Gregorio Billikopf worked as a Labor Management Farm Advisor with the University of California from 1981 to 2014 (and is now Emeritus). He served San Joaquín, Stanislaus, and Merced counties. Billikopf is also a Visiting Professor of the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences of the University of Chile (since 2005).

His agricultural extension research and teaching efforts have focused on such topics as employee selection, compensation (especially piece-rate pay), quality control, performance appraisal, discipline and termination, supervision, interpersonal relations, conflict resolution and mediation, 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 Party-Directed Mediation (3rd Edition, 2014), as well as chapters in Large Dairy Herd Management (1992), Small Farm Handbook (1994), and Container Nursery Production and Business Management Manual (2014) and Editor of Dairy Incentive Pay (4th Edition, 2005). He has authored a number of books in Spanish, also. Bilikopf has been sought out both in and out of agriculture.

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 (PDM) and the Negotiated Performance Appraisal (NPA). He presented both of these models at the International Association for Conflict Management (IACM) meetings in Seville, Spain and Kyoto, Japan. In the area of worker productivity he has been working on piece-rate pay as well as quality control issues.

Gregorio has been a guest speaker throughout the United States, as well as in Russia, México, Canada, Uganda, Colombia, Argentina, New Zealand and his native Chile. Gregorio has a BS in Plant Science from UC Davis, and a Human Resource Management MA (with a focus on organizational psychology) from CSU Stanislaus.

Billikopf's maternal family have been grape growers in Chile for generations. It is at the labor intensive family vineyard, where Gregorio 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. His paternal great grandfather Louis Marshall was also a mediator.

Gregorio and Linda Billikopf have four children and a growing number of grandchildren. Gregorio has been a dressage rider (equestrian sports) 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. Linda & Gregorio now live in Llanquihue, Chile (X Region).

Agricultural Labor Management

E-mail: gebillikopf@ucdavis.edu

Gregorio Billikopf Encina
University of California
+56 9 94559913

7 September 2015