White rhinos for sale, one careful owner: tycoon looks for a I retrace the road I came in on and cross old Tulare Lake, which rose by flood and sank by drought. Each tree produces 38 pounds of nuts. 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. One of the neighbors watched in disgust as the bulldozers tore into the hillside. Have we gone too far? Its the summer of 2016, eight weeks before the big pick, and Im zigzagging across the almonds and pistachios, square mile after square mile of immaculate orchards lined with micro-irrigation systems and heavy with nuts. Hes serious about taking water out of this valley, farmer Milt Pace, who once partnered with Vidovich, told The Bakersfield Californian. Hes trying to play dumb, but I can see the sliest of grins peeking out from his mustache and goatee. All told, 36 men operating six machines will harvest the orchard in six days. John, 66, is a former military intelligence officer and Santa Clara Law School graduate who served as Santa Clara County Planning Commissioner from 1990 to 1994 and is as shrewd as his father. It gives me the luxury to keep on working. One cousin arrived only last week. Thousands of Wonderful acres lay bare. I study the terrain. John T Vidovich, 67 - Los Altos, CA - Has Court or Arrest Records Theres a section stacked with weights and a yoga room with mats on a hardwood floor. His grandfather, who came to California from Croatia in 1908, got his start with 10 acres of cherries and apricots in Mountain View. As he drives off, he throws a clue out the window. This isnt any road. I notice she keeps the water running for a long time. Main Street is Highway 46, which slices through the middle of town. 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. It wont hurt the canal, he said. The deed had been done in a series of hidden meetings in Monterey. He is irrigating 121,000 of those acres. 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. In the winter of 2010, Vidovich put up for sale half his draw of state water from the Dudley Ridge Water District. His real estate empire became big enough to bring aboard each of his four children. And that scares the hell out of everybody who lives here.. The price for pistachios has climbed from $4.50 a pound to an unbelievable $5.25 a pound. It wanted assurance that the pipeline wont interfere with the canal, as well as proof that Vidovich has $5 million in insurance if the canal gets damaged. Not a single one of them wants any part of Wonderful. Hes thankful to the Resnicks, especially Lady Lynda, for that. So much snowmelt comes down the mountain that it nearly takes out Oroville Dam. In 2009, Vidovich sold the annual rights to 14,000 acrefeet of water belonging to property sitting in the Dudley Ridge Water District, located in Kings County, for an eye-popping $73 million. His strategy, and his Silicon Valley wealth, arouse both admiration and suspicion in this rural community. The relatives try not to press them, but the arrangement still feels like a form of indentured servitude. Rubbish, said Vidovich, in a Los Altos office decorated with maps of his land holdings. View the profiles of people named John Vidovich. Young men and women from Teach for America will do their two-year stints at the complex and live in village housing. The hospital, senior citizens center, and football stadium all bore the signature of his giving. His dad had sold the bar and was adrift. Get a D&B Hoovers Free Trial. He wouldnt know one of his Valencia orange groves from one of his Washington navel orange groves. She divorced her husband in 1968 and began dating Anthony Russo, who worked at the RAND think tank in Santa Monica with military analyst Daniel Ellsberg. They are still paying off the $27,000 debt to relatives who hired the coyote. Each one blames the other, he said. Locals recount how he bought a 360-acre parcel in Los Altos Hills for $5.5 million and, only four years later, turned around and sold part of it to the MidPeninsula Regional Open Space District for $9.3 million. Do you know what I am? He makes $10.75 an hour. The nets of the Chinese during the Gold Rush caught terrapin that was served as turtle soup in the fanciest restaurants of San Francisco. What if he dropped his lawsuit and the two of them worked together to solve their water problems? The south valleyits people and poverty, its obesity and diabetesis her newest mission. In fact it should be getting smaller, more sustainable and thats what youre seeing play out on the land right now. Kingdom. The next year, it delivers 300,000 acre-feet. Vidovich has a unique perspective on Stewart Resnick and the acres of crops that have made Wonderful a success, as he tells Arax . 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. On Sleepy Farm Road outside Paso Robles, the Resnicks were looking to add 380 acres of wine grapes and build a small reservoir with groundwater. He was a big drinker, a big liver who loved the fast life. Los Altos, CA. The workers didnt react well. Its a bad day, he says, shooing me out. 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. Ultimately,youre going to dry up that aquifer under the earth, and thats whats happening now. I try again to pin him down, but hes a man who likes to think of himself as wily. Resnick dipped into his savings from his job at a mental hospital and went in half on the machine. 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. When will it be used? She wanted to tell the story of the pomegranate, he told me with a touch of sarcasm. Bernard, hard to believe, is driving straight toward the aqueduct. This sale made headlines because it was engineered by one farmeran outsider from the cityfor his benefit only. 