I would have worn my Levis, he says, but Lyndas here, and she thinks I dress like a bum. Were standing in the sun outside the plants corporate office, a building whose clean lines and retro furniture wear the imprint of Lynda, too. Now shes getting lots of credit.. I get out of the car and walk down an embankment. No ones going to get fired for bringing home 2,500 pounds of nuts an acre. In fact, the piece is called A kingdom from dust. Its a pretty dry place right? I take a last bite of cauliflower rice. My father, born in a vineyard outside Fresno, was a raisin grower before he became a bar owner. Business got so brisk that he bought two trucks and hired crews. The pipeline, bankrolled by his investment firm Sandridge Partners, is an efficient and conservation-minded way to ship water, he says. No longer does it have to be a career that brings Mexicans to their hands and knees. 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. Lynda has a son who works as a musician and a son who suffered a birth trauma and lives in a care facility. 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. By the decree of Lynda, who once contemplated a bowl of those juicy little seedless mandarins and on the spot named them Cuties, this is now the land of Wonderful. John Catsimatidis, the billionaire CEO of the Gristedes supermarket chain who donated to Donald Trump's 2020 re-election campaign, says that Florida Gov. This is the Lynda who now endeavors to see farmhands as something more than workers. John Vidovich - Board of Directors - Tri-County Lakes - LinkedIn Mathews: Should climate projects benefit communities they impact? It was like being in the middle of a hurricane.. Days Inn or Motel 6. 16: Emmanuel Forbes, CB, Mississippi State My take: Washington entered the draft wanting to take a corner or an offensive lineman in the first round. John Vidovich - Green Dunes Legal bills for this and other Boswell-related disputes are costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, he said. He explains that Wonderful has grown too big to hassle such precision. The south valleyits people and poverty, its obesity and diabetesis her newest mission. Or at least thats the way Vidovich puts it when I finally reach him. Look, these farmers go back two, three, and four generations. If only Eve had offered Adam a pomegranate instead of an apple, Lynda wrote, every day could have been a holiday.. Compulsive gambler and alcoholic. His daughter, who used to own a restaurant, is busy raising her one son. Lucky for her that the young man was kind. If the pipeline failed and the canal collapsed, precious well water would be lost, the company asserted. She is determined that their lives will play out differently from the lives of their parents, but she means no disrespect by this. The great drought is officially over. His bar was a place for guys, Damon Runyontype guys., Resnicks pals were all Jewish kids from upper-class families, so it wasnt easy being the poorest one, the one whose father was a gambler and capable at any moment of losing the few comforts they had. State water dwindling year after year. Of the 22,000 acres they ripped during the drought, 18,000 acres are being replanted in pistachios. You rely on Marketplace to break down the worlds events and tell you how it affects you in a fact-based, approachable way. If anyone doubted the health benefits of the juice, they spent more than $30 million in research to prove that it fought heart disease and prostate woes. He lingers in the crowd long enough to shake hands with a friend from Bel-Air whos planting thousands of acres of pistachios in the worst ground of Tulare Lake. The junk scattered about could be a lot worse. Let the smaller grower walk among his trees and farm by the row. John was vital in helping the company's executive group reposition its strategy. This water basically came from a land owned by someone who's also a near billionaire a guy named John Vidovich. 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. You cant stop a grower from taking his own water to his crops, said consultant Grewal. It isnt going down because he wont let it go down. The tumbleweeds on open ground give you a peek into what Lost Hills looked like before the aqueduct made a river here. 