The dispute over the no fly zone was finally resolved by the invention of a netting that Resnick sheathes around his mandarins each spring. Its gone, I say. In my lifetime alone, California has gone from 13 million people to 40 million people. Who would have thought the two of them in cahoots? I look back at Resnick. All Access Digital offer for just 99 cents! Youve read the 0 free articles available to you. She wanted me to put our $5 million in an account, draw interest, and we could live happily on the 50 grand a year.. Vidovich didnt have to wait long for a buyer to come calling. Where does the water end up? Highway 46 shoots past Resnick almonds and takes you straight into town, population 1,938. It would return as tule fog to remind the white man of his theft. The state of California has adopted a new law that finally regulates the pumping. Each face wears its own weary. Theyre our future, she says. Scott: So you set out with this question: how was he defying nature? John Vidovich - Biography For farmers who rely on water from the Kings River, the answer winds up as some shade of yes.. This is an offering of cake handed down from king and queen to serfs. Lemoore Council likely to respond to proposed feedlot near Lemoore and All told, nine men operating five machines will pick clean this orchard over the next four weeks. Vidovich went on a shopping spree. One of his films, The Blob, became a cult classic, and they lived in a house on the Westside with two Rolls-Royces in the garage. His father was 3 years old at the time. Burglar alarms, on the other hand, offered round-the-clock vigilance without coffee breaks. The July sun is a scorcher, and I fuss with the dial on the AC long enough to blow past the towns one stoplight and the aqueduct, too. So I ask about the big picture. Past Oildale and the boxcar where Merle Haggard grew up. Rethink Your Drink is the latest slogan. Look, I have no guilt. Tell me, he asked, though it wasnt entirely a question. One cousin arrived only last week. She was aiming to surround herself with famous actors and artists and public intellectuals. My dust cloud tells him Im getting close. Or at least thats the way Vidovich puts it when I finally reach him. John Vidovich. Legendary Investor Strategies And Stocks For The Current Market - Forbes Growers a tenth the size of Resnick flee the dust in their Ferraris to their second houses in Carmel. The 789 acre project . I walk up and reintroduce myself. I didnt know good land from bad land. For now, theyre selling to farmers like Resnick who can pay the price. Somehow, 30 or 40 nuts arent compelled to drop. Too many pistachios. Your donation today powers the independent journalism that you rely on. The baby is now a 20-year-old student at Bakersfield College. From Dudley Ridge, pipelines belonging to the farming empire of The Wonderful Company (owned by Beverly Hills billionaires Stewart and Lynda Resnick) the move the once-Angiola . According to alawsuit, one animal bolted through an electric fence onto a highway, where it was killed by a truck. His story is the one Ive been carting around in my notebook for the past few decades, sure I was ready to write it after five years or ten years, only to learn of another twist that would lead me down another road. The next year, it delivers 300,000 acre-feet. The rent is $540. Not that long ago, we used to time our sinus infections by the immense cloud of defoliants sprayed on the cotton fields at the end of Indian summer. What if the endless days without rain become endless years? Forbes' Real-Time Billionaires rankings tracks the daily ups and downs of the world's richest people. One man drives and shakes the tree while the other man makes sure the clusters fall into the butterfly opening of the receiver. Since it is also true that Lost Hills has belonged to the Resnicks for 30 years, one of us might have blurted out, What took you so long to find it? As the film runs to credits, I can see that one credit is missing. Mr. Vidovich was a descendant of one of the pioneer farm families that settled here from Croatia . When Resnick plants, he plants his trees wall to wall. My grandfather, a survivor of the Armenian genocide, traveled 7,000 miles by ship and train in 1920 to find out if his uncles exhortationThe grapes here are the size of jade eggswas true. Selling the farm to migrant families has required Lynda to rebrand agriculture. These are donations from other farmworker families, but theyre not for her and Manuel and the kids. This is Twisselman. The brick-hard ground cant be bought. We tell the children about the fields when they are young so they dont know the fields when they are old, she says. More than a dozen family members have followed Lupe and Manuel