Mouzin Brothers: Four generations of grit and growth

Quick Facts

Operation: Mouzin Brothers Farms, a fourth-generation family grower-shipper of produce and honey

Location:  Based in southern Indiana, with growing operations across Indiana, Illinois, Florida, and Georgia

Crops: Watermelon, cantaloupe, sweet corn, pumpkins, squash, and honey

Workforce: 15 to 20 full-time staff, roughly 150 to 163 H-2A workers, plus 200 to 300 additional seasonal harvest workers

Customer since: 2023

Seso products used: H-2A filing and software, H-2A worker services, logistics, digital onboarding, and worker transfers

Problem. Mouzin Brothers grew from a small family farm into a multi-state grower-shipper, and the old family-farm habits stopped scaling. "One person remembers something and does it again," is how Brady describes the way it used to run. In a business this size, that does not hold. H-2A only raised the stakes, since it is heavily regulated and watched by several government agencies. And a lot of the record-keeping still lived in binders.

Solution. Mouzin Brothers brought its H-2A program to Seso as a single point of contact, using it for filing, consular services, logistics, onboarding, and worker transfers. The draw was getting trustworthy answers in one place instead of piecing the program together. Brady's read on Seso: they are "trying to be a one stop shop for H-2A. That's pretty apparent."

Result. When a regulatory question comes up, Brady gets an answer he can act on. In his words, "it's been nice to know we can ask a question and they're not going to give us an H-2A answer and leave us to figure out the rest of it." The paperwork is moving off the shelf, too. In a four-week trial of Seso's ad hoc tool, the farm sent dozens of documents to workers, from training videos to job contracts, and now plans to fold it into next year's onboarding.

"Knowing that if we need something H-2A related, we're probably going to find it on the app. I think that's a huge benefit."

- Brady Mouzin, Director of Sales and Operations.

Who They Are

Mouzin Brothers Farms started in 1935, when Julius Mouzin Sr. worked a small plot with horse-drawn plows. Four generations later the family farms around 10,000 acres of watermelon, cantaloupe, sweet corn, pumpkins, squash, and honey across four states, and sells direct to retail chains like Kroger and Walmart. Brady, the fourth generation, was born and raised about two and a half miles from the main location and grew up doing nearly every job on the farm before he took over sales and operations after finishing a business degree in 2016.

The family is still in the fields. Brady's grandfather, close to 90, still drives a tractor and combine. He carries a flip phone, but when the farm went digital, he learned to use an iPad so he could keep harvesting. As Brady puts it, the name is on the label and the shed is 20 yards behind him, so the work carries a certain pride and responsibility.

What wasn't working

The hard part of getting big was not the acres, it was the systems. Mouzin Brothers had to organize itself as a business rather than a family farm, which meant standard operating procedures where memory used to do the job. H-2A sat right in the middle of that shift, a program with real compliance weight and paperwork the farm was managing across binders. The team had worked with a labor consultant who did a good job for the size they were, but the operation kept outgrowing the setup.

Why Seso

The push into Seso came from an unlikely place: trucking. During COVID, freight costs ran several times higher than normal, enough to wipe out the margin on a watermelon crop, so Mouzin Brothers built its own fleet with local drivers. Then the local CDL drivers got hard to find. The family pursued H-2A CDL drivers, which was new ground in Indiana, and with little precedent it got too complicated for anyone on the farm to manage. They went to Seso to sort out the existing issues and get everything set up correctly. "We ended up with Seso by necessity," Brady says. Everything the platform did beyond that was, in his words, "just extra."

What changed

The biggest shift is confidence. For a program watched by multiple agencies, Brady values having one place he trusts for answers, and he names the H-2A management and consulting as his favorite part of Seso. The paperwork side is catching up too. The ad hoc trial showed the team it could send training videos, policies, and individual worker documents digitally instead of chasing signatures on paper, and it gave them a picture of what a fully digital onboarding could look like.

Where they're headed

For a family that has spent the last decade turning a farm into a business, the direction is clear: fewer binders, more of the program in one place.

"There’s so much uncertainty in farming, especially around labor. Partners like Seso help us spend less time reacting and more time building the future we want.”

- Brady Mouzin, Director of Sales and Operations.

Photos courtesy of Mouzin Brothers Farms.