2018 CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD Craig Reade: First Job Yields a Career
By Tim Linden T hough Craig Reade’s dad was in the oil industry, he grew up around agriculture in the Central Coast and always knew he was destined to be in the farming business. “From the time I was 10 years old, I was driving a tractor on a neighbor’s farm and I knew that was what I wanted to do,” he said. Reade worked on farms in high school and college, majored in Ag Business Management at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and helped start a soil laboratory at nearby Betteravia Farms while still in college. Now, more than 35 years later, he is still at Betteravia Farms. Today, he is a managing partner along with the other third generation partners: Mitch Ardantz, Rob Ferini, Alain Pincot and Tommy Minetti. “We run operations while senior partners Henry Ardantz, Milo Ferini and Patrick Ferini bring the institutional experience and knowledge to the business while staying involved on a daily basis.” Reade’s entry into the farming business wasn’t totally by happenchance. His father’s family grows grapes in the southern San Joaquin Valley. When the elder Reade moved to San Luis Obispo to attend Cal Poly, he “met my mom who was a San Luis Obispo-born-and-raised gal and never returned to the family ranch.” But his dad was still passionate about farming and instilled that trait into a young Craig. “As I look back at my career, I owe special thanks to a handful of people in the ag industry that took an interest in me, supported me, which
afforded me an opportunity to follow a passion and become further involved with production agriculture. Families such as the Acquistapaces, Nishinos, Taniguchis, Ferinis and Ardantzes played keys roles in my success over the past 40 years and deserve a very special thanks.” When Craig looks at the company’s current soil lab and protocol and its handful of technicians and myriad of tests, he chuckles a bit at the early effort he was involved in starting in the 1980s. “We were doing very basic stuff—soil salinity, nitrate levels and pH levels. Much different than what we are doing today. We have a full lab complete with four full- time employees.” After several years of running that lab,
Craig began to work side by side with the farm’s general manager. He learned about ground preparation, planting and scheduling, and completely loves that part of the work. In those early years, he thought he would take the knowledge he was learning and eventually strike out on his own, but “I was treated so well here, I never left.” While his involvement in management has brought him indoors for a significant portion of his work day, what he enjoys best is checking the progress of the many crops that the firm has been producing since the 1930s. Today, the organization is a year- round producer of an array of crops with cauliflower, broccoli, head lettuce, celery
Craig and Christine and family
8 Western Grower & Shipper | www.wga.com JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2018
Made with FlippingBook - Online catalogs