to Lost Hills. This is a lot of gestures to unpack, and as I exit the grounds, I keep turning around to get one last look thats true. Wages that used to go to workers stay in the pocket of the nut growers. Even so, Resnick says, he learned a lesson from the 2004 recall of 13 million pounds of the companys salmonella-tainted almonds: Dont fight the FDA. I retrace the road I came in on and cross old Tulare Lake, which rose by flood and sank by drought. They married in 1972, and he sold the alarm company for $100 million. Well still make money.. He kept planting more and more trees. The film ends with the laughter of kids playing inside the giant sunburst at the center of the soccer field. It gives me the luxury to keep on working. This isnt any road. He commands his realm, and she commands hers, and he takes care to mind the line. Here and there my boots crunch down on the dried remains of pomegranates that look like small pieces of scat dropped by a coyote. Has the San Joaquin Valley reached its Chinatown moment? He maneuvers down the middle of the row, sweeps up the dried almonds, and throws them into a catcher. So its a really extraordinary kind of development thats never happened in agriculture in California before really to raise the living of your workers. Los Angeles Fire Marshal John Vidovich was at the peak of his career in 2015. The oldest of five children, he came from Mexico when he was 18. He wanted to stay in the customer service business and heard from his doctor that Teleflora, the giant flower-delivery company, could be bought for a buyers price. Johannesburg He spent his vast fortune on a 30-year quest to save the rhinoceros. She washes two kinds of lettuce and cuts up fresh papaya to mix into a salad. Lucky for her that the young man was kind. But theres no denying his desperation. So the question before me was how are these guys farming? He points to the young almond trees that envelop his 20 acres like a siege. The sale is still considered a blow to Kings' water portfolio by other farmers. Hes farming water. A meat store, an auto repair, a pool hall, and an arcade pass for a commercial strip. His accountant suggested he buy apartments. It moves in a wave from trunk to limb to nut and back down to earth. Ultimately,youre going to dry up that aquifer under the earth, and thats whats happening now. He hired Bert Steir, a Bostonian with a Bronze Star from the Second World War and a degree from Harvard, to come west and work his deals. The math works out to $162 a tree. Typically, each pound sells wholesale for $3.75. Pablo prunes and irrigates the almond and pistachio trees and applies the chemicals that cannot be applied by helicopter. Angiola has become a critical element of Vidovichs water moves, transferring water across the Valley for additional sales, so much so that it put him and the district in hot water. She joined the Oakland Tribune in 2001. Shes now providing tutors and counselors in every region of California to boost the graduation rate. I find a former partner of Resnick. I cut across Twisselman Road to the pipeline gliding along the aqueduct like a silver snake. The jolt and shudder would tear out the roots of a lesser species. The company periodically flies a helicopter over Vidovichs rangelands, its ominous WHOMP-WHOMP-WHOMP frightening cattle already stressed by drought, said dairy and beef farmer Jim Wilson, who leases nearby land from Vidovich. His 15 million trees in the San Joaquin Valley consume more than 400,000 acre-feet of water a year. In a profile of Vidovich written by Lois Henry then of The Bakersfield Californian now writing exclusively for her own service, SJVWater the farmer-lawyer-real estate magnate made no bones about where local misgivings began. The Boswell company, their attorneys and Tulare Lake Canal Company president Mark Unruh did not respond to repeated requests for comment. I follow one of the engines of harvest as it rolls into an orchard like a tank. A member of the commission, on the eve of its demise, told me, Stewart wants to be a benevolent dictator. How will courts rebuke of Berkeleys natural-gas ban affect the national movement it began? This is the domain of Stewart Resnick, the richest farmer in the country and maybe the most peculiar one, too. Yes, the pipeline belongs to Resnick. He accused Resnick in 2008 of using various shell companies to monopolize control of the Kern Water Bank. They rely only on rain, which concentrates the flavorful oils. Why not California? Hes trying to play dumb, but I can see the sliest of grins peeking out from his mustache and goatee. One mile, two miles, three miles, fourit keeps going until it reaches another county and back to one of the main canals in the Dudley Ridge Water