Longtime small farmers say water is hard to track and could drain towardrich and politically powerful users, leaving them dry. It becomes something else as soon as they encounter their workers in another guiseas a fellow shopper at Costco or as the parents of the kid who goes to school with their kid. The river is nothing if not fickle. His strategy, and his Silicon Valley wealth, arouse both admiration and suspicion in this rural community. She is small with lively brown eyes and a sweet but confident voice. Vidovich, who has declined to sign paperwork ensuring his pipeline wont cause harm, filed a lawsuit alleging trespass. For college, he picked California Polytechnic in San Luis Obispo over the hill and majored in agriculture business. Whether its Fresno or Kings or Tulare or Kern counties, hes grabbing land where the groundwater is plenty or a river runs through it or the aqueduct spills its north-to-south flow. If this were any other part of Kern, the farmers would be reaching into the earth to make up the difference. Wheres it coming from? His grandfather Resnick had fled the Ukraine in the wake of another killing of Jews by Cossacks. Stewart and Lynda planted 15,000 more acres and bought a juice plant. Mr. Vidovich was a descendant of one of the pioneer farm families that settled here from Croatia . There have been several instances where damaged equipment has reduced flows, he said. In fact, the piece is called A kingdom from dust. Its a pretty dry place right? The vibration here isnt quite as vehement. VIDEO: Christmas wonderland featuring the Grinch . Where does the water end up? Nearly $365 million worth of Wonderful almonds will have dropped down from the dry sky. Jim Wilson of J & D Wilson & Sons Dairy says two of his cattle died and $80,000 worth of fencing was damaged after a Boswell Co. helicopter buzzed his farm that he leases from John Vidovich, in . They greet me with smiles and handshakes. Im down, Stewart, he protests. The softballs will go to market as whole fruit or as seed pods in a package. I think I paid $9 million. You dont lose one drop at all.. The choices for the Kern farmer now come down to two: He can reach deep into his pocket and buy high-priced water from an irrigation district with surplus supplies. Past Delano and the first vineyards that Cesar Chavez marched against. So why hasnt this place gone to tumbleweeds? He was short, bull-like, and didnt take crap from anyone. Another intrepid California billionaire named John Vidovich, scion of the Vidovich fortune, has a different path forward for the Golden State, one that he's established in his own land and water grabs. He landed a steady job with a big grower and a year later paid a coyote $5,000 to bring Lupe and their baby son to Lost Hills. Forbes' Real-Time Billionaires rankings tracks the daily ups and downs of the world's richest people. That little red string is supposed to remind him to count to ten. So the state couldnt deliver, in one year couldnt deliver any of it. His father was 3 years old at the time. Shoving aside the coins, they introduced a Scarlett OHara doll that, by itself, raked in $35 million in sales. He says he doesnt feel sorry for Resnick. . Two strains of salmonella found in their pistachios had caused a multistate outbreak of illnesses. Fiefdom. When it doesnt come, he finds a way to make it come. He spits tobacco juice into the empty can of Rockstar. Each tree produces 38 pounds of nuts. Its California., Sure. 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. And that scares the hell out of everybody who lives here.. This is the domain of Stewart Resnick, the richest farmer in the country and maybe the most peculiar one, too. He wants his fair share, but he wants everybody else to prosper, too.. While water has been moved, bought, sold and traded in California for decades, most deals have typically involved small supplies. The white flowers have set into buds, and the buds have become baby almonds covered in fuzz. Where gravity needs a boost, the pipes run atop wooden crates used to pack boxes of fruit. He maneuvers down the middle of the row, sweeps up the dried almonds, and throws them into a catcher. It takes a lot of work to get ahead. She and Manuel were able to buy their trailer several years ago. In his book, The Dreamt Land, Fresno-based reporter and author Mark Arax noted that Vidovichs business moves were driven out of an almost singular commodity: water. It was Lynda who teamed up with the USDA to develop 21 new single-family homes and 60 new townhouses on a couple of acres of almonds that Wonderful tore out. 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. In Vidovich, J.G. So in that time, we started cleaning windows, too. They named the business Clean Time Building Maintenance. I find a former partner of Resnick. 