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. Former L.A. Fire Marshal John Vidovich has filed a lawsuit against the city, alleging he was "unlawfully and unceremoniously ousted from his job" in August 2016. It was a curious statement but true. Its his pipe, not mine. All told, nine men operating five machines will pick clean this orchard over the next four weeks. Hundreds of giant praying mantises standing on platforms of concrete are pulling oil from a Chevron field. But if its the tube that Im looking to follow, I must drive through the almond grove. By the time he drove back, he was a citrus grower. White rhinos for sale, one careful owner: tycoon looks for a The rent is $540. Valuable research and technology reports. Three dogs, part pit bull, the menacing part, have given up on the shade and lie on the open road. It took time for the wax to dry. Lynda isnt just writing checks, Donoso told me. Lost Hills sits on an upslope. Is John Vidovich Planning to Sell Off the Valley's Lifeblood? They greet me with smiles and handshakes. But with shared ambitions of buying land and moving water, theyre all doing the same thing, in our eyes.. Washington Commanders NFL draft picks 2023 selection analysis - ESPN Fallowing the farm until the footprint gets smaller and smaller. When it goes into full effect, in a decade or two, more than a million acres of cropland across the valley will have to be retired. Faced with scarcity, farmers are very protective of their pipes and canals, said Barton Buzz Thompson, a Stanford Law School professor and director of the universitys Water in the West program. Up and down the Central Coast, restaurants are boycotting their wines. The project would take five days to completewhen the canal wasnt in use. There she stood in the foreground of the photo that accompanied a New Yorker profile titled Pomegranate Princess. She was wearing a black pantsuit with open-toed silver pumps and a single piece of jewelry around her neck. It then dawned on him that guards were good, but they had to be paid an hourly wage. Theyre either working in the heat or hiding from the heat. This road ends abruptly at the rise of a second fence. Ousted L.A. fire marshal claims corruption among city fire inspectors Though his father passed 13 years ago, the son a graduate of Santa Clara School of Law and inactive lawyer continues to manage the real estate firm with holdings in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Salt Lake City, and San Diegos North County. Too many pomegranates. What kind of empire are you trying to build?, Im here to show the farmer that ags footprint needs to get smaller., I chew on his answer for a second. 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. Im driving too fast for the ruts in the road. Now, it seems, high-profile developer John Vidovich has assumed the role of financier. The comments don't come from Boswell and Vidovich themselves, of course, but from the groundwater sustainability agencies each farming . Are big banks following through on their climate pledges? Main Street is Highway 46, which slices through the middle of town. Under his leadership, the company used its business smarts, political clout and legal strategies to acquire water and transform a modest cotton farm into an agricultural empire. The nut must be hurried from bin to truck to processing plant to keep it from discoloring. 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. The Ninth Annual Wonderful Pistachio Conference at the Visalia Convention Center is an invitation-only affair, but I managed to sneak in and grab a seat. Bankers and their fair-weather financing exasperated Resnick. Dun & Bradstreet collects private company financials for more than 23 . Today, most everything in this desolate reach of Kern County, save for the oil wells, belongs to Paramount Farming, which belongs to the Resnicks. Your donation today powers the independent journalism that you rely on. The stacks of bottles gave him no answer. All this stirring up is a consequence of mechanization. His father met his mother, the cantors daughter, and they married. Theyre our future, she says. Id rather be unknown than known. He had recently read The King of California, and that got him thinking. 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. He tells me to meet him in Lost Hills. He kept planting more and more trees. Boswell, who owned more land and controlled more water than any other person in the West for most of the 20th century. If he sticks even a toe onto her turf, says a former business partner, she gives him a look that sends him right back.. Uneasy about the slow plan to siphon Valley water for Southern California, farmers and water managers are worrying about a large land owner in the region. The food is more. Theyre listening with their heads bent down. This is a company that runs its resources to the max, he tells me. Hes carrying 55,000 pounds of crop in two swaggering trailers open to the sun. She remembers handing the boy to her sister-in-law, who carried phony papers, and watching them cross by bridge into California. What do you need to know, sir?, Whats it been like here during the drought?, Drought, no drought, makes no difference. The son, 5 foot 6 and thin, with closely cropped blond hair and blue eyes that fix on you, isnt concerned about ingratiating himself. He leveled its hog wallows, denuded its salt brush, and killed the last of its mustang, antelope, and tule elk. I applaud, too. Wages that used to go to workers stay in the pocket of the nut growers. It exists as one thing they can almost rationalize out in the fields. Mobile home park owner raises $94K to fight Measure D Do they sense the shaming about to come? Its my property, and I have a right to cross.. 