The Fresno City Chamber of Commerce and Baker Peterson Franklin announced Gary Serrato as the winner of this year’s Agriculturalist of the Year and agricultural software company Agrian Inc. as recipient of the Ag Business Award in front of Fresno State’s Vincent E. Petrucci Viticulture Building on Oct. 9.

Serrato is a Fresno State alumnus who has worked as general manager of the Fresno Irrigation District since 1986. Serrato is also executive officer of the North Kings Groundwater Sustainability Authority and is active in many water committees throughout the San Joaquin Valley.

“I am humbled and I am honored to be receiving this award today,” Serrato said. “To be able to come up with some solutions at least within our district seems to be very satisfying as we move forward, and I see that the things that were thought about years ago are now being implemented.”

To receive the Ag Business Award on behalf of Agrian, the company’s founder and CEO, Nishan Majarian, gave a short speech about his company and its home in Fresno.

Majarian said Fresno has been a valuable location for Agrian because of its prominence in the agriculture industry as well as being a “great tech market with a lot of talent from the Bay Area that want to come down here.”

Agrian was founded in 2004 and is the first ag software company to operate cloud-based software in the industry. With 130 employees in Clovis, Armenia and Nepal, Agrian offers compliance, agronomy, precision farming, sustainability and analytic tools with its free software to more than 200,000 users.

Announcing the winners of the awards was Chamber of Commerce president and CEO Nathan Ahle.

“It just really shows the dedication to Fresno County’s water issues and Fresno County’s ag industry that folks like Gary exemplify. It made a very easy choice to select Gary as our Agriculturalist of the Year,” Ahle said.

There will be a formal award and recognition ceremony at the Fresno Convention Center in Downtown Fresno on Nov. 7.