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. When the Depression struck, his parents migrated to Middlebush, New Jersey, where they bought a few trucks and peddled coffee and pots and pans. The net return on the pistachio proves that Wonderfuls dominance in the market has benefited every grower in the room. It will carry his private water on his private land, never leaving the regions geological basin. Hes oblivious, or so it seems. The water will be stripped from the land and sold to developers of new towns both here and over the mountain. The neighborhoods didnt have sidewalks; when it rained, the kids had to walk to school in the mud. The Resnick story certainly deserved a book, but did he really want me to be the one to write it? What market share has been lost in Asia and the Middle East, the company is looking to get back in Mexico with its spicy Latin line of nuts. So now theyre doing everything they can to frustrate my ability to utilize the property, said Vidovich. The company is now run by son Jim, or J.W., 69, who lives 2.5 hours away from this dusty valley in a palatial home in the wealthy Southern California town of La Caada Flintridge. You look like Border Patrol undercover.. Its artificiality had achieved a permanence; its permanence had created my California. She wanted me to put our $5 million in an account, draw interest, and we could live happily on the 50 grand a year.. Tracts of houses, Californias last affordable dream, civilize three or four exits, and then its back to the open road splattered with the guts and feathers of chickens that jumped ship on the slaughterhouse drive. The truth a mercenary has landed on. She owns this place. He goes on to explain what he means by own. His grandfather, who came to California from Croatia in 1908, got his start with 10 acres of cherries and apricots in Mountain View. The Wonderful Company is located in Californias Central Valley where droughts hit frequently, but that hasnt stopped the company from harvesting record crops. Back then, the Los Angeles Times had a bureau in the middle of California. Arax: This place called Lost Hills, it is kind of a modern-day company town not unlike Hershey, Pennsylvania. 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. When Lynda learned that half the students receiving thousands of dollars in company scholarships were dropping out of school, she wasnt deterred. The abundance of that water in good years has created this overreach of agriculture. San Antonio south doesnt exist anymore. He is a small, good-looking man with a patch of black hair under his lip. The Wheat King begets the Cattle King, and the Cattle King begets the Cotton King, and the Cotton King begets the Nut King and Pomegranate Queen. Business got so brisk that he bought two trucks and hired crews. He grew up in New Jersey, where his father ran a bar. They do that because they love it., A POM craze followed. She is the brander of the empire, the final word on their Super Bowl ads, the creator of product marketing. Hes trying to play dumb, but I can see the sliest of grins peeking out from his mustache and goatee. Roll Corp. was ranked #246 on Forbes' list of America's largest private companies in 2008 and had an estimated revenue of $1.98 billion in 2007. . The 5.3 acres are so flawless and at odds with the town that the whole thing feels like a movie set. 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 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. 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. I walk to another part of the orchard and watch phase two. Even if they had wheels, they wouldnt be going anywhere. A road will pick up and connect me to where the tube is going. He had no intention of farming it, either. Look, I delegate a lot of things, obviously. Every river busting out of the Sierra was bent sideways, if not backward, by a bulwark of ditches, levees, canals, and dams. Due to the drought, this water would be impossible to replace, it said. 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. This is a big crop, the field man tells me. It would return as tule fog to remind the white man of his theft. Maybe this explains why the United Way could declare the valley one of the nations skinflints, a place where the wealthy farmers donated to the childrens hospital or Fresno State athletics but almost never to the communities filled with Mexicans where their crops grew. Thats why he built the pipeline. Whatever remains is not nearly enough to make up for the shortfall of imported water from the state. Then he turned and faced me. All I know is I dont want to split it up or sell it in some leveraged buyout. John Vidovich. 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. General Partner. The aquifer either doesnt exist or is so befouled by salts that the water is poison. Still, he was starting to think about his legacy, and thats why he finally agreed to meet with me. By the time he died an old man on his tractor in the Cupertino Hills, where he had planted grapes again and was making wine, the transformation of his valley by the silicon chip was complete. Im a billionaire. Hes got an awful temper hes trying to control through Kabbalah. 