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 settled in Brooklyn among Jews who had fled their own pogroms, and his grandfather went into the needle-and-embroidery trade. Each mound is fed into an even bigger machine whose teeth pulverize the trees and make sawdust. It will carry his private water on his private land, never leaving the regions geological basin. Tonight, feeling no pain, hell sit in one of the strip clubs in Bakersfield and maybe buy himself a fancy lap dance.. On the shallow bottom, the women fished mussels and clams with their toes. But a controversial pipeline sits empty, as dry as dust, caught in an angry feud between two of Californias largest land barons, Silicon Valley developer and farmer John Vidovich and Pasadena-based longtime cotton king J.G. On this same stretch of 99, I once wrote a story about farmworkers who moonlighted as meth cookers to make ends meet. The farmers there are raising almost 1 million acres of crops, and fewer than half these acres are irrigated with flows from the Kern. The new plantings arent cotton, alfalfa, or carrotsthe crops a farmer can decide not to seed when water becomes scarce. She was aiming to surround herself with famous actors and artists and public intellectuals. Nowhere to turn, I turn back around and roll down my window. In the winter of 2010, Vidovich put up for sale half his draw of state water from the Dudley Ridge Water District. But this outwardly unassuming multimillionaire has become a lightning rod of controversy. 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? Lupe says no one in her family, and none of her friends living in the trailer park or on the other side of town, drinks the water that comes out of the pipe. Look, I delegate a lot of things, obviously. But theres none for his precious corn, almond and pistachio trees in the south county and, because of new restrictions, he cant simply drill a new wellthere. They are still paying off the $27,000 debt to relatives who hired the coyote. She owns this place. He goes on to explain what he means by own. Forbes Billionaires 2023: The Richest People In The World Weve had our battles in the past, and I dont agree with everything hes doing. So do the Israelis, who go to the trouble of repackaging the nuts so it doesnt appear that theyre consuming the product of an enemy. Where the pipes butt up against Twisselman Road, a more clever bit of engineering is required. Turn onto Twisselman Road off I-5 and continue west until it intersects with the California Aqueduct. Talk to me, Hussein says, draining a can of Rockstar. Hes using it to irrigate his almonds and pistachios in Lost Hills. By the eighth day of harvest, the sun is gone. But if he thinks youre defying him, hell start with, Nobody realizes the good Ive done for agriculture. Then he moves on to, Do you know who I am? Title. I park the car and walk across the barren rows. Whos it going to? Where does the water end up? He was about my size, but he was very tough. They were actually harvesting record crops. A public resource had been privatized for the purpose of growing tens of thousands of acres of nuts, he charged. 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. Theyve always been able to bully anyone, he said. That breaks your agreement with those farmers. John Vidovich is 67 years old and was born on 11/23/1955. This is only $3? But for a lot of workers, bringing that big fat burrito from home still makes sense., I had seen what J.G. Now theres something here. Kingdom. California water war: San Joaquin Valley landowners battle over scarce This is one of the ways the Nut King and the Pomegranate Queen are defying the California drought. He had an industrial machine, hardly used, that scrubbed and waxed floors. The net return on the pistachio proves that Wonderfuls dominance in the market has benefited every grower in the room. Arax: They lose their livelihood. Each bush is saddled with more than a hundred pomegranates the size of softballs and baseballs. The next day, I drive to a spot a few miles beyond the trailer park where the county road dead-ends in a pomegranate orchard, or what used to be a pomegranate orchard before a Caterpillar came crashing through. 