For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you. 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. When we learned of the terrible situation, not to mention our poor reputation within the community, we were ashamed and are sorry, their official statement reads. One cousin arrived only last week. 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 . This is where the pistachios, 400 truckloads a day, 50 days of harvest, come to be weighed, washed, peeled, dried, gassed, sorted, salted, roasted, packaged, and shipped out to the world. Each one blames the other, he said. If I follow them south into Resnick almonds, I can see where the water is going. We hope you enjoy Finding Lost Hills., The 11-minute film opens with a shot of swirling dust. Hes getting ready to introduce Lynda, the main speaker, but first he wants to address the federal governments recent recall of Wonderful pistachios. But Vidovich isnt backing down. 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. Then the men of cotton, driven out of the South by the boll weevil, put the five rivers into canals and dried up the lake. The 5.3 acres are so flawless and at odds with the town that the whole thing feels like a movie set. His account appeared in the Earth Island Journal, a small environmental quarterly out of Berkeley. I leave Gabbys and follow a winding concrete path through the new Wonderful Park. Its gone. He doesnt wave me off or give chase. But the players are different. Through it all, Marketplace is here for you. If I follow them north through Resnick pomegranates, I can find out where the water is coming from. He guides me back into the main store with its displays of fresh fruit and vegetables, meats, cold cuts, and baked goods. One of his films, The Blob, became a cult classic, and they lived in a house on the Westside with two Rolls-Royces in the garage. 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. Every mogul, every movie star. Round 1, No. Native Americans fished from reed boats. On a chilly morning in January, the day the pipe was to cross under the canal, Boswells crew arrived to block construction with trucks, trailers, excavators, a motor grader and a bulldozer with the diamond B logo, according to the lawsuit. What the Resnicks were doing for Lost Hills, though, was a level of philanthropy I had never witnessed in the valley. Vidovich went home with $74 million in his pocket. He was headed to the fields at the same time that another farmworker, drunk on beer, was coming home from the fields. His bar was a place for guys, Damon Runyontype guys., Resnicks pals were all Jewish kids from upper-class families, so it wasnt easy being the poorest one, the one whose father was a gambler and capable at any moment of losing the few comforts they had. Because the road ends here, there is no physical way to follow the canals flow. Sure enough, cozied up next to the bank of the aqueduct, I see a glint. California showed me why.. It makes interesting reading. Carls Jr., Subway, McDonalds, Wendys, Loves, or Arbys. The POM tanks, Im told, are backed up with a three-year supply. What if he dropped his lawsuit and the two of them worked together to solve their water problems? Theyre no longer in danger. 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. Drought turning to floodit is the story of California. One of the first things he did with his monopoly was kill the California Pistachio Commission, the industrys marketing group, by yanking his funding. This is how Resnick became a pistachio, almond, and pomegranate grower. I find a former partner of Resnick. Theres no issue with the pipeline.. This was Lost Hills before Lynda got involved. He commands his realm, and she commands hers, and he takes care to mind the line. It sure looks heavier than last year., Bernard smiles and nods to the others. What spikes blood sugar more than a can of Coke? Is John Vidovich Planning to Sell Off the Valley's Lifeblood? Age : 59. America still leads the world, with 735 billionaires worth a collective $4.7 trillion, including Elon Musk, who tops the World's Billionaires list for the first time. She had her own bookabout her genius as a marketergoing. The water is cold, clean, and salty, though not too salty for a desperate man. Then he motions to Lynda, whos standing off to the side of the light-dimmed stage. STRATFORD Water is the lifeblood in the parched San Joaquin Valley, sustaining endless acres of trees, seeds and pastures that feed a hungry nation. I grab my notebook and walk up to one of the vans. The bells in the churches pealed, and out came the villagers with their scythes and axes, believing they had found the reason for their poverty. But inside he had these weaknesses. The water is being taken from unsuspecting farmers in an irrigation district in Tulare County more than 40 miles away. Arax: They lose their livelihood. More than one ballad was about the valley, so he came to Fresno. Dont let his boots, blue jeans, and ball cap fool you, the old-timers say. Or at least thats the way Vidovich puts it when I finally reach him. The men and women who planted, irrigated, sprayed, and