Gregorio Billikopf (Gregory Encina Billikopf) is a Labor Management Farm Advisor with the University of California and Visiting Professor of the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences of the University of Chile. His agricultural extension research and teaching efforts have focused on such topics as employee selection, compensation, performance appraisal, discipline and termination, supervision, interpersonal relations, conflict resolution, and interpersonal negotiation skills.

Billikopf is the recipient of the 1989 National Association for County Agricultural Agents (NACAA) Achievement Award and the 2006 Distinguished Service Award. He has received a number of other awards from NACAA, including two National Winner communication awards: Webpage in 1999 (Agricultural Labor Management); and Publication in 2006 (for his book Labor Management in Agriculture: Cultivating Personnel Productivity, 2nd Edition, 2003).

Billikopf is also author of Helping Others Resolve Differences: Empowering Stakeholders (2004), as well as chapters in Large Dairy Herd Management (1992) and Small Farm Handbook (1994), and Editor of Dairy Incentive Pay (4th Edition, 2005). His latest research deals with the contributions of caucusing and most especially pre-caucusing in mediation and has developed a mediation model called Party-Directed Mediation.

As a farm advisor since 1981, Gregory has been a guest speaker throughout the United States, as well as in Russia, México, Canada, Uganda, Colombia, and his native Chile. Gregory has a BS in Plant Science from UC Davis, and a Human Resource Management MA from CSU Stanislaus. He serves San Joaquín, Stanislaus, and Merced counties.
Billikopf's maternal family have been grape growers in Chile for generations. It is at the labor intensive family vineyard, where Gregory spent much of his youth, that he first developed an interest in labor issues, horses and agriculture.

While doing a search in the internet, Billikopf found that this interest in conflict management also runs in the family. His paternal grandfather, Jacob Billikopf, is listed as a "notable arbitrator" whose writings are included in the Cornell University School of Industrial Relations' Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archive and elsewhere.

Gregory and Linda Billikopf make their home in Modesto, California, and are the parents of four children. Gregory has been a dressage (equestrian sports) rider and instructor (and is author of A Passion for Dressage, an amateur radio operator, and a youth soccer referee. More recently, his deep love for the Scriptures has occupied much of his free time.

Agricultural Labor Management

E-mail: gebillikopf@ucdavis.edu

Gregorio Billikopf Encina
University of California
(209) 525-6800

5 May 2009