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. Domestic sales are up 42 percent over the past eight years, but foreign sales have stalled. This was Lost Hills, where the people are dependent on the Resnicks from cradle to grave. She was in her late 20s, almost a decade younger than Stewart, and the mother of two children. It was good for the bottom line. The Resnick story certainly deserved a book, but did he really want me to be the one to write it? What the Resnicks were doing for Lost Hills, though, was a level of philanthropy I had never witnessed in the valley. His face is still blank. Theres a lot happening in the world. She tells me the water comes out of the tap yellow and foul smelling, and she doesnt trust it. Vidovoch's New Kings County Water Pipeline Triggers Alarm Bells I did not name the town, Lynda says. The Story of How Beverly Hills Billionaire Farmers Stewart and Lynda So its a really extraordinary kind of development thats never happened in agriculture in California before really to raise the living of your workers. He is also on the board of ELM Resources Corp. Current positions of John Vidovich. The aqueduct brings the water, yes? A California developer, farmer, and water buyer, John Vidovich, is seeking approval to build a beef feedlot and processing plant near Lemoore on what appears to be a 789-acre project located along Highway 41, just south of Highway 198. . The baseballs will be crushed into juice. John Gibler, a freelance journalist, found Lost Hills a year before Lynda. And like other of the regions water barons present and past Resnick and Boswell Vidovichs last name is a sort of shorthand in coffee shop chatter from Delano to Easton. Every mogul, every movie star. Arrayed before him were small bowls of almonds, pistachios, and easy-to-peel mandarins, a plate of ground white turkey meat cooked in olive oil, and a glass of pomegranate juice. A flour tortilla. How come?, We dont need it anymore, he whispers., Back at the plant, Lynda is meeting with Wonderful doctors, nurses, and farmworkers. John also answers to John Visovich, John Vodovich, John T Vidovich, John Thomas Vidovich and Johnathon T Vidovich, and perhaps a couple of other names. In the years of plentiful rains and heavy snowmelt, the bank fills up with more than 1 million acre-feet of stored water. On one side of the road and the other, for miles in both directions, the dirt belongs to Wonderful. 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. They spend $50 a month on bottled water. Im down.. San Antonio south doesnt exist anymore. He is a small, good-looking man with a patch of black hair under his lip. Boswell has met its match. As a relative newcomer, Vidovich said he angered Boswell when he outbid the company on Westlake Farms, one of the oldest and largest farms in California, with valuable access to groundwater and Kings River flows. No picking of crop agitates the earth like the picking of almonds and pistachios. Lupe gave birth to two daughters, U.S. citizens, who are now 11 and 6. Thousands of Wonderful acres lay bare. I meet up with the Wonderful field man who first tipped me off to the pipeline. It was a hit. Ive gone too far. In his writing in The Dreamt Land, Arax notes that Vidovich found a creative route around that restriction. He had no papers, like so many others, just an image of what this side of the border looked like. Each tree produces 22 pounds of nuts. Annual sales at the Mint jumped to nearly $1 billion. It moves in a wave from trunk to limb to nut and back down to earth. His frat brother got bored, as rich boys do, and Resnick bought out his half interest for $300. He saved up a down payment for a raisin ranch west of Fresno, where my father was born in the worst of the Great Depression. Inside, a trainer watches over a line of treadmills, elliptical machines, and stationary bikes. Among the graduating class are kids headed to Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Dartmouth, and the state and community college systems. A day later, I get a call from Mr. Resnick. When John Vidovich was appointed as fire marshal in September 2014, he was given the difficult task of cleaning up the city of L.A.'s stubbornly antiquated Fire Prevention Bureau, making it more . Before he left her to cross alone, he gave her soda, water, chips, and Cheetos. The plastic unfurls across the grove like a giant roll of Saran Wrap. But this is water for Mr. Resnick. And one of the things he was doing was sort of an off-the-books irrigation deal? She deftly places her body between him and me. Hes thankful to the Resnicks, especially Lady Lynda, for that. Welcome to the club. Once he finished grabbing the flow of the five rivers that ran across the plain, he used his turbine pumps to seize the water beneath the ground. While Vidovich owns less acreage than Boswell, more of it is devoted to high-value orchards. The water is being taken from unsuspecting farmers in an irrigation district in Tulare County more than 40 miles away. This water basically came from a land owned by someone whos also a near billionaire a guy named John Vidovich. Building an agricultural empire in a land of drought - Marketplace Hed been diagnosed with early prostate cancer and had no doubt that the juice was keeping him well. Rather, they say, theyre harvesting health and happiness around the world through our iconic consumer brands. Their crops arent crops but heart-healthy snacks and life-extending elixirs. Who would have