picked our crops were phantoms. It must have wounded all the more because she and Stewart thought of themselves as progressive Democrats. The money was too easy. Like many billionaires, he didnt have a decent explanation for his fortune. On the north end sits the Wonderful Soccer Field with its all-weather track, stadium lights, artificial turf, and giant yellow sunburst embossed at midfield. Yes. She gestures to the young students in the front row, the ones enrolled in the ag-prep classes, and asks them to stand up and take a bow. The borough measured no more than 2 square miles. She was a very frugal lady. On our trips to Disneyland, I must have blinkered my eyes heading down 99. Whatever remains is not nearly enough to make up for the shortfall of imported water from the state. Theyre dusty with San Joaquin dirt. Vidovich, whose total compensation was about $236,000 in the last fiscal year, was previously the agency's chief of staff. While water has been moved, bought, sold and traded in California for decades, most deals have typically involved small supplies. The curriculum is being created by Noemi Donoso, the chief of education for the Chicago public schools before Lynda recruited her to Wonderful. A member of the commission, on the eve of its demise, told me, Stewart wants to be a benevolent dictator. He paved over the last orchard in the Santa Clara Valley with some apartments and then went looking for another valley where he might build his own empire. One day, gunmen mowed down residents with AK-47s and threw grenades at the church filled with parishioners. In the late 1970s, he went looking for a hedge against inflation. Bankers and their fair-weather financing exasperated Resnick. Her husband, Manuel, will awaken in 30 minutes to prepare for his night shift. They greet me with smiles and handshakes. 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. Vidovich has a unique perspective on Stewart Resnick and the acres of crops that have made Wonderful a success, as he tells Arax . Im sure I knew we had a pipeline in there. One more bin, a post reads. Bernards eyes are fixed straight ahead. One of the most dramatic alterations of the earths surface in human history took place here. They had survived the drought. You dont believe me?, No, I believe you, Resnick says. White rhinos for sale, one careful owner: tycoon looks for a It was the early 1900s, and his grandfather and grandmother decided to secure passage to America. Now shes getting lots of credit.. She owns this place. He goes on to explain what he means by own. 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. Their goal is to prevent me from successfully farming. That little red string is supposed to remind him to count to ten. This is a big crop, the field man tells me. Mark Arax: Yeah. Yet the Resnick pipeline is doing just that. The farmers there are raising almost 1 million acres of crops, and fewer than half these acres are irrigated with flows from the Kern. The sentimental ones stay away. The partner kept the Cutie name but only after paying the Resnicks tens of millions of dollars. Henry A. Barrios / The . Rather, they say, theyre harvesting health and happiness around the world through our iconic consumer brands. Their crops arent crops but heart-healthy snacks and life-extending elixirs. Vidovich digs 17 new wells, several to the depth of 1,400 feet, and pumps groundwater into ditches and canals that move the flow across miles of flat lake bed. She had recently divorced and wasnt about to settle for a life in Culver City. It would return as tule fog to remind the white man of his theft. A lot of it is undocumented and they are in these sort of company towns that you describe that are maybe even more sort of dedicated to the company than most. Once you have them, you spend a lifetime defending them.. I try to calculate how many hundreds of aluminum sections need to be linked seamlessly, or at least watertight, to cover the distance of a mile. Boswell pumps reach 2,500 feet into the earth looking for water to grow crops, looking for water to sell. The piece, I was told, had left Lynda embarrassed and fuming. 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 food is more. It looks like no other campus in the valley: a modern, minimalist two-story design that uses paneled wood and fabricated metal, wild colors, and terraced landscaping to create the feel of a high-tech mountain retreat. 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. Lynda isnt just writing checks, Donoso told me. His real estate empire became big enough to bring aboard each of his four children. In the summer of 2010, hed spent several days documenting the deplorable conditions of the modern company town. I dont know. Im down.. Its a bad day, he says, shooing me out. 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. Vidovich claims that he was . If anyone doubted the health benefits of the juice, they spent more than $30 million in research to prove that it fought heart disease and prostate woes. 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. 