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. If Resnick retains every drop, he might squeeze 25 acre-feet of water a day out of both pipes. The wide-open middle of California did its lullaby on me again. That still leaves the majority of the workforce beyond his cajole. This is the Lynda who now endeavors to see farmhands as something more than workers. That breaks your agreement with those farmers. We are horrified by the lack of regard for both neighbor and nature, and we hope that the community will accept our deepest and most sincere apologies and find it in their hearts to forgive us. They pledge to donate the 380 acres to charity. The juice isnt selling like it used to. Billionaire comes to the rescue of billionaire., But those two guys hate each other., Not anymore. My dust cloud tells him Im getting close. Four thousand peoplemore than double the number on the highway signlive in town, and three out of every four rely on a payday from Wonderful. 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? 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. 2019 - 2023 The San Joaquin Valley Sun, a project of, Meet the water baron you (likely) havent heard of, Calif. OKs 2036 ban on diesel truck sales, Newsom slaps down tax hike proposal to close deficit, Yosemite Valley reopens as flooding worries subside, Saints 4th round pick brings Fresno St.s Haener, Carr together, now writing exclusively for her own service, SJVWater. She can be reached at lois.henry . 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. On a fog-drip night in January 1972, two men walked into my fathers empty bar with gloves on and shot him to death. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you. And its an area that doesnt have ground water, so its there completely because of the State Water Project. Fallowing the farm until the footprint gets smaller and smaller. The piece, I was told, had left Lynda embarrassed and fuming. A major set of wells for Angiola sits within the Pixley Irrigation District, where the Vidovich-controlled district began improving old wells, installing new ones, and building a pipeline. Through the haze I can see the knoll of the aqueduct come closer. Turn onto Twisselman Road off I-5 and continue west until it intersects with the California Aqueduct. 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. Resnick has saved the front seat for me. How come?, We dont need it anymore, he whispers., Back at the plant, Lynda is meeting with Wonderful doctors, nurses, and farmworkers. He says his bosses have been instructing him to cut the water each irrigation. Past Oildale and the boxcar where Merle Haggard grew up. John Vidovich, the owner of the Santiago Villa and Sahara mobile home parks in Mountain View, is listed as a partner in both businesses. Even now, months later, the flyovers continue, said Wilson. On our trips to Disneyland, I must have blinkered my eyes heading down 99. It cant be farmed like it was, he says. Anzaldos grandfather came from Guadalajara in the 1950s as part of the bracero farmworker program. Have we gone too far? The Newsom Water Resilience Portfolio has seven investment principles, none of which includes the actions of water entrepreneurs, such as farmer John Vidovich who has been trying to put together a voluntary speculative groundwater market in Kern County for dry years. 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. His father met his mother, the cantors daughter, and they married. He kept planting more and more trees. John Vidovich. Dynamic search and list-building capabilities. It isnt going down because he wont let it go down. 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. A woman named Lupe is standing above me on the wooden stairway that climbs to the front door of her trailer. He yanks and pulls, and it finally comes off, throwing him a foot backward. The problem is this last drought lasted five years. The land to him isnt real. Im not going to live forever, even with the massive amounts of pomegranate juice Im drinking. This means he can avoid the thievery of a labor contractor who acts as a middleman between the farmer and the farmworker and charges for rides and drinks and doesnt always pay minimum wage. It takes my visiting the irrigation district office during a public meeting for him to cough up more details. 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. Look it, Im from Beverly Hills. For the bright kids who have no interest in a bachelors degree, she has designed the Wonderful Agriculture Prep Program to serve an additional 1,000 students. Where he takes the water is none of my business., Hes taking it into his orchards in Kern. Unlike the almond, the pistachio is moist and combustible. Ive done no big wrong in my life that would cause me to have any. The project would take five days to completewhen the canal wasnt in use. Theyve gone back to the nut line. When a copy found its way to The New York Times, Lynda was pursued by federal prosecutors until they concluded she was more dilettante than radical. I head straight into the glare of the sun shooting over the Coast Range. A cross of Jesus hangs from the bedpost. I waited five years before placing another call to his headquarters. And the Resnicks run the place, thats where this story gets conflicted and very complicated because in the last five to eight years they have committed millions and millions of dollars to making this place better educating the children, helping the workers deal with obesity and things like that. 