Hes carrying 55,000 pounds of crop in two swaggering trailers open to the sun. Selfo works 50 hours a week as an irrigator. One way or the other, we got rid of our last farm a few years before I was born and moved to the Fresno suburbs. Once each tree has been shaken, the nuts are left on the ground for a few days to dry. In case the growers are fearing the antitrust cops from the Department of Justice, they neednt. Why not send him an email? the secretary suggested. Each tree produces 22 pounds of nuts. Ive never given an interview to a newspaper or magazine before. So now theyre doing everything they can to frustrate my ability to utilize the property, said Vidovich. And then it hits me when I reach the road to Weedpatch, where my grandfathers story in Americaa poet on his hands and knees picking potatoesbegan. He guides me back into the main store with its displays of fresh fruit and vegetables, meats, cold cuts, and baked goods. A year into his studies, an uncle called from California. She tells me her not-so-silent partner is Lady Lynda, who was so bothered that Lost Hills didnt have a sit-down restaurant of its own that she sought out Angelica. Boswell territory. This sale made headlines because it was engineered by one farmeran outsider from the cityfor his benefit only. His second son is a psychiatrist. You dont lose one drop at all.. If he sticks even a toe onto her turf, says a former business partner, she gives him a look that sends him right back.. Boswell, Vidovich is heir to a real estate empire. Digging in was its own wisdom, he discovered. Month after month, she made ends meet on a $1,600 budget. The bureau happened to be my house in northwest Fresno. What spikes blood sugar more than a can of Coke? 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. Then hed lose his temper and get the strap out.. These are loaded, Resnick says. It takes a lot of work to get ahead. She and Manuel were able to buy their trailer several years ago. The bunches of chartreuse-tipped nuts hanging from antler branches never touch the ground. I grab my notebook and walk up to one of the vans. His frat brother got bored, as rich boys do, and Resnick bought out his half interest for $300. But Vidovich isnt backing down. Its ridiculous, he said. Because the road ends here, there is no physical way to follow the canals flow. In Lost Hills, they call her Lady Lynda. She shows up in high fashion and stands in the dust and tells them about another charter school or affordable-housing project she is bringing to them. Manhattan was 30 minutes in one direction; the Jersey Shore, 30 minutes in the other. The Resnick story certainly deserved a book, but did he really want me to be the one to write it? 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. She is small with lively brown eyes and a sweet but confident voice. Falling groundwater levels are stressing their wells. It comes out to $2,000 a month. Here, private water jumps from Tulare County to Kern County, but government jurisdictions dont count. There is a local water bank, a kind of underground lake, that the Resnicks control. In the summer of 2010, hed spent several days documenting the deplorable conditions of the modern company town. Ive never seen her up close, never watched her in action. Seventy-five years ago, writer Carey McWilliams, in Factories in the Field, lambasted the ribboned Dukes and belted Barons of California agriculture. The people here have traveled too far. Its the beginning of September 2016, and battalions of heavy machinery dispatched from the Wonderful equipment yards pound the ground and rattle the trees. Theres a lot to commend here, I tell Anzaldo, but where does persuasion end and coercion begin?, As a second-generation Mexican American, Anzaldo says he knows the powerful clench of fast food and sugar among his own family. Resnick has saved the front seat for me. Whether he realizes it, hes part of the biggest pistachio harvest in history. To manage the disease. Anything else I can help you with?, He seems in a hurry. At the core, though, the Resnicks were still moved by the duty of social justice, not just as traditional liberals but as secular Jews. But with shared ambitions of buying land and moving water, theyre all doing the same thing, in our eyes.. Water wars in a drying California: New money, Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window), Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window), Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window), First Republic Bank seized, sold to JPMorgan Chase, Water wars in a drying California: New money vs. old power in San Joaquin Valley, PG&E measures 211 inches of snow in final Northern California park survey, Walters: Lengthy California water rights battle moves into the Legislature, This California town hasnt had clean drinking water in 11 years, California snowpack data debunked: 2023 was no record year. My old well cant compete with his new wells. Where gravity needs a boost, the pipes run atop wooden crates used to pack boxes of fruit. 