Neill Callis, General Manager, Turlock Fruit Company Director since 2019 | Member since 1944 Farming, the Final Frontier By Michelle Rivera, Communications Manager After 17 successful years of working for NASA as a project manager and systems engineer, Neill Callis ended up taking his career to the unlikeliest of places—agriculture. How on earth does that happen, one has to ask? It wasn’t exactly rocket science, according to Callis. All puns aside, Callis explained that both jobs, while presenting different buckets of challenges, require a similar set of skills. “What I found, and people laugh at me all
After their eldest child was born in 2011, the couple considered a change that would add to their quality of life. “We were living in San Francisco and commuting back and forth to Mountain View, and we were wondering how we were going to do this. The Bay Area can be a tough place,” Callis said. It was around this time that Callis was presented with, quite literally, a career-changing opportunity when his father-in-law asked him to join the family business. Turlock Fruit Company, founded in 1918, is a four-
the time for saying this, is that there are a lot of similarities with what I needed to be successful in my last career and what I needed to be good at in farming,” Callis said. “You need an array of project management skills, including resource management, budget management, fiscal management and people management.” After earning a degree in political science from Elon University in 1997, Callis sharpened these skills when he began his career working for the Universities Space Research Association, a nonprofit research corporation in Washington D.C. He then moved to the Bay Area in 2003, spending the next decade working at NASA’s Ames Research Center on the SOFIA mission (an airborne telescope installed in a Boeing 747SP) in Mountain View, where Callis would meet his wife Hilary Smith, the great- granddaughter of the renowned James “Cantaloupe” Smith, who founded Turlock Fruit Company more than 100 years ago.
Neill Callis after introducing PAC Speaker Michael Shellenberger at the PAC Lunch at the 2023 WG Annual Meeting
Neill Callis with his family at the WG Annual Meeting on Kauai
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