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. For generations, the company has supplied steady work for Kings County families and has been an integral part of the regions identity, helping to build a community park, the YMCA, Corcoran District Hospital and the high school football stadium. It took time for the wax to dry. Their goal is to prevent me from successfully farming. 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. If that happens, theyll go down the highway, and hell lose the $1 he takes for every $100 worth of their checks. His oldest son is retired in Seattle. He was the bad guy in agriculture for no bigger offense than that he was big. The compass in my car says Im headed east, but that means almost nothing inside a province of 15 million trees. The pipeline will pose a constant and continued threat to the easements function, compromising the structural integrity of the easement through saturation and subsidence or by negligent maintenance, wrote attorney Leonard Herr. John Vidovich lives in Los Altos, CA; previous city include San Jose CA. Me, Im a carpetbagger from Beverly Hills. California growers, in the grip of drought, have produced 900 million pounds of the green nut. He guides me to the caf, and we grab our lunches from the buffet. For the next two or three seconds, the almonds pour down like hail. The buyer? Theyre paying $340 a month for its privilege. He bought 20,000 acres in the Tulare Lake basinland that not even Boswell dared farm. No farmer ever is. He leveled its hog wallows, denuded its salt brush, and killed the last of its mustang, antelope, and tule elk. 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. The construction of the pipeline forced the irrigation districts hand, launching a lawsuit to halt Angiolas water exports at one point to the tune of 30,000 acre-feet annually. Selling the farm to migrant families has required Lynda to rebrand agriculture. 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. Because when we dont manage it, they end up with severe chronic health issues and amputated limbs., Anzaldo is a man wired for solemn, but he does manage to smile once during lunch, when talking about the 1,150 workers whove earned bonuses of up to $500 for losing a collective 14,000 pounds in two years. It is the ditch up the road, the one that carries no water, that is filled with old mattresses and spent appliances. When will it be used? She didnt understand his drive. His father worked as a truck driver, transporting crops to the city. Yet the Resnick pipeline is doing just that. So I ask about the big picture. He bought his first San Joaquin Valley parcel in 1994 when he invested in a foreclosed property in Kings County. Groundwater agencies up and down the San Joaquin Valley had to file plans with the Department of Water Resources earlier this year showing . The growers would stand in front of the cull line and never stop moaning about how much of their fruit got rejected by Girazians graders. Where do you begin with a man of great riches if not the distant places you might have in common? 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 ran the city's Fire Prevention Bureau, oversaw more than 150 employees and won awards from Mayor Eric Garcetti . They were pushing plates, costume jewelry, perfume, and model cars. The Resnicks are growing again. In my lifetime alone, California has gone from 13 million people to 40 million people. I remind him of the time we spent together eight years earlier in his Sunset House. Whether he realizes it, hes part of the biggest pistachio harvest in history. This is the west end of Lost Hills, the extraction end. 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. It is flowing to a place of dire thirst. The grass is a color green on the verge of blue, and the cutouts for trees are razor etched. She walks off the stage with Stewart. 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. He commands his realm, and she commands hers, and he takes care to mind the line. Mostly, though, they cant wait for the avalanche of nuts to end. Manhattan was 30 minutes in one direction; the Jersey Shore, 30 minutes in the other. You dont believe me?, No, I believe you, Resnick says. Ive gone too far. Ive told them all no. Valuable research and technology reports. I feel too good to give any of it up.. He turns out to be a kindly religious man whose short hair is dyed the black of shoe polish. The boss showed him a storeroom filled with chemicals tossed here and there and told him to bring order to the mess. The leathery skin on the fruit has turned a nice orange-red. We cant insist on wellness the way we can insist on plant safety. The winter goes down as one of the wettest in recorded history. Farmers near Pixley already have sued him once for taking too much water out of their ground and moving it. Still, none of it would have happened without luck., What he and Lynda had done with the wretched pomegranate was another matter. His account appeared in the Earth Island Journal, a small environmental quarterly out of Berkeley. His face is still blank. Water rights are like democracy, he told Forbes in 1989. He only needed to find groundwater from another basin to replace the state