He needs nearly 1,000 acre-feet a day for 165 daysthe length of nut-growing seasonto hang a good crop across his acres in western Kern. It also means giving back.. Los Angeles Fire Marshal John Vidovich was at the peak of his career in 2015. His grandfather, who came to California from Croatia in 1908, got his start with 10 acres of cherries and apricots in Mountain View. It hardly ceases for the next five months. Welcome to San Antonio del Norte, he says. Background details that you might want to know . Each square-mile section is divided into blocks, and each block counts a precise number of rows. 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. This drought has brought Stewart to his knees. But western Kern has no groundwater to draw from. 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. But the smaller farmer still uses a pruning shears to make his most important cuts. Im down.. But this is water for Mr. Resnick. He called it fake junk, sued, and won. The softballs will go to market as whole fruit or as seed pods in a package. It was linear, logical, fluid, and quite nearly destined. They were hardly the first rich people to use patronage to try to wheedle a citizenry toward their idea of a better life. The knoll begins to rise. The people here have traveled too far. The front gates of the 25,000-square-foot Beaux Arts mansion on Sunset Boulevard magically opened without a guard giving a nod. Im 80 years old. . During the holiday season, they sent out 4,000 gift boxes to their nearest and dearest friends filled with their fruits and nuts, along with a card of the two of them dressed in skin-colored body stockings, posing as Adam and Eve. The juice isnt selling like it used to. It cracks open and out pops the head shot of Stewart Resnick in a pistachio green tie. Why not send him an email? the secretary suggested. California showed me why.. 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 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. Lynda spent $150,000 at an auction to buy the beaded gown and matching bolero jacket, the Elvis Dress, that Princess Diana had worn on a visit to Hong Kong. Los Altos, CA. I gaze out the passenger window, looking for the glint of the pipeline. They dont do agribusiness. To the growers, it must feel like a jab in the stomach. 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. The bunches of chartreuse-tipped nuts hanging from antler branches never touch the ground. She owns this place. He goes on to explain what he means by own. Order finds itself through action. I walk to another part of the orchard and watch phase two. The Spanish rice isnt rice but cauliflower made to look like rice. Hes carrying 55,000 pounds of crop in two swaggering trailers open to the sun. So how do we do even better next year?. You Have Found Lost Hills! I dont know how Hershey did Hershey, Pennsylvania, but Lynda is present in every painted sunburst, every planted flower, every blade of grass. Once you have them, you spend a lifetime defending them.. The clash of the agricultural titans, who hold influential positions on local water boards and control thousands of acres with precious water rights, is being waged against a backdrop of deep distrust in the community about both companies hidden agendas. Since. Each section of pipe is 40 feet long. Did it teach him any lessons? I know I cant do this forever, he says. He wanted to stay in the customer service business and heard from his doctor that Teleflora, the giant flower-delivery company, could be bought for a buyers price. His grandfather Resnick had fled the Ukraine in the wake of another killing of Jews by Cossacks. Where do you begin with a man of great riches if not the distant places you might have in common? This is how the land of Wonderful is keeping alive its trees. Its my property, and I have a right to cross.. 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. Talk to me, Hussein says, draining a can of Rockstar. Why not California? Arax: That is the question that you know Im dealing with in this magazine piece. On a fog-drip night in January 1972, two men walked into my fathers empty bar with gloves on and shot him to death. 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. Fresh from a shower, a red Kabbalah string tied around his wrist and a multihued pair of socks covering his feet, he welcomed me. His partner in the mandarins once told me that when Stewart is done with you, hes done with you. One million acres of the valley floor, greater than the size of Rhode Island, are now covered in almond trees. The pipe needed to cross under Boswells dirt canal, but that seemed like no big deal to Vidovich. On a Facebook page with postings in Spanish, they offer a glimpse of life inside pistachio world. They give thanks for a job that provides decent wages and access to a free wellness center next door staffed by a full-time doctor, physicians assistant, registered dietitian, and marriage and family therapist. Resnick picks up the water in Dudley Ridge, Vidovich says. As a class of people, the farmers and real estate developers harbor a deep-down contempt for what they have built. To block constructionof the pipeline, Boswell parked a parade of giant construction vehicles atop the canals embankments. The Boswell comments are in a letter sent from the El Rico GSA, while Vidovich's concerns are outlined in a letter from the Southwest Kings GSA.. Are big banks following through on their climate pledges? 