District. Conceived by Lynda, it cost one fortune to build and a second fortune to light up. Now the land is dry and saline, drained to support a vast and rigid geometry of nut, fruit and dairy farms. Not a single penny was put in that piggy bank.. In a timespan even shorter than Resnicks, the 61-year-old Vidovich has bought up more than 100,000 acres of farmland scattered across the valley. But the one thing he cant control is what hes most dependent on water. The bunches of chartreuse-tipped nuts hanging from antler branches never touch the ground. Its going to be what its going to be. He paved over the last orchard in the Santa Clara Valley with some apartments and then went looking for another valley where he might build his own empire. Even as the supplies of federal and state water have dropped to near zero, agriculture in Kern keeps chugging along, growing more intensive. Vidovich is the owner of Sandridge Partners, LP a farmland investment firm that has undertaken more than 100,000 acres of Valley farmland. It comes out to $2,000 a month. I steer toward the almonds, past a row of worker housing and a main gate. He called it fake junk, sued, and won. One day, gunmen mowed down residents with AK-47s and threw grenades at the church filled with parishioners. The imported flow arrives by way of the Central Valley Project and State Water Project, the one-of-a-kind hydraulic system built by the feds and state to remedy Gods uneven design of California. I know I cant do this forever, he says. Resnick picks up the water in Dudley Ridge, Vidovich says. He grew up in New Jersey, where his father ran a bar. Digging in was its own wisdom, he discovered. We are sensitive to that. He tells me to meet him in Lost Hills. Thats more than double the crop that Resnick boasted about when I saw him eight years ago. Its not the fidget of boredom. On this same stretch of 99, I once wrote a story about farmworkers who moonlighted as meth cookers to make ends meet. Unlike many other billionaires, they could poke fun at themselves. The boss came back in, saw his do-nothing, and said only three words: Just get started. He began to move, and the job went quickly after that. Thousands of California oaks were felled. I then move to the far side of the orchard, where another worker, riding a huge mower, is kicking up an even bigger cloud of dust. While Vidovich owns the surrounding land, Boswells Tulare Lake Canal Company traverses it with a longstanding legal easement established back in 1906, in spidery cursive print, by the long-dead owner of a long-gone ranch. Seventy-five years ago, writer Carey McWilliams, in Factories in the Field, lambasted the ribboned Dukes and belted Barons of California agriculture. Shes done giving big gifts to Los Angeles museums and mental health hospitals that name buildings after her and Stewart. Cotton still grows on the lake bottom, but less and less each year. Two days after the Tulare Lake Canal Company sued Sandridge Partners, the farming and water giant owned by John Vidovich, to halt trenching work on a water pipeline set to cut . Instead, Southern California water users in the arid desert municipal and industrial alike now hold the rights. Here, a crew has dug a culvert beneath the road and hiked the pipeline under the asphalt that divides one field from another. He came to California in the 1950s to remake himself. We saved the best for last, he says. The nut must be hurried from bin to truck to processing plant to keep it from discoloring. Look, I delegate a lot of things, obviously. Stewart tries to interrupt, but hes not the boss in this room. For college, he picked California Polytechnic in San Luis Obispo over the hill and majored in agriculture business. Everything about our physical selves, Lynda believes, begins in our guts. Forbes Billionaires 2023: The Richest People In The World When I crossed the border and found Lost Hills, there was nothing here, he says. I stick to the left lane and try to stay ahead of the pack. In fact, the piece is called A kingdom from dust. Its a pretty dry place right? This is the route my grandfather, one of a legion of fruit tramps, took as he drifted from farm to farm in the 1920s picking crops. But we werent there long. They moved to Highland Park, home to Johnson & Johnson and close enough to Rutgers University to hear the fans screaming at Neilson Field. Agriculture in the south valley has extended far beyond the provisions of its one river, the Kern. Its happening. The bosses wont speak of it, he says. General Partner. When the mansion was built in 1927, it was known as the Sunset House. The curtains were made of a fabric woven in Venice and substantial enough that they might finish off a person who happened to be looking