Rick Antle
President and CEO, Tanimura & Antle 1 Harris Road, Salinas (831) 455-2950, taproduce.com
Matt Damon’s character in The Martian creates a makeshift space greenhouse to grow enough food to survive being stranded on Mars. He makes it look like successful farming is an exercise in chemistry and biology. That’s part of it for T&A, but CEO Rick Antle’s leadership is built on a different resource: people. Under Antle, the company invested $17 million to build Spreckels Crossing in 2015, providing housing for up to 800 farm laborers. That’s since caught on as a trend among Salinas Valley agribusinesses, with others using the project as a blueprint. T&A is one of five companies that voluntarily partnered with a farmworker advocacy group to implement a pilot program to improve safety. But maybe most telling is that Antle spearheaded a transition in 2017 to give T&A’s employees – everyone from harvest crews to management – a chance to actually become part owners in the company.