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. The Cutie and the Halo are now warring in the fields outside the Visalia Convention Center. What to give a grieving widow and her five children in Lost Hills but drinking water? Boswell Company. Groundwater accountability sparks clash of Central Valley ag titans Turn onto Twisselman Road off I-5 and continue west until it intersects with the California Aqueduct. The Resnicks are growing again. Farmers near Pixley already have sued him once for taking too much water out of their ground and moving it. In his writing in The Dreamt Land, Arax notes that Vidovich found a creative route around that restriction. Damn, if he doesnt look even younger and more fit than the last time I saw him eight years earlier. Look, I delegate a lot of things, obviously. These are loaded, Resnick says. Agriculture in the south valley has extended far beyond the provisions of its one river, the Kern. Thats how he came upon the San Joaquin. 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. As far as the company can tell, no active salmonella has ever traced back to the plant. He packed his bags and left his wife and kids. One million acres of the valley floor, greater than the size of Rhode Island, are now covered in almond trees. 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. Like J.W. Ah, he says, so youre the one whos been snooping around. She grabs him by the wrist, and they make a beeline for the convention hall door. 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. On this same stretch of 99, I once wrote a story about farmworkers who moonlighted as meth cookers to make ends meet. They made a new plantation here. The tumbleweeds on open ground give you a peek into what Lost Hills looked like before the aqueduct made a river here. That was eight or nine years ago. His 15 million trees in the San Joaquin Valley consume more than 400,000 acre-feet of water a year. Lynda sent the first batches of POM, week after week, as gifts to David Bowie, Rupert Murdoch, and Disney head Michael Eisner. I want to know that what we built will continue into the future.. So how do we do even better next year?. Do they sense the shaming about to come? And state groundwater regulations restrict the drilling of new agricultural wells. 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. One hundred and twenty thousand acres of nuts and fruits and berries in California and still counting. 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. John Vidovich. Summer or not, theyre dressed in shirt layered upon shirt and the same no-name dusty blue jeans. Whos it going to? He commands his realm, and she commands hers, and he takes care to mind the line. It wasnt a midlife crisis, he told me. I leave Gabbys and follow a winding concrete path through the new Wonderful Park. His story is the one Ive been carting around in my notebook for the past few decades, sure I was ready to write it after five years or ten years, only to learn of another twist that would lead me down another road. Scott: So we should talk about the labor that makes this all possible. He and the Resnicks had fought an ugly legal battle that tore their Cutie brand in two. Before being dammed and diverted, the water was home to millions of birds, mountain lions, wolves, bears and more. The juice isnt selling like it used to. My old well cant compete with his new wells. The land is turning to salt. Was Fire Marshal John Vidovich Taken Out by the Firefighters Union Boswell Company, and Sandridge Partners, controlled by John Vidovich, will be back in court on March 23 when Judge Valerie Chrissakis will decide whether the Sandridge pipeline is subject to review under the California Environmental Quality Act If so, it would mean the pipeline would have to undergo a full-blown EIR with . Thats why hes in trouble., So he makes a deal for private water?, Yep. His partner in the mandarins once told me that when Stewart is done with you, hes done with you. Theyre either working in the heat or hiding from the heat. 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. It wouldnt even make a couple of sections of his almonds. Before he died at age 86, J.G. For college, he picked California Polytechnic in San Luis Obispo over the hill and majored in agriculture business. Its gone, I say. There before me, two aluminum pipes, side by side, 12 inches in diameter each, slither in the sun. The buyer? The load will translate into 18,000 pounds of finished nuts in a matter of days. The Boswell Company wants it blocked, saying it threatens the companys own water supplies, which run through a canal over the pipelines underground route. It was linear, logical, fluid, and quite nearly destined. She had her own bookabout her genius as a marketergoing. He left in 1956. I never liked New Jersey, but I never knew why. When it doesnt come, he finds a way to make it come. He spits tobacco juice into the empty can of Rockstar. Its loaded, Bernard says. Stewart Resnick: Land, Nuts and Water Made America's Biggest Farmer 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. Were building infrastructure, and they dont like it.. But not even the two projects working in perfect tandem can defy drought. Its artificiality had achieved a permanence; its permanence had created my California. I park the car and walk across the barren rows. No bee can penetrate the shield, and his mandarins remain seedless. The company operates the most wells in the lake basin and the deepest ones. And neither was 1952, Tri-Valley bids farewell to water restrictions as end of drought emergency declared. But theres no denying his desperation. Ultimately, it drives a lucrative if sad mission, as uttered by the looming giant himself. Meanwhile, without water, his cattles corn crop is stunted. One year later, Vidovich turned his gain from the water sale to Mojave into an almost outright acquisition of land in the Angiola Water District in Tulare County. More than one ballad was about the valley, so he came to Fresno. Im sure I knew we had a pipeline in there. He had his hands on 65 percent of the nations crop. When I crossed the border and found Lost Hills, there was nothing here, he says. Mostly, though, they cant wait for the avalanche of nuts to end. Yet the Resnick pipeline is doing just that. Im 80 years old. The plastic unfurls across the grove like a giant roll of Saran Wrap. If he had his druthers, he said, hed still be living in a little ranch house in Culver City. The making of a billionaire over the next half-century was a series of dots that connected in the California sunshine. It cant be farmed like it was, he says. 