out the window in the throes of an earthquake. Each time I called, his secretary hung up the phone. One out of eight has diabetes. He was going to Vegas, hanging out with his own Damon Runyon characters, and making plans to get even bigger. I ask him how the drought has affected Wonderful. Boswell says no 2022-08-07 - By Lisa M. Krieger and Veronica Martinez Staff writers . She tells me the water comes out of the tap yellow and foul smelling, and she doesnt trust it. He did little, if any, catting around. And while Resnick and Vidovich have been at odds in the past over San Joaquin Valley water feuds especially centering on the appearance that Resnick was overly-familiar in his utilization of the Kern Water Bank the feud is long gone. When nature bites down hard, and the government flow gets reduced to a trickle, growers in Kern turn on their pumps and reach deeper into the earth. The ancestral Tulare Lake was once the master of this valley, a catch basin for four mighty rivers the Kern, Tule, Kaweah and Kings flowing down from the Sierra. The shiny red orbs, three months shy of harvest, pop out from the bright green leaves like bulbs on a Christmas tree. At the east end, where the highway meets Interstate 5, the traveler gets a choice. I cross the Tulare County line heading south into Bakersfield, and there in front of me, for no eye to miss, stands the Wonderful Citrus complex with its four-story storage building designed in the shape of an almighty box of Halo mandarins. After three years of drought, tensions are running high all over rural California. Uneasy about a slowly-marching plan to siphon Valley water for Southern California, farmers and some water managers are worrying about the growing shadow of one of the regions largest land owners. But the smaller farmer still uses a pruning shears to make his most important cuts. The company was founded in 1925 by the father and unclesof James Griffin J.G. Boswell II, a Stanford grad who served on the boards of General Electric, Safeway and the California Institute of Technology. I catch Highway 99 in rare somnolence. The four grandchildren have visited the orchards once or twice. Because Lupe had no papers, she followed the coyote for many more miles until they reached a steep pass. Well, maybe just a little guilt, but thats Jewish. He said the prod for all their giving in Lost Hills happened in Aspen, of all places. But some residents and local leaders are growing wary of the companys dominance and secrecy. Me, Im a carpetbagger from Beverly Hills. Im 80 years old. To top it off, the greedy SOB (farmers rarely uttered Vidovichs name) intended to keep his 7,000 acres of nut trees in Dudley Ridge. Henry A. Barrios / The . The citrus is still handpicked but all the nuts are machine picked, and thats idled workers as well. He is a single man who rents a bedroom from other family members for $150 a month. Union pressured Mayor Garcetti's office to oust top fire official The company has built lucrative apartment, condominium, mobile home, hotel and office projects all over the South Bay and Peninsula, from Redwood Citys Trailer Villa RV Park to Los Altos Gardens condominiums, with imported European appliances and hand-cut marble. We send money home each month to our families left behind, Lupe says. Future of state housing is at stake in UC ruling, governor says, Center for Watershed Sciences at UC Davis, erved as Santa Clara County Planning Commissioner, Do Not Sell/Share My Personal Information. Across the street, the Soto family has built a new Mexican restaurant named Gabbys that dwarfs every other business on the street with its Spanish Mission faade. You rely on Marketplace to break down the worlds events and tell you how it affects you in a fact-based, approachable way. In court, Boswell also warned about the pipelines potential use, suggesting that water could eventually end up in Southern California. Stewart Resnick is the biggest farmer in the United States, a fact he has tried to keep hidden while he has shaped what we eat, transformed Californias landscape, and ruled entire towns. Fiefdom. This last-ditch water in Lost Hills wont make everything right. A cross of Jesus hangs from the bedpost. In a region of wall-to-wall plantings, one of the walls is crashing down. Like many billionaires, he didnt have a decent explanation for his fortune. Dont let his boots, blue jeans, and ball cap fool you, the old-timers say. I thank him and hurry down the dirt road through the almonds, eyeing the rearview mirror to see if a Resnick truck is following me. This isnt the Lynda posing for photos with Barbra Streisand. The wildfires cant be far behind. Then one day, he was trying to find a marketing person and got a call from Lynda Sinay, who