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. We tell the children about the fields when they are young so they dont know the fields when they are old, she says. More than a dozen family members have followed Lupe and Manuel to Lost Hills. She was the daughter of Jack Harris, a film distributor, who moved the family to Los Angeles when Lynda was 15 to produce movies. In the city of trees, I find a paved road with speed bumps that takes me to the harvest of pistachios. It takes a lot of work to get ahead. She and Manuel were able to buy their trailer several years ago. At Wonderful Health and Wellness, were educating our employees about this health crisis. U.S. immigration has little say-so here. All this stirring up is a consequence of mechanization. He went out and bought an alarm company. He is irrigating 121,000 of those acres. He is a San Joaquin Valley farmer from Northern California. Hes not only able to irrigate his nut trees with an imported flow of groundwater40,000 acre-feet in some years. As far as the company can tell, no active salmonella has ever traced back to the plant. A public resource had been privatized for the purpose of growing tens of thousands of acres of nuts, he charged. As he walks away, I notice his $400 sneakers. But others are suspicious of Vidovichs record of buying land and selling its water, both surface and groundwater, out of the area, sometimes to urban users. If they were farmers, they were farmers who hung out with Tom Hanks, Steve Martin, David Geffen, Warren Beatty, and Joan Didion. It was his father and uncles who founded the company in 1925. 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 contents of each catcher, 500 pounds of almond meat, are placed on a conveyor 20 feet high and dumped into a big-rig hauler for transport to the Wonderful processing plant. The sale is still considered a blow to Kings' water portfolio by other farmers. Stewart and Lynda planted 15,000 more acres and bought a juice plant. He needs every drop he can get., Dont you know? In the trailer next door, Lupes cousin Margarita lives with her husband, Selfo, and their three young children. Fifty-three percent of our employees are obese, and 12 percent of them have diabetes., The growers start to fidget. View the profiles of people named John Vidovich. . The colors turn brilliant in the light made spectacular by the particles of dust. The 789 acre project . By age 19, Lynda had dropped out of college, married a magazine ad man, and opened her own advertising agency. One more hour and Im outta this fucking place.. Maybe not since the wheat barons has the income disparity between farmer and farmworker been greater. Then the drug cartels took over the countryside and planted poppies. Thats $83 a tree. In this fragile and failing oasis, small farmers worry that both will sell precious water to the highest bidders, then ship it far away. It was good for the bottom line. This is gamblers ground unlike any other in California, and as I drive from hill to dale, examining each orchard, my head spins. He had left for the cornfields a few minutes before the killings.. They were hardly the first rich people to use patronage to try to wheedle a citizenry toward their idea of a better life. Most everything that can be touched in this corner of California belongs to Wonderful. Now in farming, were in a unique position. We changed the culture of safety, and we think we can do the same with health, Anzaldo says. Since international sanctions were lifted five years earlier, Iran has been crowding the market with its more buttery-tasting pistachios. I call the manager of the Lost Hills Water District. How can another record crop be sitting pretty on these trees? Thats when the Resnicks decided to sell the concept of wellness to their 4,300 employees throughout the valley the same way they sell workplace safety. When Resnick plants, he plants his trees wall to wall. You can plant only so many acres on ground that has no groundwater. I catch Highway 99 in rare somnolence. John Vidovich. He only needed to find groundwater from another basin to replace the state aqueduct water he had just sold. LOIS HENRY: Fallout from water war continues as state mulls plans When nature bites down hard, and the government flow gets reduced to a trickle, growers in Kern turn on their pumps and reach deeper into the earth. Its bringing water from the Dudley Ridge Water District in Kings County. Damn, if he doesnt look even younger and more fit than the last time I saw him eight years earlier. Each tree produces 22 pounds of nuts. No ones going to get fired for bringing home 2,500 pounds of nuts an acre. 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. 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. It was the same distance that allows them to control more land and water130 billion gallons a yearthan any other man and woman in California and still believe it isnt enough. Father Stephen excelled in land deals, trading the toil of farming for successful real estate offices and expense accounts. Each section of pipe is 40 feet long. And then they pump more groundwater. Id rather be unknown than known. He had recently read The King of California, and that got him thinking. Lynda is making the trip on the company jet more often these days. He turns out to be a kindly religious man whose short hair is dyed the black of shoe polish. He takes a look at his watch. John Vidovich, Student Loan Corp: Profile and Biography 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. Im down, Stewart, he protests. 