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. Boswells response has a tough Spaghetti Western quality. 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. Arax: That is the question that you know Im dealing with in this magazine piece. Month after month, she made ends meet on a $1,600 budget. Lynda assisted her with the design and color scheme but otherwise has remained hands-off. A minute later, I reconnect with the pipeline and pursue its length for a football field. 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. Then the drug cartels took over the countryside and planted poppies. From a safe, Ellsberg had lifted the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of how successive presidents lied to the public to cover up the failings of the Vietnam War. He found it. It sure looks heavier than last year., Bernard smiles and nods to the others. Nowhere to turn, I turn back around and roll down my window. Hes farmingwater.. The nuts are kept there a few more daysany longer and the ants will attack themto complete their drying. Summary. Wonderful is getting smaller, he says. They were hardly the first rich people to use patronage to try to wheedle a citizenry toward their idea of a better life. Thirty-five percent of our pre-diabetic population has gone into the healthy range, she tells the team. 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. Order finds itself through action. For years, agriculture has been given a wide berth when it comes to monopolistic practices. He was in the mood to gamble. Our relatives have been patient. He worries because there isnt enough water now to properly irrigate the almonds, pistachios, and pomegranates. They married in 1972, and he sold the alarm company for $100 million. As he walks away, I notice his $400 sneakers. Hes not only able to irrigate his nut trees with an imported flow of groundwater40,000 acre-feet in some years. She walks off the stage with Stewart. They were pushing plates, costume jewelry, perfume, and model cars. He and Lynda decided in 1984 to buy the Franklin Mint, the maker of commemorative coins and other kitsch, for $167.5 million. Six hundred pistachio growers in blue jeans isnt her usual crowd. Is John Vidovich planning to sell off the valley's lifeblood? Or is he A native of Sunnyvale, Vidovich was the son of a Bay Area real estate scion. The great drought is officially over. I thank him and hurry down the dirt road through the almonds, eyeing the rearview mirror to see if a Resnick truck is following me. This is Lynda.. 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 water via pipeline to Kern County to irrigate the companys fields of pistachios, pomegranates, and citrus. 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. In the trailer next door, Lupes cousin Margarita lives with her husband, Selfo, and their three young children. Whether its the glint of a 15-carat, yellow canary diamond ring, a 25th wedding anniversary gift from Stewart, or one of the pomegranate-colored rubies she says are a girls best friend, its hard to tell from the back row. Vidovich went on a shopping spree. Lupe knocks on his door, and he invites us in. The extraction of water beneath the lake bottom wont last forever. It then dawned on him that guards were good, but they had to be paid an hourly wage. Like other small farmers, my water stays on my ground. So its a really extraordinary kind of development thats never happened in agriculture in California before really to raise the living of your workers. 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. Theres a lot happening in the world. Shes designing the curriculum.. But she doesnt dictate this or that. Angelica would prefer not to get into the details of their financial arrangement. And in fact these guys were able to squeeze and buy water in the open market, and do a few other things to keep their crops going and they were in the midst of drought. They were married only a short time when Manuel decided to cross the border almost 20 years ago. The winter goes down as one of the wettest in recorded history. Then the autumn of 2016 arrives with the strangeness of clouds. None of the sales taxes go to City Hall because Lost Hills isnt a city. 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. John Vidovich Profiles | Facebook What do you need to know, sir?, Whats it been like here during the drought?, Drought, no drought, makes no difference. 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. To block constructionof the pipeline, Boswell parked a parade of giant construction vehicles atop the canals embankments. 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. A few weeks later, I found myself riding up the elevator of a high-rise on the Westside of Los Angeles. Then he turned and faced me. All told, nine men operating five machines will pick clean this orchard over the next four weeks. 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 . How much was plunder? The region plays an important role in California agriculture but its also ground zero for many of the states most difficult water management problems. Facebook gives people the power to. 