worked in advertising. Yes. The space for a familys secrets is only a few feet. Lets meet again in two weeks, he said. Then he motions to Lynda, whos standing off to the side of the light-dimmed stage. But Vidovich isnt backing down. Arax: This place called Lost Hills, it is kind of a modern-day company town not unlike Hershey, Pennsylvania. He went out and bought an alarm company. Theres no issue with the pipeline.. A day later, I get a call from Mr. Resnick. California had passed a law intended to stop the rising of new towns in the middle of nowhere. A balancing of books in an office in the city has decided that this orchard and others around it, covered by too little water, can go. He remade himself into a graduate of the UCLA law school, a cleaner of Los Angeles buildings, a vendor of security alarms, a seller of flowers in a pot, a minter of Elvis plates and Princess Diana dolls, a bottler of Fiji Island water, a farmer of San Joaquin Valley dirt. The oil companies and insurance companies were looking to unload their farms in Kern County, Steir learned, chunks of earth that measured 20,000 and 40,000 acres. And Vidovich ended up pumping water an extraordinary amount of water out of the ground in an area where theyre pumping so much water on the ground the land is sinking. Made of durable plastic, the pipe would be buried four feet below the bottom of the canal, with a foot-deep cement barrier to protect both. Its bringing water from the Dudley Ridge Water District in Kings County. Hes a decent guy making $216,000 a year who doesnt pretend that he isnt beholden to Wonderful. They were actually harvesting record crops. Measuring the reach of the Resnicks, its tempting to lean on the hyperventilated language of the 1930s: Empire. Inside, a trainer watches over a line of treadmills, elliptical machines, and stationary bikes. Past McFarland and the high school runners who won five state championships in a row in the 1990s. I stand over the pipes and give them a hard slap. The gas to and from the orchards costs him $80 a week. A fully equipped teaching kitchen will turn the harvest into school lunches. Ultimately, it drives a lucrative if sad mission, as uttered by the looming giant himself. Even the community water tank is painted baby blue with a big sunflower. The big-rig drivers are cranky two ways, and the farmworkers in their last-leg vans are half-asleep. With that insight, he sold the company for $2.5 million and went into the security guard business. Why not we start with an extended interview or two? I offered. The vibration here isnt quite as vehement. As a consequence, the farmland here, nearly 100,000 acres planted in permanent crops, is completely reliant on the governments supply of mountain water. It was going to houses. They knew little about the company except it was selling its keepsakes for five times the amount Teleflora was. So why hasnt this place gone to tumbleweeds? If the pipeline failed and the canal collapsed, precious well water would be lost, the company asserted. The juice isnt selling like it used to. Vidovoch's New Kings County Water Pipeline Triggers Alarm Bells Its artificiality had achieved a permanence; its permanence had created my California. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you. Together, the Resnicks have wedded the valleys hidebound farming culture with L.A.s celebrity culture. He got himself into this jam. As farmworker colonies go, this one isnt as grim as others Ive visited. Its the summer of 2016, eight weeks before the big pick, and Im zigzagging across the almonds and pistachios, square mile after square mile of immaculate orchards lined with micro-irrigation systems and heavy with nuts. It was the early spring of 2008, and this time his secretary didnt hang up on me. Most everything that can be touched in this corner of California belongs to Wonderful. She had recently divorced and wasnt about to settle for a life in Culver City. They planted the first 640 acres, half the pomegranates in the country at the time, knowing there was zero market. John Vidovich, Student Loan Corp: Profile and Biography I hop out of the car. Veronica Martinez is the news librarian for the Bay Area News Group. Alex Tavlian is the Executive Editor of The San Joaquin Valley Sun and Executive Director of Valley Future Foundation. I didnt grow up here, but if it wasnt for California, its openness and opportunities, I wouldnt be sitting where Im sitting., No other farmer, not even Gallo, had cornered a market the way Resnick had cornered the growing, buying, processing, and selling of pistachios. Summary. The man and his pincers cant be bothered. Their goal is to prevent me from successfully farming. Look, these farmers go back two, three, and four