Too many almonds. Past McFarland and the high school runners who won five state championships in a row in the 1990s. Somehow, 30 or 40 nuts arent compelled to drop. They were actually harvesting record crops. Well still make money.. The wall of Pacifico and 16-ounce cans of Bud is rebuilt daily. 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. 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. A woman named Lupe is standing above me on the wooden stairway that climbs to the front door of her trailer. Or at least thats the way Vidovich puts it when I finally reach him. It takes a lot of work to get ahead. She and Manuel were able to buy their trailer several years ago. 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. John Vidovich. As we hop down from the van to inspect the pomegranates on the eve of harvest, Resnick motions to Bernards belly. 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. Not a single penny was put in that piggy bank.. This is a company that runs its resources to the max, he tells me. Their houses made from railroad boxcars have been painted purple, blue, yellow, and gold. Each section of pipe is 40 feet long. Big fish eat the small fish here. Lynda sent the first batches of POM, week after week, as gifts to David Bowie, Rupert Murdoch, and Disney head Michael Eisner. Nothing changes. The bureau happened to be my house in northwest Fresno. So its a really extraordinary kind of development thats never happened in agriculture in California before really to raise the living of your workers. Even now, months later, the flyovers continue, said Wilson. During paid breaks, they do their 15 minutes of Zumba, take a walk along a designated path, and munch on the free fruits and veggies put out for them. This is my wife. The stacks of bottles gave him no answer. Do they sense the shaming about to come? Tender sprouts poke out of the dry soil, and I bend down to feel their prickle. The rain of almonds has moved on to the next tree. Its gone, I say. Round 1, No. Right there in the big canal of the Dudley Ridge Water District. So I ask about the big picture. Theyre the 300-pound gorilla, said Mark Grewal of Grewal Consulting, who worked for J.G. If that happens, theyll go down the highway, and hell lose the $1 he takes for every $100 worth of their checks. Boswell has been the aggressor for years. If they were farmers, they were farmers who hung out with Tom Hanks, Steve Martin, David Geffen, Warren Beatty, and Joan Didion. For as far as I can see, the water in the canal runs inky through the orchards. He was 13 and standing inside the Rutgers Pharmacy on the first day of his first job. No journalist had written a word about his rise as an agricultural giant, how he had turned public water into private water by grabbing control of Californias largest water bank, a project jump-started with $74 million in taxpayer money. Name. He points to the young almond trees that envelop his 20 acres like a siege. You sure this isnt 18 tons an acre? he says, goading. But others are suspicious of Vidovichs record of buying land and selling its water, both surface and groundwater, out of the area, sometimes to urban users. There before me, two aluminum pipes, side by side, 12 inches in diameter each, slither in the sun. Theres a lot of people who dont like me, he said after his fathers death. The softballs will go to market as whole fruit or as seed pods in a package. Wonderful is getting smaller, he says. Theyre now building an $80 million charter-school complex in Delano, just down the road from Cesar Chavez High. The Boswell company, their attorneys and Tulare Lake Canal Company president Mark Unruh did not respond to repeated requests for comment. This is Twisselman. This is gamblers ground unlike any other in California, and as I drive from hill to dale, examining each orchard, my head spins. Not a single one of them wants any part of Wonderful. Thats on top of managing 100,000 acres of farmland and sitting in on Valley-based water boards. The Boswell Company wants it blocked, saying it threatens the companys own water supplies, which run through a canal over the pipelines underground route. Vidovich has a unique perspective on Stewart Resnick and the acres of crops that have made Wonderful a success, as he tells Arax . What if he dropped his lawsuit and the two of them worked together to solve their water problems? I sort of remember growing up on a farm, he said. This is the first installment of a new SUNLIGHT Series: Kings of the River, a review of the machinations and battles on the oft-overlooked Kings River. Even the community water tank is painted baby blue with a big sunflower. She was the daughter of Jack Harris, a film distributor, who moved the family to Los Angeles when Lynda was 15 to produce movies. He wants his fair share, but he wants everybody else to prosper, too.. "Stakes are higher than ever," Myers told CNBC. I feel too good to give any of it up.. The Iranians dont irrigate their trees. As he bled the aquifer dry, he called on the government to bring him an even mightier river from afar. Upon graduation, he only needed to look across the Raritan River to find his college. As a class of people, the farmers and real estate developers harbor a deep-down contempt for what they have built. The great drought is officially over. Today, most everything in this desolate reach of Kern County, save for the oil wells, belongs to Paramount Farming, which belongs to the Resnicks. It wont hurt the canal, he said. Theyre baby