CALIFORNIA DIRECTOR PROFILE
Franz De Klotz Richard Bagdasarian Inc. Mecca, CA
Director Since 2019 | Member Since 2003
Ag Career by Choice Not Birth
By Tim Linden U nlike so many others in this industry, Franz De up in Fresno, CA, and always had an affinity for agriculture. “I grew up in the Fig Garden development in Fresno where many of the houses were on one-acre plots,” he said, noting the family always had a vegetable garden and fruit trees in their backyard. De Klotz was drawn to that work, and even though his folks were in the medical field, when he was a teenager he looked for jobs on the farms in the surrounding communities. Coincidentally, he remembers working for several different fig farms in nearby Madera when he was a teenager. After high school, he went to the University of California at Davis and then transferred to Fresno State to study viticulture. It was an apropos major as he and his father had just established a vineyard in Madera. “We planted it ourselves. I remember putting in lots of end posts,” he recalls. The 200-acre vineyard consisted of French Colombard and Chenin Blanc grapes, and it is still in the family today. After graduating from college in 1983, De Klotz was advised to join California’s Agricultural Inspection Service as a way to improve his ag knowledge and meet prospective employers. In fact, he spent a year inspecting grapes vines in the Coachella and San Joaquin valleys. In 1985, he was hired by Sun World and worked for them for three years in various capacities, including in the company’s foodservice division at the Irvine Ranch in Orange County. That led to a position with Sysco in their Los Angeles office. After several years there, he went back to Sun World to work with the firm on managing some of its proprietary crops including the Superior Seedless grape and the Le Rouge Royale Klotz was not born into agriculture. His father was a physician and his mother a nurse. However, he did grow
16 Western Grower & Shipper | www.wga.com JULY | AUGUST 2019
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online