generations. Like the waters of the lake, the indent of the Resnicks will recede from the land, too. When he was told there were fields upon fields, he did not believe there could be this many fields. Still, he was starting to think about his legacy, and thats why he finally agreed to meet with me. They're drought's best buddies." John Vidovich will tell you he's the interloper who came over the other mountain, the Coast Range. What he knows is that Wonderful is buying up to 50,000 acre-feet of water a year in a series of hidden deals. I cant afford to move it., But the Boswells and Vidovichescan invest to move water around, he said. Antioxidants that delivered 32 grams of sugar in each serving didnt come cheap: $11 a bottle. He was a small, trim man, no more than 5 foot 5, in his early 70s with thinning silver hair and brown eyes rimmed in pink. They hide from the fact that it relies on the subjugation of peasants from Mexico they themselves have brought here. Since international sanctions were lifted five years earlier, Iran has been crowding the market with its more buttery-tasting pistachios. Bernards eyes are fixed straight ahead. To get there, the pipeline has to cross under a Boswell-controlled canal. But she doesnt dictate this or that. Angelica would prefer not to get into the details of their financial arrangement. Age : 59. Boswell II started the Boswell company. You may have never heard of John Vidovich, but his impact on the day-to-day life of the average southern San Joaquin Valley farmer is difficult to be understated. Russo and Ellsberg needed a place to photocopy the 7,000 pages, and Lynda volunteered the Xerox machine at her ad agency on Melrose Avenue. It was the early 1900s, and his grandfather and grandmother decided to secure passage to America. You cant be exporting groundwater from one basin to another., Whatever water hes taking, its too little, too late.. Everything but the turkey had come from his orchards. A road will pick up and connect me to where the tube is going. There have been several instances where damaged equipment has reduced flows, he said. At Wonderful Health and Wellness, were educating our employees about this health crisis. But this is water for Mr. Resnick. About five years ago, Lynda started our community development organization in Lost Hills, and the journey has been an amazing one. If they were farmers, they were farmers who hung out with Tom Hanks, Steve Martin, David Geffen, Warren Beatty, and Joan Didion. I head straight into the glare of the sun shooting over the Coast Range. Like other small farmers, my water stays on my ground. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you. When I tell her my name, she whispers into his ear. Mobil and Texaco and Prudential Life were willing to practically give the ground and trees away. To grow, Big Ag needed a bigger and more dependable supply. On Thursday, the newly formed committee was suddenly flush with cash: Two businesses, VG Investments and VO Limited Partners, poured a combined $94,400 into the campaign. He told his neighbors to alter the flight of the bees or hed sue them for trespassing. The farmer moved the rain. These are trees and vines raised in nurseries and put into the ground at a cost of $10,000 an acre to satisfy the worlds growing appetite for nuts and fruits. Theyve always been able to bully anyone, he said. The scale of productionand the ability to process, market, and sell its own cropsallows Wonderful to be mostly mediocre in the fields and remain highly profitable. Surely, no one does this better than Wonderful? Do you know what I am? He takes a look at his watch. The feedback were hearing is No. In fact, some of the workers think that we havent gone far enough., The workers arent around for a quick survey. Nowhere to turn, I turn back around and roll down my window. One year later, Vidovich turned his gain from the water sale to Mojave into an almost outright acquisition of land in the Angiola Water District in Tulare County. Its gambling. And then they pump more groundwater. His second son is a psychiatrist. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. The river is nothing if not fickle. A woman named Lupe is standing above me on the wooden stairway that climbs to the front door of her trailer. But those 20,000 acres near the town of Pixley came with an endowment: a little spit of earth that produced endless amounts of groundwater. If only Eve had offered Adam a pomegranate instead of an apple, Lynda wrote, every day could have been a holiday.. It wanted assurance that the pipeline wont interfere with the canal, as well as proof that Vidovich has $5 million in insurance if the canal gets damaged.
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