tumbleweeds that have come home. Today, at 81, his money is all but gone, and South African conservationist John Hume is throwing in the towel . Its known as a census-designated place, which is another way of saying that Kern County has every reason to neglect it. Vidovich digs 17 new wells, several to the depth of 1,400 feet, and pumps groundwater into ditches and canals that move the flow across miles of flat lake bed. My father, born in a vineyard outside Fresno, was a raisin grower before he became a bar owner. Get a D&B Hoovers Free Trial. I get out of the car and walk down an embankment. The sentimental ones stay away. He is also on the board of ELM Resources Corp. Current positions of John Vidovich. He explains that Wonderful has grown too big to hassle such precision. It took time for the wax to dry. Now shes getting lots of credit.. He doesnt know what pipeline means. I returned for two more sessions, and then he and Lynda took off to their $15 million vacation house in Aspen, where they were warring with the locals over a housing project for community workers that was blocking their view. In the kitchen corner, cases of bottled water are stacked halfway up the wall. They slap back with the cold vibration of water. Presently, John Vidovich is Vice President & Sales Director at The Student Loan Corp. He ran the city's Fire Prevention Bureau, oversaw more than 150 employees and won awards from Mayor Eric Garcetti . 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. The neighborhoods didnt have sidewalks; when it rained, the kids had to walk to school in the mud. If he were on the scene today, hed have to add sashed Queens to the list. A fully equipped teaching kitchen will turn the harvest into school lunches. Every last tree has been torn out of the ground. It was linear, logical, fluid, and quite nearly destined. He says he doesnt feel sorry for Resnick. The Sureos gang has tagged the front entrance but otherwise has left the inside unmarked. Theres no waiting around. No one pushes their product harder. It was this persistence and, above all, good timing that explained his bigness. It would return as tule fog to remind the white man of his theft. The vibration is a stunning piece of violence to behold. Its bringing water from the Dudley Ridge Water District in Kings County. Already, Wonderful has bulldozed 8,000 to 10,000 acres of pomegranate trees over the past few years to send more water to its nuts. Because it is a community of all Hispanics.. It isnt a lot of water., Im not going to give you the numbers. He got himself into this jam. Once his parents decided to go, he decided to go, too. His frat brother got bored, as rich boys do, and Resnick bought out his half interest for $300. 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. Its an economy of scale on a scale no ones ever tried here. The compass in my car says Im headed east, but that means almost nothing inside a province of 15 million trees. I had in mind a magazine profile on Stewart, the Nut King. The pizza dough is cauliflower, too. The gas to and from the orchards costs him $80 a week. Surely, no one does this better than Wonderful? Theres a lot happening in the world. 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. Thats a billion-dollar crop. Through it all, Marketplace is here for you. In the summer of 2010, hed spent several days documenting the deplorable conditions of the modern company town. Who knows when a five-year drought is coming? Like many billionaires, he didnt have a decent explanation for his fortune. 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. He left in 1956. I never liked New Jersey, but I never knew why. She delivers it in classic Lynda style. The 5.3 acres are so flawless and at odds with the town that the whole thing feels like a movie set. Background details that you might want to know . We were asleep at the wheel. Theyre our future, she says. Nowhere to turn, I turn back around and roll down my window. The Resnicks are growing again. The believer and the skeptic do their tussle inside my head. Kingdom. No ones going to get fired for bringing home 2,500 pounds of nuts an acre. The bunches of chartreuse-tipped nuts hanging from antler branches never touch the ground. Yes, theyre still delivering water. Lost Hills sits on an upslope. 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. Boswell Company for 26 years and now advises the regions growers on water and land management issues. The Federal Trade Commission found Wonderful guilty of false advertising and ordered the Resnicks to stop claiming that POM cured heart disease and erectile dysfunction. Title. . Vidovich wrote out a check for the full amount, then went looking for the water to prop up Resnicks monopoly. The State Water Project that allowed western Kern County to grow into a farming behemoth has given no water or very little water over the past three years amid the worst drought in California history. A pump is shooting water out of the canal and into the Rain for Rent pipes. Like the wheat barons of the 1870s who lived on San Franciscos Nob Hill, Resnick isnt of this place. The price for pistachios has climbed from $4.50 a pound to an unbelievable $5.25 a pound. He was tough on the outside. On one side of the road and the other, for miles in both directions, the dirt belongs to Wonderful. Business got so brisk that he bought two trucks and hired crews. Theyve gone back to the nut line. He had an industrial machine, hardly used, that scrubbed and waxed floors. It