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. So he started laying pipes last December. The softballs will go to market as whole fruit or as seed pods in a package. The company operates the most wells in the lake basin and the deepest ones. Photo courtesy of Trent Davis Bailey/The California Sunday Magazine. Shes designing the curriculum.. He isnt farming dirt. The farmers responded that the path of a bee wasnt something they could supervise, and they threatened to sue him back. He did this first in the name of wheat and then beef, milk, raisins, cotton, and nuts. The pistachio trees in Wonderful number 6 million. The project would take five days to completewhen the canal wasnt in use. Its happening. The bosses wont speak of it, he says. Let the smaller grower walk among his trees and farm by the row. In court, Boswell also warned about the pipelines potential use, suggesting that water could eventually end up in Southern California. He left in 1956. I never liked New Jersey, but I never knew why. In the kitchen corner, cases of bottled water are stacked halfway up the wall. 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. He commands his realm, and she commands hers, and he takes care to mind the line. Down the great aqueduct, by freight of politics and gravity, came the excess waters of the Sacramento River. Its bringing water from the Dudley Ridge Water District in Kings County. The vibration is a stunning piece of violence to behold. 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. The concept changed the industry. Vidovich went home with $74 million in his pocket. This is a big crop, the field man tells me. He had left for the cornfields a few minutes before the killings.. China, for one, prefers the Iranian pistachio. Unlike the almond, the pistachio is moist and combustible. She was aiming to surround herself with famous actors and artists and public intellectuals. Water seems to be disappearing, said Verboon. No water in the ground to make up for the missing government supply. 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. 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. Scott: And of course that could have serious implications for these workers. (SJV Water/ Lois Henry) A large water pipeline being built near Lemoore in Kings County is raising eyebrows as much for its possible uses as for the name associated with its construction John Vidovich. As he drives off, he throws a clue out the window. Its John Vidovich. EMEA +44 20 7330 7500. When a farmers orchards encompass 186 square miles, finding the field man can be a challenge. But, until now, nobody had the money to fight back.. It was the early 1900s, and his grandfather and grandmother decided to secure passage to America. Why not we start with an extended interview or two? I offered. He doesnt know what pipeline means. Theyre dusty with San Joaquin dirt. 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. Mark Arax: Yeah. At the buildings he was cleaning, he noticed that no one was watching the front and back doors. The clash of the agricultural titans, who hold influential positions on local water boards and control thousands of acres with precious water rights, is being waged against a backdrop of deep distrust in the community about both companies hidden agendas. Maybe not since the wheat barons has the income disparity between farmer and farmworker been greater. This isnt the Owens Valley and William Mulholland doesnt work for the City of Los Angeles. You can plant only so many acres on ground that has no groundwater. But the smaller farmer still uses a pruning shears to make his most important cuts. But that doesnt make people buy a second bottle. In a region of wall-to-wall plantings, one of the walls is crashing down. 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. Each square-mile section is divided into blocks, and each block counts a precise number of rows. Over the years, they had donated large sums of money to political campaigns, and some of it went to Republicans who had pledged to prop up California agriculture. Arax: They lose their livelihood. He thinks Ive understated the crop.. Theyre no longer in danger. The pipeline, bankrolled by his investment firm Sandridge Partners, is an efficient and conservation-minded way to ship water, he says. The citrus is still handpicked but all the nuts are machine picked, and thats idled workers as well. Its California., Sure. John Vidovich lives in Los Altos, CA; previous city include San Jose CA. He guides me to the caf, and we