He holds a little more than 100,000 acres in Kings County, 40,000 acres in Kern, and 10,000 acres in Tulare County. 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. They do that because they love it., A POM craze followed. Then he turned and faced me. No way, according to Vidovich and his longtime associates. It was the early spring of 2008, and this time his secretary didnt hang up on me. Past Bakersfield and the high school football stadium where Frank Gifford and Les Richter, two future NFL Hall of Famers, squared off in the Valley Championship in 1947 in the driving rain. The Yokut had a saying that when the farmer drained the last drops of snowmelt from Tulare Lake, the water would return. Anything else I can help you with?, He seems in a hurry. I steer past Wasco to the dust-blowing orchards that flank Lost Hills, the densest planting of almonds, pistachios, and pomegranates on earth. His law license is inactive, according to the California State Bar Association website. You rely on Marketplace to break down the worlds events and tell you how it affects you in a fact-based, approachable way. It was a curious statement but true. Then the drug cartels took over the countryside and planted poppies. Wow. I hop out of the car. Vidovich says he uses that Angiola groundwater to farm in Dudley Ridge, so the groundwater isnt leaving its home basin. Across the field, a heavy machine is stacking whats left of the trees into giant mounds. 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. His father worked as a truck driver, transporting crops to the city. What happens to them if Wonderful downsizes? As the nuts pour down onto the roof of the catcher, the operator shifts the trough so that it becomes a conveyor belt. Feudal. 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. 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. He was short, bull-like, and didnt take crap from anyone. Its an economy of scale on a scale no ones ever tried here. The big-rig drivers are cranky two ways, and the farmworkers in their last-leg vans are half-asleep. We changed the culture of safety, and we think we can do the same with health, Anzaldo says. 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 hospital, senior citizens center, and football stadium all bore the signature of his giving. Ive told them all no. Halfway through his solo performance, he interrupted his set to tell us a piggy bank had been set up by the exit to donate money to the hardworking men and women in the fields. When the concert was over, I took my wife and children backstage to meet him. But he wasnt looking for the monotony of steady. You can plant only so many acres on ground that has no groundwater. And its that groundwater part of Semitropics agreement with Vidovich that is raising hackles along with eyebrows. Vidovich used the $73 million in 2010 to buy nearly 75 percent of the land in the Angiola Water District. Even if they had wheels, they wouldnt be going anywhere. Once a river is at flood stage, that usually means all other rights have been filled and the overflow is free game. The John Wick: Chapter 4 posters are rolling in one after another. Theyre all chasing Bobby, whose 325-pound bench press, 335-pound squat, and 455-pound dead lift make him the sole member of the 1,000-Pound Club. But this is water for Mr. Resnick. The fight between the Tulare Lake Canal Company, controlled by the J.G. Resnick has saved the front seat for me. The latest water fight between two of the San Joaquin Valley's largest growers will continue with heavy equipment intended to block a pipeline project allowed to remain on the banks of the Tulare Lake Canal in Kings County. 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. She was the daughter of Jack Harris, a film distributor, who moved the family to Los Angeles when Lynda was 15 to produce movies. The courtship of Stewart and Lynda went fast. A minute later, I reconnect with the pipeline and pursue its length for a football field. The idea was to enroll at Rutgers and study to become a doctor. Do you know what I am? Theres a mountain range to my left and a mountain range to my right and in between a plain flatter than Kansas where crop and sky meet. To do that, the state requires each area to form Groundwater Sustainability Agencies (GSAs) to account for whats going in and coming out of the aquifer. LOIS HENRY: Is John Vidovich planning to sell off the valley's lifeblood? Lucky for her that the young man was kind. Theyre listening with their heads bent down. Here and there a mulberry tree, its canopy pruned back, breaks up the red-smeared sky.. That was four years ago. Preview. We pile back into the van and head up the road. But she cannot remember the last time she or Manuel or their children drank it. The 5th District Court of Appeal in Fresno has overturned a $73.4 million verdict against McCarthy Family Farms and Bay Area developer John Vidovich and Sandridge Partners involving a land and. But if its the tube that Im looking to follow, I must drive through the almond grove. Arax: They lose their livelihood. The extraction of water beneath the lake bottom wont last forever. Perched up there, a queen might peek out and utter, Let them eat cake, Lynda once said. Number two, Angiola is trying to maintain the local aquifer by retiring land to limit pumping. 