He’s looking for seeds, an honorable task, but it’s making quite a mess. Seeing a guest come upon him, his first instinct is to extend a hand in greeting. But as the visitor recoils at his fruit-bloodied hands, Kazokas laughs and thinks better of it.

Here off Crosby Road in Myakka City, Kazokas represents the interests of Enza Zaden Research, a Dutch seed company. His assignment? Plant the finest tomato and pepper seeds from around the world and determine which bears the best genetic code for thriving in Florida’s heat and humidity—not to mention native insects and a plague of plant-attacking diseases.

If Enza Zaden doesn’t ring any bells in your house, you might recognize one of the products of its research: Campari tomatoes, found in every Publix Super Market.

Zaden is Dutch for seed. Enza is a conglomeration of the old company’s names. It started in the 1950s in a small Holland town called Enkhuizen, and so it was known as Enkhuizen Seed or Enza, Enkhuizen Zaden. They shortened it to Enza and then added the Zaden on the end. The company—ranked fifth in sales out of the 10 competitor companies around the world and reporting $250 million a year in sales and 1,000 employees—is actually well-known in Europe but a relative newcomer to North America.

As for Kazokas, the 46-year-old tomato breeder and station manager took the long way to Manatee, starting life on a cattle ranch in Broken Arrow, Okla. He attended Oklahoma State University, but staying close to home was never in the cards for this son of an oilman.

“My father’s travels opened the world to me,” Kazokas says. “He would come back with great stories. He was in Scotland. He was in Nigeria and Indonesia. So even though I grew up in Oklahoma, I had a very broad view of the world.”

After graduation, Kazokas worked a few years in ornamentals, then struck out on his own with a horticultural business, a nursery and a landscaping business. (The man does not lack in ambition—or energy.) “I always had the farm boy in me, was always farming and gardening, and I loved tractors,” he says.

His first year of marriage was hard because the company was pulling him in so many different directions. “It wasn’t a life I wanted,” he explains. “I missed being with plants and close to the earth and was tired of shuffling papers. So I threw the whole thing out, sold it for a song and decided to go back to graduate school.”

That decision brought him to the University of Florida in Gainesville for a Ph.D. in plant breeding.
Then a job opportunity came up in Mexico and Kazokas, who speaks fluent Spanish, took it. He worked as an organic farmer at a health spa, Rancho La Puerta, which grew all its own food for guests.

“I’d always been fascinated with plant breeding and we had 300 types of lettuce and 50 different types of tomatoes. The guests, of course, loved it. They had no idea there were that many varieties of anything,” Kazokas says.

While he was in Mexico, Kazokas, who has a second identity online as organic/Zen farming consultant “Farmer Bill” (www.farmerbillphd.com), met the founder of Jurlique, an Australian skincare line. Jurlique was founded in Australia 20 years ago by a German chemist who believed that anything put on skin should be pristine. All his ingredients were organically grown and processed without the harsh petroleum that goes into a lot of skincare products. Jurlique needed someone to manage its Australian farms and develop new varieties. “A lot of the herbs they were using were sort of wild,” Kazokas says. “They hadn’t been selected intentionally for higher content of certain compounds that they were looking for. They needed a grower and a breeder. So that’s how we got to Australia.”

That job lasted just a year, because another irresistible opportunity presented itself in May 2006: tomato breeder and station manager for Enza Zaden, not in Holland, but in Florida.

“My father’s getting up in age and we wanted to get a little bit closer to him. He lives in Oklahoma on the family ranch. So I started casting my net for something back here stateside, and it was serendipitous,” Kazokas says. “I just happened to be looking at a time when they were looking for somebody with my skill set. And my wife grew up in Florida. It just all clicked.”