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. If I want to know more, I need to talk to Lupes brother, Gustavo, who has worked as an irrigator at Wonderful for five years and knows what the company is planning for the future. They settled in Brooklyn among Jews who had fled their own pogroms, and his grandfather went into the needle-and-embroidery trade. Fiefdom. Vidovich has more than one reason to be evasive. You cant stop a grower from taking his own water to his crops, said consultant Grewal. The city of Los Angeles, by comparison, consumes 587,000 acre-feet. Through the haze I can see the knoll of the aqueduct come closer. One of the most dramatic alterations of the earths surface in human history took place here. Were building infrastructure, and they dont like it.. While Vidovich owns less acreage than Boswell, more of it is devoted to high-value orchards. Now they have to keep that up, right? While Vidovich owns the surrounding land, Boswells Tulare Lake Canal Company traverses it with a longstanding legal easement established back in 1906, in spidery cursive print, by the long-dead owner of a long-gone ranch. 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. And state groundwater regulations restrict the drilling of new agricultural wells. Here, a crew has dug a culvert beneath the road and hiked the pipeline under the asphalt that divides one field from another. I meet up with the Wonderful field man who first tipped me off to the pipeline. How much bigger can agriculture get. Weve had our battles in the past, and I dont agree with everything hes doing. These trees are pruned by a machine that hedges one side and then the other, he says. He leveled its hog wallows, denuded its salt brush, and killed the last of its mustang, antelope, and tule elk. Then one day, he was trying to find a marketing person and got a call from Lynda Sinay, who worked in advertising. It isnt a lot of water., Im not going to give you the numbers. Even if they had wheels, they wouldnt be going anywhere. One more bin, a post reads. Its loaded, Bernard says. Anzaldos grandfather came from Guadalajara in the 1950s as part of the bracero farmworker program. Arax: So because there is no groundwater out in Lost Hills, they came up with this idea of pumping groundwater from 40, 50 miles away. I then move to the far side of the orchard, where another worker, riding a huge mower, is kicking up an even bigger cloud of dust. He makes $10.75 an hour. Its a bad day, he says, shooing me out. This was how a billionaire who needed more water did politics. Wild salmon and all these sides made from scratch. Theyre paying $340 a month for its privilege. Perched up there, a queen might peek out and utter, Let them eat cake, Lynda once said. 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. What Lynda seems to have in mind is a kind of utopian village set amid orchards, not unlike the utopias that were tried by the early dreamers of Southern California. The man and his pincers cant be bothered. Hes trying to play dumb, but I can see the sliest of grins peeking out from his mustache and goatee. 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. In the kitchen corner, cases of bottled water are stacked halfway up the wall. At the plant, we built our gyms, and we have stretching and walking activities. This is the west end of Lost Hills, the extraction end. My father, born in a vineyard outside Fresno, was a raisin grower before he became a bar owner. I try again to pin him down, but hes a man who likes to think of himself as wily. The tumbleweeds on open ground give you a peek into what Lost Hills looked like before the aqueduct made a river here. His father, Stephen Vidovich, founded DeAnza Properties in 1966 and led the charge to convert the Santa Clara Valley from farmland and pave the way for Silicon Valley to become the hub of late-20th century and early-21st century American innovation. And while Resnick and Vidovich have been at odds in the past over San Joaquin Valley water feuds especially centering on the appearance that Resnick was overly-familiar in his utilization of the Kern Water Bank the feud is long gone. This is a big crop, the field man tells me. The land to him isnt real. 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. 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. John Vidovich will tell you hes the interloper who came over the other mountain, the Coast Range. 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. Look, these farmers go back two, three, and four generations. Vidovich needs the pipe to move water. 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. 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. Somehow, it made its way to Lynda. 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. So so sleepy, says another. 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. Ninety-nine is the deadliest highway in America. General Partner. Mathews: Should climate projects benefit communities they impact? They knew little about the company except it was selling its keepsakes for five times the amount Teleflora was. It supports two full-ride college scholarships to the top graduates of Corcoran High School and a faculty position at Fresno State. There is a local water bank, a kind of underground lake, that the Resnicks control. The Sureos gang has tagged the front entrance but otherwise has left the inside unmarked. Like J.W. Resnick has saved the front seat for me. This is an offering of cake handed down from king and queen to serfs. His real estate empire became big enough to bring aboard each of his four children. Already, the high school is filled with hundreds of students bused in from farmworker towns that are among the poorest communities in the West. Measuring the reach of the Resnicks, its tempting to lean on the hyperventilated language of the 1930s: Empire. Bruce Springsteen turned it into a song on his Ghost of Tom Joad album. I head straight into the glare of the sun shooting over the Coast Range. It would return as tule fog to remind the white man of his theft. 