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. Then some of the money we save goes to pay the coyote. Being healthy is a choice. At the time we were handing out college scholarships in the valley, but Lynda decided it wasnt nearly enough. A year and a half after hearing Sandeland in the wake of Giblers storyLynda kicked into high gear their mission to save Lost Hills and several other farmworker towns where Wonderful operated its orchards and processing plants. Notifications from this discussion will be disabled. It gives me the luxury to keep on working. The checks the workers bring in here from Mr. Resnick are the same checks they bring in for years. This is one of the ways the Nut King and the Pomegranate Queen are defying the California drought. For half my life, I never stopped to wonder: How much was magic? So were seeing a shift now and then to have nature imposing its will on the situation. When I got out of law school, I probably had 100 people I was employing.. But for every good-sized fruit, theres a bunch that never sized up. Resnick is giving him one of his looks. The softballs will go to market as whole fruit or as seed pods in a package. Iranian pistachios show up in Tel Aviv as nuts from Turkey. My dust cloud tells him Im getting close. Its a $500 million project, of which Semitropic is hoping to get $250 million from Proposition 1 funding. Fussing with one input or another, he can produce 3,500 pounds of nuts an acre. What the Resnicks were doing for Lost Hills, though, was a level of philanthropy I had never witnessed in the valley. In one orchard, half the trees are dying., I had traveled the fields of Wonderful from one end of western Kern to the other, looking for dying trees. Lynda sent the first batches of POM, week after week, as gifts to David Bowie, Rupert Murdoch, and Disney head Michael Eisner. Even as the supplies of federal and state water have dropped to near zero, agriculture in Kern keeps chugging along, growing more intensive. I take out my cellphone and swipe across Google Maps. Before we go much further, you should probably know a little more about Vidovich. Its gone, I say. Vidovich has more than one reason to be evasive. Because the urban places would pay a hell of a lot of money for it. Not that long ago, we used to time our sinus infections by the immense cloud of defoliants sprayed on the cotton fields at the end of Indian summer. Theres no garbage piled high and smoldering, no chickens picking at scratch. Angiola was ordered to stop pumping and eventually the districts came to a settlement. They issued a commemorative medal of Tiger Woods winning the 1997 Masters that offended the golfer. It takes my visiting the irrigation district office during a public meeting for him to cough up more details. He had none of his fathers sentimentality. Vidovich has long been at odds with. Nearly a third of the harvestthe nuts grown by Wonderful, the nuts grown by hundreds of farmers who belong to the Wonderful brandwill come through these gates. His accountant suggested he buy apartments. Photo courtesy of Trent Davis Bailey/The California Sunday Magazine. She wanted to tell the story of the pomegranate, he told me with a touch of sarcasm. "I want to be as open-minded as I can and get all the facts I can," he insisted. They hide from the fact that it relies on the subjugation of peasants from Mexico they themselves have brought here. So off the developers went in search of farm water. But inside he had these weaknesses. Lynda has a son who works as a musician and a son who suffered a birth trauma and lives in a care facility. It wouldnt even make a couple of sections of his almonds. 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 would involve a public permitting process and be very difficult, not to mention expensive, both men said. Understanding water, water rights and the often complex structures of water districts has become a Vidovich hallmark. ! it says. 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. Other water districts contended it was much more. You have no idea the people on my VIP list who drink it. By the time he graduated from UCLA in 1960 and entered its law school, he was bringing home $40,000 a yearthe equivalent of $320,000 today. Ive never seen her up close, never watched her in action. john vidovich documentary. True, Angiolas canal stops about 23 miles southeast of the project. Then it hits me. Mitchell agreed, giving Vidovich credit for seeing where groundwater laws were headed before anyone else. She owns this place. He goes on to explain what he means by own. Hes never driven a tractor or opened an irrigation valve. The water will be stripped from the land and sold to developers of new towns both here and over the mountain. When he was told there were fields upon fields, he did not believe there could be this many fields. Its just smart business. When I tell her my name, she whispers into his ear. Rain likely. Under his leadership, Buena Vista has installed a pipeline system to reduce reliance on canals, which lose a lot of water to seepage and the district has become extremely active in buying up land for water banking. The white flowers have set into buds, and the buds have become baby almonds covered in fuzz. The gas to and from the orchards costs him $80 a week. These trees are pruned by a machine that hedges one side and then the other, he says. Too many pomegranates. His operation is extensive and very smart.. For a silent minute, we dig into our bowls. He worked as a gardener in Los Angeles and then heard about the almond trees on the other side of the mountain where the living was so much cheaper. Wonderful, by contrast, shoots for the middle. The water is cold, clean, and salty, though not too salty for a desperate man. He started cleaning pizza parlors and drugstores. A public resource had been privatized for the purpose of growing tens of thousands of acres of nuts, he charged. I waited five years before placing another call to his headquarters. 