grab our lunches from the buffet. A bunch of trees are going dry, he says. Look, I have no guilt. Its not the fidget of boredom. I didnt see the tumbleweeds along the roadside and the strip of parched earth that separated what remained of the desert from the perfect rows of irrigated agriculture. They both knew what they wanted. It takes a life every six seconds. What started as a dispute about a tube of plastic under a muddy ditch is escalating into a bitterlegal fight between the two multimillion-dollar businesses, pitting old power against new money and ambition. He sat behind a desk without clutter and stood up to shake my hand. Just ahead I can see the last section of pipe throwing a cascade of white water into a main canal belonging to the Lost Hills Water District. 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 unfolds a $20 bill from a wad he keeps inside a bent paper clip, and we take a seat in the far corner. Thats more than double the crop that Resnick boasted about when I saw him eight years ago. Scott: How sustainable is this operation given that California only recently came out of a long drought and may actually be headed there again soon? The workers didnt react well. Vidovichs supporters like Wilson say he loves to help people, donating laptops to the struggling Stratford school district and inviting local Native Americans to his property to harvest reeds and teach basket-weaving traditions. Not a single one of them wants any part of Wonderful. As water users fight over a decreasing amount of water, he said, its just inevitable.. The rent is $540. What? I walk into the supermarket El Toro Loco, and the clerk directs me to the back office, where a tobacco-chewing Yemeni named Anthony Hussein is sitting beneath a photograph of an uncle in his U.S. Army uniform. There, he tells me, in the shadow of the states great concrete vein moving snowmelt north to south, I will find a private, off-the-books pipeline that Stewart Resnick has built to keep his trees from dying. I follow him inside to a long line of workers that ends at a plastic window where Hussein sits on the other side, working the cash register like a teller at a race track. He packed his bags and left his wife and kids. I feel his gaze going past me, his voice turning oddly sentimental. The bloodless ones stay away. I tried not to stare at the gold that was everywhere: heavy-legged gold furniture, paintings in thick gold frames, gold-leaf carpet, and gold-fringed drapes. She tells me the water comes out of the tap yellow and foul smelling, and she doesnt trust it. In a valley of dead rivers, each one killed on behalf of agriculture, the aqueduct was the one river still alive. The fight between the Tulare Lake Canal Company, controlled by the J.G. The comments don't come from Boswell and Vidovich themselves, of course, but from the groundwater sustainability agencies each farming . A meat store, an auto repair, a pool hall, and an arcade pass for a commercial strip. He had spent the morning on his exercise bike reading Fortune. This is a magnitude of intervention that no other agricultural company in California has ever attempted. 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. Because it is a community of all Hispanics.. The boss showed him a storeroom filled with chemicals tossed here and there and told him to bring order to the mess. Join Facebook to connect with John Vidovich and others you may know. That breaks your agreement with those farmers. Financial Data. They arrive in Chevy trucks and Dodge vans and spill out in groups of four or five under the sweat-stained hats of the 49ers, Penn State, and the Yankees. John Gibler, a freelance journalist, found Lost Hills a year before Lynda. Never mind that this is one of the most over-drafted basins in California or that the land is sinking a half-foot a year. There before me, two aluminum pipes, side by side, 12 inches in diameter each, slither in the sun. Register now for a free, virtual event about the latest season of "The Uncertain Hour". Central Californias family raisin farms are drying up, Commercial bees, the unsung heroes of the nut business, From California to the Midwest, examining the perils of industrial farming and the risk to food, Drought has California farms destroying crops, rather than pay for water, Californias drought is all but over, but some wells are still dry, The color of the year has a political past, A California farm battles drought: Were out here trying to survive, Your donation today powers the independent journalism that you rely on, Seasonal foreign workers fill critical landscaping jobs, enabled by easier access to visas. Welcome to the club. In fact it should be getting smaller, more sustainable and thats what youre seeing play out on the land right now. It exists as