The senior Avinelis had built a team with that expertise and philosophy, offering farm management, agronomy, and land development services. Today, AgriCare oversees 10,000 acres across California and Oregon of permanent specialty crops — primarily blueberries, citrus varieties such as navel oranges and Dekopon mandarins, kiwi berries, cherries, grapes, pistachios, and hazelnuts.
The Guiding Philosophy AgriCare, like its name implies, was born of a desire to support growers. Tom Avinelis founded the company after a career in research agronomy and chemical sales with Actagro. “[He] got to a place where he no longer really wanted to be a salesman
AGRICARE AND HOMEGROWN ORGANIC FARMS’ FAMILY-FIRST APPROACH ENSURES THAT WHERE ROOTS RUN DEEP, FUTURES GROW WIDE.
by Zoe Rosenberg photographs courtesy of Homegrown Organic Farms
AgriCare doesn’t own most of the acreage it manages, but Gunnar Avinelis says the landowners support the creation of a healthier growing environment through organic and conventional practices. (Even on conventional farms, AgriCare implements regenerative practices like cover cropping, compost applications, and integrated pest management.) AgriCare’s services include consulting, agronomic services like developing and implementing a soil nutrition and pest control program, scouting the fields, and more. AgriCare also takes over day-to-day operations for landowners or retiring growers who want to be hands-off, down to handling the books and accounting. “Because there’s a lot of year-to-year variations, it can be very challenging, especially when you begin to move toward a more regenerative, organic approach to farming,” Gunnar Avinelis says. “You really have to be proactive, because you don’t have tools to react.” The Value of Expertise One of the company’s biggest successes is the first farm they worked on in Oregon, Avinelis says. The group that had recently purchased the farm wanted to turn it organic. That required controlling one of the most challenging blueberry pests in the Pacific Northwest, the spotted wing drosophila, which lays its eggs in ripening fruit.
GRIVISION IS A COMPANY that prides itself on forging beneficial relationships with the growers whose land it manages and crops it markets. The company places just as much importance on the people who help bring these products to grocery store shelves across the United States. Based in Porterville, California, Agrivision comprises two family-founded businesses: AgriCare, a full-service farm management company launched by Tom and Karen Avinelis in California’s San Joaquin Valley in 1990, and Homegrown Organic Farms, a marketing arm founded by Porterville organic citrus growers John and Cindy France in 1998. Today, Agrivision operates about 10,000 acres in California and Oregon and markets all kinds of produce for more than 100 growers in California, Oregon, and Mexico. It’s also owned and operated by its 140 or so full-time employees. In 2021, the Avinelises and Frances were looking to step away from day-to-day operations. They decided the best way forward was to create an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) that allowed employees to buy stock in the company, giving them a heightened stake in Agrivision’s success. Brenna Benevidez, chief administration officer of AgriCare, food safety manager for
From SOUL to SOIL
AgriCare supervises over 10,000 acres of crops across California and Oregon.
Homegrown Organic Farms, and the Avinelises’ daughter, says this employee-forward ethos underscores the entire business. “It’s important to understand that what makes our family of companies unique is, it’s not just about the bottom line, it’s about the people,” Benevidez says. “It’s about taking care of our employees, giving them opportunities to learn and grow and train in their roles.”
Once the berries start turning blue, Avinelis says, growers often begin blanket-spraying pesticide at regular intervals, but AgriCare implemented a scouting program instead: Trained and paid seasonal interns, often students from local colleges, sample fruit as it matures, looking for signs of the pest so they can apply pesticide only where necessary. This targeted approach increased cost savings by 40% to 50% in
so much as he wanted to support growers understanding how to farm more sustainably, which wasn’t a buzzword back then in the early ’90s,” explains Gunnar Avinelis, Tom and Karen’s son, who took over as CEO of AgriCare in 2016 and executive vice president of Agrivision in 2022. “He really had this desire [to figure out], How do we work with the land? How do we work with the environment to produce really good produce?”
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