thought the two of them in cahoots? But this wasnt the Resnick Pavilion at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The pistachio trees in Wonderful number 6 million. He never knows when, but the pattern is the same, based on flight radar recordings. Lynda is making the trip on the company jet more often these days. Wow. EMEA +44 20 7330 7500. One more bin, a post reads. I come upon a Wonderful field man in a four-by-four truck who listens to my bewilderment and takes pity. She wanted to tell the story of the pomegranate, he told me with a touch of sarcasm. Ron DeSantis isn't returning his calls . It can be squeezed only so much. But his egotheres no controlling that., Resnick had heard it all before. One out of eight has diabetes. 2023 Minnesota Public Radio. Down the great aqueduct, by freight of politics and gravity, came the excess waters of the Sacramento River. Among other projects, he developed the posh Quarry Hills subdivision in Los Altos Hills with 22 multimillion-dollar luxury homes, where he now lives in a 15,000-square-foot house on 10 acres and a vineyard. Springsteen shook his head and smiled a thin, ironic smile. His account appeared in the Earth Island Journal, a small environmental quarterly out of Berkeley. 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. Then he turned and faced me. Yes, theyre still delivering water. They married in 1972, and he sold the alarm company for $100 million. I dont know how Hershey did Hershey, Pennsylvania, but Lynda is present in every painted sunburst, every planted flower, every blade of grass. Nearly $365 million worth of Wonderful almonds will have dropped down from the dry sky. The brick-hard ground cant be bought. Growers a tenth the size of Resnick flee the dust in their Ferraris to their second houses in Carmel. A fully equipped teaching kitchen will turn the harvest into school lunches. The depletion is causing land to collapse nearly a foot a year, in what U.S. Geological Survey hydrologists Devin Galloway and Francis Riley called one of the single largest alterations of the land surface attributed to humankind.. Vidovich, meanwhile, is accusing Boswell-backed groundwater agencies of dragging their feet on pumping reductions to the point their actions could sink the small, rural town of Corcoran up to another 11 feet. They were pushing plates, costume jewelry, perfume, and model cars. Across the field, a heavy machine is stacking whats left of the trees into giant mounds. Before being dammed and diverted, the water was home to millions of birds, mountain lions, wolves, bears and more. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you. At the east end, where the highway meets Interstate 5, the traveler gets a choice. This is Twisselman. Now in farming, were in a unique position. And how will the Resnicks fare? Legendary Investor Strategies And Stocks For The Current Market - Forbes Im going to Kern County, just shy of the mountains, to figure out how the biggest farmers in America, led by the biggest of them all, are not only keeping alive their orchards and vineyards during drought but adding more almonds (79,000 acres), more pistachios (73,000 acres), more grapes (35,000 acres), and more mandarins (13,000 acres). He was the bad guy in agriculture for no bigger offense than that he was big. As she announces the newest gift, the men and women in the back of the crowd smile and applaud politely and try not to show their faces to the publicity crew she has brought with her to film the event. 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. Sandridge Partners, L.P. Company Profile - Dun & Bradstreet Typically, each pound sells wholesale for $3.75. Due to the drought, this water would be impossible to replace, it said. The shiny red orbs, three months shy of harvest, pop out from the bright green leaves like bulbs on a Christmas tree. Here, a crew has dug a culvert beneath the road and hiked the pipeline under the asphalt that divides one field from another. All I know is I dont want to split it up or sell it in some leveraged buyout. I try again to pin him down, but hes a man who likes to think of himself as wily. The POM tanks, Im told, are backed up with a three-year supply. Boswell had tried to tear apart a copy of The King of California when his secretary asked if he might autograph it. By age 19, Lynda had dropped out of college, married a magazine ad man, and opened her own advertising agency. Within the confines of the settlement with Pixley Irrigation District, he continued to move water out of Angiola and into Dudley Ridge. If you study his moves, you can see a method to the acres he is accumulating. The farmer isnt here to smell the cracking open of wood, the ripping open of warm secret earth. No stranger enters this zone unless its to get rid of a body or dump waste from cooking meth or drown a hot car. And you know why?
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