one thing they can almost rationalize out in the fields. Of all the wonders of Wonderful, this is the one I find most mystifying. Since then, his Sandridge Partners has accumulated ownership or control of thousands of acres of farmland across the Central Valley 123,424 in Kings County alone, per ParcelQuest, focusing on land with secure surface water rights or where groundwater is abundant. To fix the subsidence, and keep the town dry in the next flood, residents and the state prison are having to pay $10 million in extra taxes. Altogether, Resnick has purchased 300,000 acre-feet of water from farmers and water districtsat a cost of $200 millionto cover his shortfall during the drought. By age 19, Lynda had dropped out of college, married a magazine ad man, and opened her own advertising agency. Im here to show the farmer that ags footprint needs to get smaller.. This is gamblers ground unlike any other in California, and as I drive from hill to dale, examining each orchard, my head spins. Five years ago, they decided to get rid of the nacho chips, french fries, and soft drinks. Mostly, though, they cant wait for the avalanche of nuts to end. Its gambling. He wouldnt know one of his Valencia orange groves from one of his Washington navel orange groves. And while Vidovich grows crops on thousands of the acres he holds and processes his own almonds at a plant in Wasco, his vast holdings in farmland have granted him entree onto a bevy of water district boards, controlling the regions economic lifeline. Ron DeSantis isn't returning his calls . The dam ends up holding and the levees, too. My life is about California. Too many almonds. He wants his fair share, but he wants everybody else to prosper, too.. Arax: This place called Lost Hills, it is kind of a modern-day company town not unlike Hershey, Pennsylvania. I thwack both lines. Id have to say that fully half of my success has been luck. Now, it seems, high-profile developer John Vidovich has assumed the role of financier. Section, block, and row dont compute; he has to direct me by cellphone and guideposts. Then he motions to Lynda, whos standing off to the side of the light-dimmed stage. Inside, a Wonderful media specialist sees that Resnick needs to be rescued. What to give a grieving widow and her five children in Lost Hills but drinking water? Tonight, feeling no pain, hell sit in one of the strip clubs in Bakersfield and maybe buy himself a fancy lap dance.. John, 66, is a former military intelligence officer and Santa Clara Law School graduate who served as Santa Clara County Planning Commissioner from 1990 to 1994 and is as shrewd as his father. John was vital in helping the company's executive group reposition its strategy. Theyre our future, she says. Newsom's proposed fast tracking of the Sites Reservoir is a long overdue . If youve ever had Wonderful Pistachios, POM Wonderful pomegranate juice or Halo mandarin oranges, youve had produce grown on one of the largest farms in the world. My dust cloud tells him Im getting close. My head keeps hitting the sunroof. As a class of people, the farmers and real estate developers harbor a deep-down contempt for what they have built. Vidovich needs the pipe to move water. 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. He blames Iran. Theres not much left over, he says. He yanks and pulls, and it finally comes off, throwing him a foot backward. Summary. John Vidovich, the owner of the Santiago Villa and Sahara mobile home parks in Mountain View, is listed as a partner in both businesses. Background details that you might want to know . Thats why hes in trouble., So he makes a deal for private water?, Yep. Too many pomegranates. One of the first things he did with his monopoly was kill the California Pistachio Commission, the industrys marketing group, by yanking his funding. 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. I saw her a few months ago. Hes getting ready to introduce Lynda, the main speaker, but first he wants to address the federal governments recent recall of Wonderful pistachios. So everybody should have it, right? 2023 Minnesota Public Radio. Even if it leaked, it would simply add water to the canal, Vidovich insists. This must be the spot the Wonderful field man was describing. Anzaldos grandfather came from Guadalajara in the 1950s as part of the bracero farmworker program. While Vidovich owns less acreage than Boswell, more of it is devoted to high-value orchards. I saw horrible things, Margarita says. He didnt know where to begin. The aqueduct was built with tax money, yes? In a profile written by Lois Henry, then of The Bakersfield Californian now writing exclusively for her own service SJVWater, Vidovich readily acknowledge the acrimony the sale caused. 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