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 so sleepy, says another. The designers at the Mint made a porcelain doll with a tiny replica outfit so precise that it had to be hand-beaded with 2,000 fake pearls. Inside, a trainer watches over a line of treadmills, elliptical machines, and stationary bikes. "Ten percent of farmers get 70 percent of the payment," Perez said. But its just a cover for taking water out, Pace said. He wouldnt know one of his Valencia orange groves from one of his Washington navel orange groves. Lynda believes that if theyre enticed in the right direction, the 1,300 workers might choose to prepare the same healthy fare at home. There is also an existing subdivision just southeast of the college near Highway 198 (Cimmaron Park). Number one, the settlement agreement between Angiola and Lower Tule/Pixley irrigation districts wont allow Angiola or Sandridge to move the water out of Kings County. Anzaldos grandfather came from Guadalajara in the 1950s as part of the bracero farmworker program. He started buying consistently in Kern, Kings and Tulare counties throughout the early and mid-2000s and continues to add properties sometimes at a blistering pace. She is determined that their lives will play out differently from the lives of their parents, but she means no disrespect by this. That still leaves the majority of the workforce beyond his cajole. Yet the Resnick pipeline is doing just that. Cotton still grows on the lake bottom, but less and less each year. So beginning in the 1940s, Kern farmers went out and grabbed a share of not one distant river but two: the San Joaquin to the north and the Sacramento to the north of that. Its gambling. Exactly what groundwater would be moved? This must be the spot the Wonderful field man was describing. Vidovich says his quote was clipped and sewn back together to make it sound bad. 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. It cracks open and out pops the head shot of Stewart Resnick in a pistachio green tie. 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. The boss showed him a storeroom filled with chemicals tossed here and there and told him to bring order to the mess. He spends much of his off hours fixing it up. My head keeps hitting the sunroof. It was a hit. Then there was the nail in the coffin for folks like Pace and Mitchell when Vidovich appeared in a National Geographic film called Water and Power: A California Heist, which ran in mid-March and again on June 25. 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 leave Gabbys and follow a winding concrete path through the new Wonderful Park. Why not send him an email? the secretary suggested. Wages that used to go to workers stay in the pocket of the nut growers. The ceiling, all sheetrock and spackling, remains a work in progress. For the promotions of the upcoming Keanu Reeves movie the makers are revealing exclusive posters for the feature made by handpicked artists around the world. Fifty-three percent of our employees are obese, and 12 percent of them have diabetes., The growers start to fidget. The new plant, the size of seven super Walmarts and built at a cost of $300 million, rises out of a clearing like an apparition. 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. Its loaded, Bernard says. If you have any trouble accessing your account or linking your subscription, ourSubscription FAQmay have the answer you need. He lives down the road in Wasco, the Rose Capital of America, though the roses, too, have turned to nuts. Every river busting out of the Sierra was bent sideways, if not backward, by a bulwark of ditches, levees, canals, and dams. I grab my notebook and walk up to one of the vans. And, yes, that takes water. 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. By car and foot, I trace the silver pipeline as it creeps north through Wonderful pomegranate orchards. But that doesnt make people buy a second bottle. And I want to keep farming.. She delivers it in classic Lynda style. Down the great aqueduct, by freight of politics and gravity, came the excess waters of the Sacramento River. Yet Vidovich said he is not personally a booster of the farm bill, and that his company might be better off without it. Semitropic Water Storage District, in northwestern Kern, has raised a lot of eyebrows with its ambitious, some say audacious, Tulare Lake Storage and Floodwater Protection Project. Observers worry that Vidovich plans to pump Kings and Tulare counties dry, park that water in Kern County and then sell it to the highest bidder in dry years, leaving a once-thriving farm district barren. Movies. Ive gone too far. They were actually harvesting record crops. Subscribers keep our independent community news in business. So its a really extraordinary kind of development thats never happened in agriculture in California before really to raise the living of your workers. Last time he checked, he told me he owned 180,000 acres of California. There is a local water bank, a kind of underground lake, that the Resnicks control. John, his oldest son, had served in the military as an intelligence officer and graduated from Santa Clara law school. I know theres a more forceful way to ask the question, but to what end? Thousands of acres of pistachio trees now await the next flood. Thanks to Wonderfuls $15 million Get Crackin campaignthe largest media buy in the history of snack nutspistachios now rank among the top ten bestselling salty snack items in the U.S. We are no longer processing nuts, he says. All told, 36 men operating six machines will harvest the orchard in six days. Its not easy to hear, but Im not going to sugarcoat this, she says. Use the 'Report' link on Look it, Im from Beverly Hills. The cost of loneliness: Social isolation holds back workers and costs employers billions, Businesses and consumers are borrowing more, despite rising interest rates, Why a Guarneri violin is expected to fetch $10 million at auction. 