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. The oil companies and insurance companies were looking to unload their farms in Kern County, Steir learned, chunks of earth that measured 20,000 and 40,000 acres. I feel his gaze going past me, his voice turning oddly sentimental. That little red string is supposed to remind him to count to ten. The water will be stripped from the land and sold to developers of new towns both here and over the mountain. And Vidovich ended up pumping water an extraordinary amount of water out of the ground in an area where theyre pumping so much water on the ground the land is sinking. The court settlement allows him to take the water to Dudley Ridge, but it cant go outside Kings County. Today is quincena day, twice-a-month payday, and he needs me to scram because the workers coming in to cash their checks and wire 25 percent back across the border to families in Guanajuato and Guerrero will wonder if Im with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. While Vidovich owns less acreage than Boswell, more of it is devoted to high-value orchards. I stand over the pipes and give them a hard slap. Other billionaires getting behind Biden are investor Haim Saban, worth $2.9 billion, DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg, worth $1 billion, and Signum Global Advisors founder Charles Myers whose net worth is unknown. 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 walk up and reintroduce myself. But she cannot remember the last time she or Manuel or their children drank it. But its here in the bottom of long-gone Tulare Lake, which once held more fresh water than Lake Tahoe, where a conflict has turned heated. Thats $83 a tree. Fiefdom. This is my wife. 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. The money was too easy. But this wasnt the Resnick Pavilion at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. April 17, 2020. We produced a short documentary film. I walk to another part of the orchard and watch phase two. This is the Lynda who now endeavors to see farmhands as something more than workers. The oldest of five children, he came from Mexico when he was 18. To carry water from someplace far away to another place far away, he says. The water is cold, clean, and salty, though not too salty for a desperate man. Section, block, and row dont compute; he has to direct me by cellphone and guideposts. There's a reason to lose sleep over mislabeled melatonin gummies, The debt limit is not a tool for "extortion," Biden adviser Lael Brainard says. They have no way to grasp the $50 million to $80 million a year that the Resnicks say they are spending on philanthropy. Because, while he does farm thousands of acres of pistachios, almonds [] The POM tanks, Im told, are backed up with a three-year supply. I catch Highway 99 in rare somnolence. So far, Lynda has shown only patience. Im a billionaire. Hes got an awful temper hes trying to control through Kabbalah. Lupe and I walk to the far side of the trailer park to find Gustavo. John Catsimatidis, the billionaire CEO of the Gristedes supermarket chain who donated to Donald Trump's 2020 re-election campaign, says that Florida Gov. He can mix this private water with his leftover state water and ship it to at least one stranded neighbor who will pay the price. The shiny red orbs, three months shy of harvest, pop out from the bright green leaves like bulbs on a Christmas tree. Dun & Bradstreet collects private company financials for more than 23 . This is the route my grandfather, one of a legion of fruit tramps, took as he drifted from farm to farm in the 1920s picking crops. 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 they get on their high horse, you dont want to argue with them.. In court, Boswell also warned about the pipelines potential use, suggesting that water could eventually end up in Southern California. She won a gold Effie, advertisings Oscar. 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. Water War New Money Vs. Old Power in Parched California Lynda is also mapping out a farm-to-food program where students will grow fruits, vegetables, and grains on a plot of village land. Lost Hills finally has something to be proud about. 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. Through it all, Marketplace is here for you. What is indisputable is that over the past 20-plus years, Vidovich has quietly amassed more than 100,000 acres in the Central Valley, gaining footholds on numerous water boards, which has given him control over vast amounts of groundwater the valley's lifeblood. The William Saroyan Theatre was packed that October 1996 night. Its gambling. Veronica Martinez is the news librarian for the Bay Area News Group. Perched up there, a queen might peek out and utter, Let them eat cake, Lynda once said. Its bringing water from the Dudley Ridge Water District in Kings County. The sellers include farmers in the Tulare Lake basin who are pumping so much water out of the ground that the levees protecting the town of Corcoran are sinking, not by inches but by feet. If the pipeline failed and the canal collapsed, precious well water would be lost, the company asserted. Not the people. Vidovich went home with $74 million in his pocket. He lives down the road in Wasco, the Rose Capital of America, though the roses, too, have turned to nuts. Youre the one who needs to see., We pull out of the parking lot, past the palm trees and roses, and head up the thin ribbon of Highway 33 into the dust-swirling tunnel of nuts and fruits. A flour tortilla. Water seems to be disappearing, said Verboon. What? Digging in was its own wisdom, he discovered. Boswell Company, which pioneered industrial-scale agriculture to become the largest farming operation in California. 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. The neighborhoods didnt have sidewalks; when it rained, the kids had to walk to school in the mud. Its been more than a year since he gave me the cold shoulder at the pistachio conference.
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