was true that agriculture had been selling state project water to cities for two decades. His father worked as a truck driver, transporting crops to the city. Lois Henry is the CEO and editor of SJV Water, a nonprofit, independent online news publication dedicated to covering water issues in the San Joaquin Valley. From the east side of Tulare County to the west side of Fresno County, theyre planting more nuts and Halos. It goes to doctors and nurses, trainers and dietitians, who track the weight of workers, prod them to exercise, and wean them off soda and tortillas. When I tell her my name, she whispers into his ear. He called it fake junk, sued, and won. "Once you have them, you spend a lifetime defending them." One year, it delivers 900,000 acre-feet of snowmelt. A van pulls up to the curb, and the door slides open. The oldest of five children, he came from Mexico when he was 18. He lives down the road in Wasco, the Rose Capital of America, though the roses, too, have turned to nuts. Down a rutted road, 100 trailers with foundations dressed in plywood back up against an orchard. Also set to pitch in is hedge fund executive Donald Sussman who told . But the players are different. There is nothing here, one of the townsfolk told Gibler. Stewart would deny that Giblers reporting played a part in their philanthropy. When the rain returns, some of the ground will be replanted in pistachios, a tree that can better withstand drought. What if the endless days without rain become endless years? Of the 22,000 acres they ripped during the drought, 18,000 acres are being replanted in pistachios. What kind of place is this? For the next two or three seconds, the almonds pour down like hail. By then, Wonderful, if it still exists, will be a portfolio run by men even farther away than Beverly Hills. Sandridge Partners, controlled by Vidovich, is building a 10-mile-long route on its properties to ship water from its wells in the north to its thirsty fields in the south. My health, knock on wood, is good. Lynda is also mapping out a farm-to-food program where students will grow fruits, vegetables, and grains on a plot of village land. He wonders what agriculture will look like in western Kern in ten years. He yanks and pulls, and it finally comes off, throwing him a foot backward. They donated $15 million to found UCLAs Stewart and Lynda Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital and more than $25 million to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to build a pavilion in their name. Scott: So we should talk about the labor that makes this all possible. The big man with the goatee behind the wheel is Bernard Puget, a Basque sheepmans son who oversees these orchards. Let the smaller grower walk among his trees and farm by the row. Everything about our physical selves, Lynda believes, begins in our guts. Selfo works 50 hours a week as an irrigator. The concept changed the industry. The farmer isnt here to smell the cracking open of wood, the ripping open of warm secret earth. How much was plunder? The Mojave Water Agency in the high desert needed a backup supply to serve its growing communities of Barstow and Apple Valley, Hesperia and Victorville. 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. At Wonderful Health and Wellness, were educating our employees about this health crisis. As far as the company can tell, no active salmonella has ever traced back to the plant. Four tribes of Yokut lived along its shores. Last time he checked, he told me he owned 180,000 acres of California. Mr. Vidovich was a descendant of one of the pioneer farm families that settled here from Croatia . The project would take five days to completewhen the canal wasnt in use. I thwack both lines. It was the early spring of 2008, and this time his secretary didnt hang up on me. 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. We send money home each month to our families left behind, Lupe says. Like J.W. It might be nice if my kids and grandkids could turn to a book someday and read about what weve built., He and Lynda were changing the way food was grown in California and sold to the world. My husband would have been shot dead like the others, but he was lucky. He isnt farming dirt. 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. Now the land is dry and saline, drained to support a vast and rigid geometry of nut, fruit and dairy farms. But Paramount isnt Paramount anymore. The 20-year-olds look like 20-year-olds; the 30-year-olds, like 40-year-olds; the 40-year-olds, like 60-year-olds. 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. But some residents and local leaders are growing wary of the companys dominance and secrecy. Wow. I try to calculate how many hundreds of aluminum sections need to be linked seamlessly, or at least watertight, to cover the distance of a mile. 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. Here, a crew has dug a culvert beneath the road and hiked the pipeline under the asphalt that divides one field from another. Two men sit inside separate cabins of a small tractor with pincers on one side and a catcher on the other. Each face wears its own weary. The aquifer, a sea of water beneath the clay that dates back centuries, isnt bottomless. When he first planted seedless mandarins in the valley 17 years ago, the bees from the citrus orchards around him were flying into his groves, pollinating his flowers, and putting seeds into the flesh of his fruit. So were seeing a shift now and then to have nature imposing its will on the situation. 