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. As it happened, just down the road, on the other side of the lake bottom, Resnick had captured his own body of water, the Kern Water Bank, and planted millions of nut trees on desert scrub. When its Pablos turn, he hands Hussein a check for $437, and Hussein counts out $433 back to him in cash. The water will be stripped from the land and sold to developers of new towns both here and over the mountain. The nets of the Chinese during the Gold Rush caught terrapin that was served as turtle soup in the fanciest restaurants of San Francisco. He emptied the sky of tens of millions of geese and drained the 800 square miles of Tulare Lake dry. You cant be exporting groundwater from one basin to another., Whatever water hes taking, its too little, too late.. The Boswell company, their attorneys and Tulare Lake Canal Company president Mark Unruh did not respond to repeated requests for comment. The family takes showers in it, and she washes their laundry in it, and if she runs the water long enough, she will use it to wash her vegetables and cook her rice and potatoes. His father worked as a truck driver, transporting crops to the city. The miles clock by not as road but as story. Too many pistachios. 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. Whether he realizes it, hes part of the biggest pistachio harvest in history. Selfo works 50 hours a week as an irrigator. My grandfather, a survivor of the Armenian genocide, traveled 7,000 miles by ship and train in 1920 to find out if his uncles exhortationThe grapes here are the size of jade eggswas true. We produced a short documentary film. Theres a lot of people who dont like me, he said after his fathers death. But he got too big. No ones going to get fired for bringing home 2,500 pounds of nuts an acre. To top it off, the greedy SOB (farmers rarely uttered Vidovichs name) intended to keep his 7,000 acres of nut trees in Dudley Ridge. The piece, I was told, had left Lynda embarrassed and fuming. Stewart tries to interrupt, but hes not the boss in this room. So now theyre doing everything they can to frustrate my ability to utilize the property, said Vidovich. In Vidovich, J.G. Then the autumn of 2016 arrives with the strangeness of clouds. Who would have thought that people would be asking their bartender to fix them a Pomtini? he said. The rain of almonds has moved on to the next tree. He left in 1956. I never liked New Jersey, but I never knew why. 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. They had survived the drought. The uncle died at age 22 fighting in Afghanistan. The Wonderful Company is located in Californias Central Valley where droughts hit frequently, but that hasnt stopped the company from harvesting record crops. Wages that used to go to workers stay in the pocket of the nut growers. John Vidovich walks through his almond orchard near Wasco and explains the spray irrigation system he uses. The money was too easy. Wonderful is getting smaller, he says. 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. One out of eight has diabetes. Summary. 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. He turns out to be a kindly religious man whose short hair is dyed the black of shoe polish. Im sure I knew we had a pipeline in there. I get it. When I started to realize the socioeconomic issues of the Central Valley, I decided to stop writing checks to other charities and bring my business acumen into the project. Youre the one who leads the way on selling agricultural water to the cities. Vidovich is the owner of Sandridge Partners, LP a farmland investment firm that has undertaken more than 100,000 acres of Valley farmland. Presently, John Vidovich is Vice President & Sales Director at The Student Loan Corp. The rain starts to fall, big, fat, slashing drops that feel like electricity on my open palm. He remade himself into a graduate of the UCLA law school, a cleaner of Los Angeles buildings, a vendor of security alarms, a seller of flowers in a pot, a minter of Elvis plates and Princess Diana dolls, a bottler of Fiji Island water, a farmer of San Joaquin Valley dirt. We cant insist on wellness the way we can insist on plant safety. He doesnt feign surprise when I tell him about the pipeline, but he dismisses it as a private matter between private parties. The bloodless ones stay away. Yes. For half my life, I never stopped to wonder: How much was magic? Instead of trying to sell the fruit as a piece of fruit, they squeezed its seeds into POMWonderful. Every last tree has been torn out of the ground. The GPS tells me to take Interstate 5, the fastest route through the belly of the state, but Im partial to Highway 99, the old road that brought the Okies and Mexicans to the fields and deposited a twang on my Armenian tongue. Scott: So we should talk about the labor that makes this all possible. John Vidovich is a real estate developer who specializes in land use and development deals involving everything from mobile home parks and large apartment complexes to wine vineyards, pistachio farms and water baron. They dumped their stolen car into the canals black waters and got away with murder for the next 32 years. The sale is still considered a blow to Kings' water portfolio by other farmers. Ron DeSantis isn't returning his calls . Still, he was starting to think about his legacy, and