Past job prepares farmer for managing family business
family’s farm before moving to Washington, D.C., in 2011. He spent two years working on Capitol Hill for Congressman Mike Thompson, D- St. Helena. “There was a period there where I was content with, if not eager to, build a life on the East Coast,” Weiss said. But he did move back to California in the fall of 2019, working remotely for CQ Roll Call. By March 2020, he made the switch back to the family farm. Since returning to farming, Weiss said he’s been “doing my best” to brush up on
his Spanish, the language of many of his employees. The family business has “ad- justed with the times,” working with cli- ents who want their vineyards machine harvested and/or are making the switch to a more mechanical approach in the vine- yard, including pruning. Even though the family’s own vineyards are not mechanically pruned, he said, the company during the past few years has developed other vineyards that allow for mechanical pruning. The family does use
By Ching Lee (This is the second of a three-part series highlighting individuals in California Farm Bureau’s Young Farmers & Ranchers program.) With the
a reporter, then editor before assuming a director-level role in which he managed a team in India that followed U.S. regulatory and legislative information. He got his start in journalism at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he worked as a student report- er while studying English literature. After college, he returned briefly to his
labor-inten- sive crops his family
See YF&R, Page 16
grows—pears and winegrapes—Lake County farmer Will Weiss manages peo- ple as much as he manages trees and vines. As assistant general manager of his family’s business, Bella Vista Farming Co. in Kelseyville, Weiss works with 50 year- round employees. During pear harvest in August, his crew swells to 150 to 200 people, relying on seasonal workers to get through the crunch. In addition to its own farming, the com- pany develops vineyards for other clients and does custom harvesting and trucking. It was one of the first vineyard manage- ment companies in Lake County to offer nighttime harvest by hand. To secure the workforce it needs, Bella Vista works with labor contractors and is a labor contractor itself, so that it can navi- gate the complex H-2A temporary agricul- tural workers program. With this expertise, the company now supplies labor to its own farms and to other farms. That part of the business, Weiss said, has “all been an evolution.” As the company considers its future in pears and wine- grapes, labor remains top of mind. “I think it would be silly to say that we do not think about the availability and ability of our labor force at Bella Vista Farming within the context of almost every business decision,” Weiss said. From decisions about whether or how the business should grow to adding or removing clients to whether it should add a mechani- cal harvester, Weiss said they are all “tied to the folks we have available to do the work.” This year, as the company moved into its pruning season for pears and winegrapes, Weiss said there was “a larger number of individuals” applying for work on the farm than there had been during the past two years. He pointed to the ongoing drought as a reason for the reduced crop acreages in the state, which reduced competition for agricultural workers. Also, with the decline in value of the region’s cannabis crop, some growers planted fewer acres or did not plant at all, leaving “sufficient local workers to fill our needs,” he said. As a result, Bella Vista did not need to use the H-2A program, which in past years brought in two dozen employ- ees for about 10 weeks to help with pruning or vineyard development. Even before Weiss returned to the fam- ily farm more than two years ago, people management had become “the princi- pal focus” of his work. Weiss worked for more than seven years as a journalist at CQ Roll Call, a trade publication that re- ports primarily on Congress with “heavy policy analysis.” There, he worked first as
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October 19, 2022 Ag Alert 3
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