aqueduct water he had just sold. Were still trying to figure out who our typical customer is going to be, Angelica says. Under her rethink agriculture program, the kids will be trained in plant science and irrigation technology, marketing and sales. I had no idea what I wanted to do, but I reached a moment in my life where I had to give back in a meaningful way, she tells the camera. Marketplace host Amy Scott spoke with Mark Arax, who wrote an articlein The California Sunday Magazine about the Wonderful Companys farming business and issues of sustainability in the Central Valley. Under lights, he prunes, plows, and irrigates the almonds. A portion of his wages will be set aside each month to pay down the debt. The gas to and from the orchards costs him $80 a week. Not a single penny was put in that piggy bank.. Deadly in the rush of harvest, deadly in the quiet of fog, deadly in the blur of Saturday nights when the fieldwork is done and the beer drinking becomes a second humiliation. The new plantings arent cotton, alfalfa, or carrotsthe crops a farmer can decide not to seed when water becomes scarce. Contact 4? She joined the Oakland Tribune in 2001. Lupe and I walk to the far side of the trailer park to find Gustavo. Ill have to go deeper if I can.. Your donation today powers the independent journalism that you rely on. Then it hits me. None of the sales taxes go to City Hall because Lost Hills isnt a city. He wonders what agriculture will look like in western Kern in ten years. It was his father and uncles who founded the company in 1925. On the south end stands the Wonderful Community Center, where residents are urged to attend thrice-weekly Zumba and core-training sessions, healthy cooking classes, and weekend cultural outings featuring the likes of Americas Premier Latino Dance Company. Because he hadnt done it with Daddys money or what he considered a superior brain, he attributed his wealth to luck and to a simple lesson he had learned early in life. Since the middle of the drought, the price of almonds has dropped almost by half. The independent growers and processors, no surprise, regarded him as a bully eager to employ teams of lawyers and tens of millions of dollars to force his agenda. Vidovich didnt have to wait long for a buyer to come calling. Photo courtesy of Trent Davis Bailey/The California Sunday Magazine. One giant dealing water to another has rubbed smaller operators along the Kings River, but what it signals that is perhaps more worrisome that Valley water can easily wind up on the block. But nobody didnt like my dad.. Lost Hills finally has something to be proud about. He was going to Vegas, hanging out with his own Damon Runyon characters, and making plans to get even bigger. This drought has brought Stewart to his knees. Along a fan of the Kings River, a raisin farmer in Selma shows me his well thats coughing up sand. There was a majordomo of the house, a butler, a chef, a sous-chef, three housekeepers, a limo driver, and a trio of assistants who worked in the basement, juggling Lyndas calendar and the buying, wrapping, and shipping of gifts she handed out to her Rolodex of highfalutin people. Stewart had made it clear that Lynda would not be joining us. He got himself into this jam. Some of them have paid $12,000 to buy their trailers and spent thousands more to fix them up. Sitting in his mansion in 2008, he already counted more than 100,000 acres of orchards across five counties. The calculation and hubris inside it. Antioxidants that delivered 32 grams of sugar in each serving didnt come cheap: $11 a bottle. Boswells response has a tough Spaghetti Western quality. I didnt see our creation, much less the figures bent under the canopies of vine that our creation counted on. Wonderful, by contrast, shoots for the middle. 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. This is a forgotten community. (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. For half my life, I never stopped to wonder: How much was magic? April 17, 2020. Within the confines of the settlement with Pixley Irrigation District, he continued to move water out of Angiola and into Dudley Ridge. Most everything that can be touched in this corner of California belongs to Wonderful. I roll past Tulare, where every February they hold the biggest tractor show in the world, even bigger than the one in Paris. "Water rights are like democracy," he told Forbes in 1989. In a report filed Wednesday with the county . Locals also are nervous about six new pump stations, controlled by Vidovich, that they fear could pump massive amounts of groundwater out of Tulare County, into the California Aqueduct, and down to Southern California. Ive never seen her up close, never watched her in action. The wall of Pacifico and 16-ounce cans of Bud is rebuilt daily. Her husband, Manuel, will awaken in 30 minutes to prepare for his night shift. 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 nuts are kept there a few more daysany longer and the ants will attack themto complete their drying. This amounted to 14,000 acre-feet. Cotton still grows on the lake bottom, but less and less each year.

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