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 . Eat a corn tortilla instead, she urges. This doesnt count the 21,000 acres of grapefruits and limes hes growing in Texas and Mexico. Sitting in his mansion in 2008, he already counted more than 100,000 acres of orchards across five counties. The Cutie and the Halo are now warring in the fields outside the Visalia Convention Center. Theres not much left over, he says. Bruce Springsteen turned it into a song on his Ghost of Tom Joad album. Boswell pumps reach 2,500 feet into the earth looking for water to grow crops, looking for water to sell. Today, the highest bidder may grow crops in the region. Perched up there, a queen might peek out and utter, Let them eat cake, Lynda once said. So the question before me was how are these guys farming? His trees were drinking from the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project, from rivers and irrigation canals and the water bank. On a chilly morning in January, the day the pipe was to cross under the canal, Boswells crew arrived to block construction with trucks, trailers, excavators, a motor grader and a bulldozer with the diamond B logo, according to the lawsuit. We hope you enjoy Finding Lost Hills., The 11-minute film opens with a shot of swirling dust. Hes planting ground that no one has ever planted before. Lisa M. Krieger is a Bay Area News Group science writer for The Mercury News and East Bay Times, covering research, scientific policy and environmental news from Stanford University, the University of California, NASA-Ames, U.S. Geological Survey and other Bay Area-based research facilities. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you. His father bought a neighborhood bar and ran it with the same iron fist with which he ran the house. John Vidovich, the owner of the Santiago Villa and Sahara mobile home parks in Mountain View, is listed as a partner in both businesses. Water rights are like democracy, he told Forbes in 1989. Vidovich went on a shopping spree. We cant insist on wellness the way we can insist on plant safety. They all just started running, and kept running, and blew right through the hot wire fence, recalled dairyman Wilson, who estimates $80,000 in fence damage. Join Facebook to connect with John Vidovich and others you may know. But with shared ambitions of buying land and moving water, theyre all doing the same thing, in our eyes.. A battle between one of Kings County's largest farming outfits and a water district over the trenching of a massive underground water pipeline grew hotter on Friday. Its a bad day, he says, shooing me out. In my lifetime alone, California has gone from 13 million people to 40 million people. Its gambling. Boswell Company, which pioneered industrial-scale agriculture to become the largest farming operation in California. This road ends abruptly at the rise of a second fence. The jolt and shudder would tear out the roots of a lesser species. The leathery skin on the fruit has turned a nice orange-red. 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 shiny red orbs, three months shy of harvest, pop out from the bright green leaves like bulbs on a Christmas tree. His accountant suggested he buy apartments. 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. So everybody should have it, right? 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. I find a former partner of Resnick. They had survived the drought. He does enough farming in the area to make it look like hes a farmer. 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. He has plenty of well water in the northern part of Kings County, outside J.G. They dont do agribusiness. The nut must be hurried from bin to truck to processing plant to keep it from discoloring. Mathews: Should climate projects benefit communities they impact? Silicon Valley developer John Vidovich wants to build a water pipeline on his property; cotton king J.G. The deed had been done in a series of hidden meetings in Monterey. The William Saroyan Theatre was packed that October 1996 night. Still, none of it would have happened without luck., What he and Lynda had done with the wretched pomegranate was another matter. The historic king of the region is the J.G. In recent years, theres been a consolidation of farms, as investors buy land with reliable water supplies and then fallow the fields because, in an era of climate change, water can be more lucrative than crops. The pipeline, bankrolled by his investment firm Sandridge Partners, is an efficient and conservation-minded way to ship water, he says. The drought is driving prices and shifting business practices. John Vidovich, the current patriarch of the family business, and his wife Lydia live in an $11.4 million Los Altos Hills home. If she has her way, they will go to college, too. You and I look at this meal, he says. The harvest begins in January with one type of mandarin and ends in December with another type of mandarin and in between spills forth everything in your supermarket produce and dairy aisles except for bananas and mangoes, though the farmers here are working on the tropical, too. And that scares the hell out of everybody who lives here.. This must be the spot the Wonderful field man was describing. 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. About five years ago, Lynda started our community development organization in Lost Hills, and the journey has been an amazing one.
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