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. Each mound is fed into an even bigger machine whose teeth pulverize the trees and make sawdust. The uncle died at age 22 fighting in Afghanistan. John Vidovich, the current patriarch of the family business, and his wife Lydia live in an $11.4 million Los Altos Hills home. 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. It was linear, logical, fluid, and quite nearly destined. Theyll take home $11 an hour for their labors. This isnt any road. I want to know that what we built will continue into the future.. But for every good-sized fruit, theres a bunch that never sized up. Resnick is giving him one of his looks. Contact 2? Stewart Resnick is the biggest farmer in the United States, a fact he has tried to keep hidden while he has shaped what we eat, transformed Californias landscape, and ruled entire towns. So the state couldnt deliver, in one year couldnt deliver any of it. Tomorrow? My old well cant compete with his new wells. Ron DeSantis isn't returning his calls . As a relative newcomer, Vidovich said he angered Boswell when he outbid the company on Westlake Farms, one of the oldest and largest farms in California, with valuable access to groundwater and Kings River flows. When its Pablos turn, he hands Hussein a check for $437, and Hussein counts out $433 back to him in cash. The gas to and from the orchards costs him $80 a week. The three of them spent two weeks of all-nighters making copies. 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. The aquifer either doesnt exist or is so befouled by salts that the water is poison. 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. They made a new plantation here. Stewart and Lynda created a new brand, the Halo, from the same variety of mandarin. This is how the land of Wonderful is keeping alive its trees. Now its the seven-week nut harvest that brings out the inhalers. And so the question of sustainability is front and center here now in California. No rain in five years. Because the more you invested in your employees and their communities, the more productive they became. To grow, Big Ag needed a bigger and more dependable supply. 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. The water will be stripped from the land and sold to developers of new towns both here and over the mountain. Hes never driven a tractor or opened an irrigation valve. 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 . 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. Im 80 years old. But Paramount isnt Paramount anymore. Let the smaller grower walk among his trees and farm by the row. The region plays an important role in California agriculture but its also ground zero for many of the states most difficult water management problems. They are still paying off the $27,000 debt to relatives who hired the coyote. They spend $50 a month on bottled water. Now they have to keep that up, right? Too many almonds. From the east side of Tulare County to the west side of Fresno County, theyre planting more nuts and Halos. Do you know what I am? This last-ditch water in Lost Hills wont make everything right. Legal bills for this and other Boswell-related disputes are costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, he said. 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 more water he got, the more crops he planted, and the more crops he planted, the more water he needed to plant more crops, and on and on. Theyre baby tumbleweeds that have come home. Now theres something here. 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. But I had some good people helping me.. A year into his studies, an uncle called from California. And its an area that doesnt have ground water, so its there completely because of the State Water Project. Its not easy to hear, but Im not going to sugarcoat this, she says. John Vidovich - Green Dunes Water seems to be disappearing, said Verboon. The big man with the goatee behind the wheel is Bernard Puget, a Basque sheepmans son who oversees these orchards. Gov. Newsom's Water Portfolio Has No Water Entrepreneurs In the Wonderful fields, he tells me, at least 80 percent of the workers carry no documents or documents that are not real. It wasnt a midlife crisis, he told me. 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. State water dwindling year after year. Digging in was its own wisdom, he discovered. But western Kern has no groundwater to draw from. Hes never put a dusty boot on the neck of a shovel and dug down into the soil. And now Vidovich is the aggressor, said Doug Verboon, a Kings County supervisor and walnut farmer who works the same 187 acres that his grandfather bought in 1906.
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