thats why he finally agreed to meet with me. Antioxidants that delivered 32 grams of sugar in each serving didnt come cheap: $11 a bottle. Then hed lose his temper and get the strap out.. Theyre no longer in danger. In the city of trees, I find a paved road with speed bumps that takes me to the harvest of pistachios. You rely on Marketplace to break down the worlds events and tell you how it affects you in a fact-based, approachable way. They were selling 2,500 acres of oranges and lemons and a packing house for a third of their appraised value, Resnick said. George Shirakawa Jr. once counted on Santa Clara County taxpayers and campaign contributors to be his benefactors, as he spent public money and campaign funds on luxury rental cars, gambling junkets, vacations and lavish dinners for staff and political allies. So the company drafted a list of demands. But this outwardly unassuming multimillionaire has become a lightning rod of controversy. Lupe knocks on his door, and he invites us in. One of the first things he did with his monopoly was kill the California Pistachio Commission, the industrys marketing group, by yanking his funding. 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. 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. The bowls on her kitchen table are filled with grapes, berries, bananas, and red and green bell peppers. They were married only a short time when Manuel decided to cross the border almost 20 years ago. 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. A van pulls up to the curb, and the door slides open. By car and foot, I trace the silver pipeline as it creeps north through Wonderful pomegranate orchards. 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. The biggest farmer of them all is tearing out 10,000 acres because he doesnt have enough water to cover the nuts to harvest. When I crossed the border and found Lost Hills, there was nothing here, he says. She won a gold Effie, advertisings Oscar. Lupe gave birth to two daughters, U.S. citizens, who are now 11 and 6. Its happening. The bosses wont speak of it, he says. She seems a little nervous waiting in the wings. The comments don't come from Boswell and Vidovich themselves, of course, but from the groundwater sustainability agencies each farming . After school and on weekends, wed clean and wax floors. On one side of the road and the other, for miles in both directions, the dirt belongs to Wonderful. If Resnick retains every drop, he might squeeze 25 acre-feet of water a day out of both pipes. He was dressed in the latest slim-fit style. Recommended for you Videos 4:28. The State Water Project, for the first time in six years, delivers surplus flows. Correction: August 8, 2022 An earlier version of this article incorrectly reported that Stanford grad James Griffin "J.G." If only Eve had offered Adam a pomegranate instead of an apple, Lynda wrote, every day could have been a holiday.. Lost Hills finally has something to be proud about. Amy Scott: Theres a stunning aerial photo in the magazine that shows these green green trees surrounded basically by dust. A tree crop, with the investment of years and irrigation equipment, can be worth $40,000 to $50,000 an acre; in contrast, row crops are about $10,000 an acre. Across the field, a heavy machine is stacking whats left of the trees into giant mounds. Not a single penny was put in that piggy bank.. As he drives off, he throws a clue out the window. The crops we grow can only be grown in a few places in the world. Not a single one of them wants any part of Wonderful. He had an industrial machine, hardly used, that scrubbed and waxed floors. This is the closest to hills it comes. Two days after the Tulare Lake Canal Company sued Sandridge Partners, the farming and water giant owned by John Vidovich, to halt trenching work on a water pipeline set to cut . It was good for the bottom line. This isnt the Lynda posing for photos with Barbra Streisand. Arax: They lose their livelihood. 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. Along with paying a quarter-million for recharging the aquifer, with the terms including a restriction on pumping of up to 36,000 acre-feet annually, or 130,000 acre-feet within a five-year consecutive period and a separate restriction that the district, nor its members, move water outside of Tulare and Kings counties. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. The math works out to $162 a tree. He explains that Wonderful has grown too big to hassle such precision. 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. The compass in my car says Im headed east, but that means almost nothing inside a province of 15 million trees. Inside sits a young man named Pablo. Business got so brisk that he bought two trucks and hired crews. He launches into a CFOs riff on the pistachio market. Within the confines of the settlement with Pixley Irrigation District, he continued to move water out of Angiola and into Dudley Ridge. Contact 4? The boss showed him a storeroom filled with chemicals tossed here and there and told him to bring order to the mess. It was a hit. The shiny red orbs, three months shy of harvest, pop out from the bright green leaves like bulbs on a Christmas tree. Its not the fidget of boredom. A fully equipped teaching kitchen will turn the harvest into school lunches. Then the drug cartels took over the countryside and planted poppies. Marketplace is a division of MPR's 501 (c)(3). He did this first in the name of wheat and then beef, milk, raisins, cotton, and nuts. 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.
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