the crazy chaos of the beltway, when really we’re 30 minutes away.”
It’s that diversity – in people, in geography, in opportunity – Kuhn embraces. “You need that balance,” he says.
Working to preserve that equilibrium, Kuhn has placed more than 4,000 acres in Loudoun, Frederick and Fauquier counties in conservation easement over the past five years or so, protecting the land from development in perpetuity.
“If I’m not at work, we’re outdoors,” Kuhn said of how he enjoys spending time with his wife, Stacy, and their nine kids. “Just enjoying the outside, playing outside, hiking, walking, hunting, fishing. It’s how I was raised, and it’s how my kids have been raised.”
More so than his business acumen, it’s this appreciation for the natural world that has landed Kuhn in the local headlines this year.
Aside from his formal conservation efforts, Kuhn launched the JK Community Farm in Purcellville, a philanthropic project that provides fresh fruit, vegetables and protein to those in need. In 2018, Kuhn estimates the farm provided more than 50,000 pounds of organic vegetables and another 50,000 pounds of beef, chicken, pork and venison to Loudoun Hunger Relief and other pantries across the region.
“You’ve got to give back,” he said.