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. He ran, unsuccessfully for city council in his hometown of Los Altos Hills in 2006. He says he doesnt feel sorry for Resnick. The dispute over the no fly zone was finally resolved by the invention of a netting that Resnick sheathes around his mandarins each spring. What was so disappointing and alarming was that West Hills College and other educational institutions in the area are not considered agencies of required notification and (that) needs to be amended," said Oliveira. Ive done no big wrong in my life that would cause me to have any. That company led to another company, and he soon owned half the commercial alarm accounts in Los Angeles. In fact, his detractors call him the single greatest threat to Central Valley farming ever to come down the pike. Resnick himself had sold 5,000 acre-feet to a proposed new town in the farm fields of Madera. Both men saw Hurleys involvement in numerous local districts including Angiola, Deer Creek Storm Water District, Green Valley Water District and the Tri-County Water Authority, a newly formed GSA, as more Vidovich control. Six hundred pistachio growers in blue jeans isnt her usual crowd. Its bringing water from the Dudley Ridge Water District in Kings County. Includes Address (3) Phone (3) Email (1) See Results. Thank you for reading! Right there in the big canal of the Dudley Ridge Water District. The crops we grow can only be grown in a few places in the world. The relatives try not to press them, but the arrangement still feels like a form of indentured servitude. If you already have a subscription, log in or register for an account on our website to continue reading.Click here if youre having trouble accessing your subscriber account. Its happened before, he said, up in Green Valley, which is west of Interstate 5 and a few miles north of the Kern County line. Pace gave a nod to Vidovich on that count. At Wonderful Health and Wellness, were educating our employees about this health crisis. Bruce Springsteen turned it into a song on his Ghost of Tom Joad album. For the next two or three seconds, the almonds pour down like hail. Still, none of it would have happened without luck., What he and Lynda had done with the wretched pomegranate was another matter. I cut across Twisselman Road to the pipeline gliding along the aqueduct like a silver snake. 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. His father had lost it in a bet. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you. I saw horrible things, Margarita says. Growers a tenth the size of Resnick flee the dust in their Ferraris to their second houses in Carmel. Please log in, or sign up for a new account to continue reading. But out in the Buena Vista Water Storage District where Vidovich chairs the board, his original detractors all love him, Page said. 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. For now, shes playing country western music on the sound system and trying to lure a combination of oil-field workers, supervisors at Wonderful, and travelers driving the last miles of James Dean. We produced a short documentary film. It is one more way to extend the brand. A meat store, an auto repair, a pool hall, and an arcade pass for a commercial strip. It sure looks heavier than last year., Bernard smiles and nods to the others. 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. Those figures dont include recent land purchases hes made in the Kern Delta Water District and Fresno Irrigation District both areas Sandridge is targeting for even more land purchases because of its solid rights to the Kern and San Joaquin rivers. 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. 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. I do all the calculations from the numbers I am able to gather, and I cannot figure out how these nuts are getting enough water. Thank you for signing in! Once, he came home from school and discovered the family car gone. Do they sense the shaming about to come? 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. You cant be exporting groundwater from one basin to another., Whatever water hes taking, its too little, too late.. He was headed to the fields at the same time that another farmworker, drunk on beer, was coming home from the fields. Wheres it coming from? The net return on the pistachio proves that Wonderfuls dominance in the market has benefited every grower in the room. This water basically came from a land owned by someone who's also a near billionaire a guy named John Vidovich. How can this be? In the kitchen corner, cases of bottled water are stacked halfway up the wall. Like many billionaires, he didnt have a decent explanation for his fortune. Yeah, hes got a lot of money and hes been buying up land, makes some people nervous, Page said. My father, born in a vineyard outside Fresno, was a raisin grower before he became a bar owner. Our relatives have been patient. He worries because there isnt enough water now to properly irrigate the almonds, pistachios, and pomegranates. Join us for a free, virtual event for International Women's Day on March 8! Mr. Vidovich was a descendant of one of the pioneer farm families that settled here from Croatia . The aquifer, a sea of water beneath the clay that dates back centuries, isnt bottomless. A worker can still order a hamburger, but its half the size of the old hamburger and costs $6twice what the wild salmon served with creamed leeks and raw asparagus salad costs. Water is what led me to Stewart Resnick in the winter of 2003. Fallowing the farm until the footprint gets smaller and smaller.
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