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By the time he died an old man on his tractor in the Cupertino Hills, where he had planted grapes again and was making wine, the transformation of his valley by the silicon chip was complete. Hes getting ready to introduce Lynda, the main speaker, but first he wants to address the federal governments recent recall of Wonderful pistachios. His partner in the mandarins once told me that when Stewart is done with you, hes done with you. Theres a lot to commend here, I tell Anzaldo, but where does persuasion end and coercion begin?, As a second-generation Mexican American, Anzaldo says he knows the powerful clench of fast food and sugar among his own family. He does enough farming in the area to make it look like hes a farmer. Within the confines of the settlement with Pixley Irrigation District, he continued to move water out of Angiola and into Dudley Ridge. The drought?. His grandfather Resnick had fled the Ukraine in the wake of another killing of Jews by Cossacks. We changed the culture of safety, and we think we can do the same with health, Anzaldo says. One of his frat brothers was a wealthy kid whose father ran a janitorial business. Longtime Los Altos resident Stephen John Vidovich, founder of De Anza Properties of Sunnyvale, died of an apparent heart attack June 19 as he was driving a tractor on his property in the Cupertino hills, said his son John Vidovich. Where is the water going? 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. The stacks of bottles gave him no answer. Were still trying to figure out who our typical customer is going to be, Angelica says. When I look around here at what weve built and then look back at my life in New Jersey, I think, How did it happen? For one man and woman to build something like this would be almost impossible today.. The sober man died. When it doesnt come, he finds a way to make it come. He spits tobacco juice into the empty can of Rockstar. 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. Six hundred pistachio growers in blue jeans isnt her usual crowd. China, for one, prefers the Iranian pistachio. Lupe excuses herself to prepare dinner. The money was too easy. You may have never heard of John Vidovich, but his impact on the day-to-day life of the average southern San Joaquin Valley farmer is difficult to be understated. After three years of drought, tensions are running high all over rural California. Thousands of California oaks were felled. 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. Water rights are like democracy, he told Forbes in 1989. They arrive in Chevy trucks and Dodge vans and spill out in groups of four or five under the sweat-stained hats of the 49ers, Penn State, and the Yankees. How come?, We dont need it anymore, he whispers., Back at the plant, Lynda is meeting with Wonderful doctors, nurses, and farmworkers. The helicopter buzzing started in February, scattering cattle. As a class of people, the farmers and real estate developers harbor a deep-down contempt for what they have built. Sitting in his mansion in 2008, he already counted more than 100,000 acres of orchards across five counties. Contact 2? If Resnick retains every drop, he might squeeze 25 acre-feet of water a day out of both pipes. Since the middle of the drought, the price of almonds has dropped almost by half. 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. This was how a billionaire who needed more water did politics. Even Wonderful Park is spelled with the same heart-shaped O that stamps a bottle of POM. Its been more than a year since he gave me the cold shoulder at the pistachio conference. At age 81, hes gotten so big, he doesnt know how big. Hes carrying 55,000 pounds of crop in two swaggering trailers open to the sun. Theres no garbage piled high and smoldering, no chickens picking at scratch. He was the bad guy in agriculture for no bigger offense than that he was big. If only Eve had offered Adam a pomegranate instead of an apple, Lynda wrote, every day could have been a holiday.. As the nuts pour down onto the roof of the catcher, the operator shifts the trough so that it becomes a conveyor belt. He told his neighbors to alter the flight of the bees or hed sue them for trespassing. The extraction of water beneath the lake bottom wont last forever. Through it all, Marketplace is here for you. Developer, farmer and water trader John Vidovich plans to build a beef feedlot and processing plant near Lemoore according to a preliminary application filed with the county. April 17, 2020. Whos it going to? Theyre dusty with San Joaquin dirt. His frat brother got bored, as rich boys do, and Resnick bought out his half interest for $300. China (including Macau and . When the Depression struck, his parents migrated to Middlebush, New Jersey, where they bought a few trucks and peddled coffee and pots and pans. What if I failed? If I follow them north through Resnick pomegranates, I can find out where the water is coming from. Two men sit inside separate cabins of a small tractor with pincers on one side and a catcher on the other. He was tough on the outside. This is a magnitude of intervention that no other agricultural company in California has ever attempted. When you first meet John Vidovich, everything from his ball cap to his dirty boots tells you he's a farmer. 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. I get out of the car and walk down an embankment. On Oscar night, she handed out free samples to the stars at the Vanity Fair party. Turn onto Twisselman Road off I-5 and continue west until it intersects with the California Aqueduct. Where gravity needs a boost, the pipes run atop wooden crates used to pack boxes of fruit. Not the people. Twine strung trailer to trailer hangs with the laundry of fathers, mothers, and children. When I tell her my name, she whispers into his ear. I saw her a few months ago. I steer toward the almonds, past a row of worker housing and a main gate. See All Contacts. It hardly ceases for the next five months. 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. Name. He maneuvers down the middle of the row, sweeps up the dried almonds, and throws them into a catcher. Past Oildale and the boxcar where Merle Haggard grew up. He launches into a CFOs riff on the pistachio market. 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. Bernard, hard to believe, is driving straight toward the aqueduct. The farmer corralled the snowmelt and erased the valley, its desert and marsh. I feel too good to give any of it up.. Never mind that this is one of the most over-drafted basins in California or that the land is sinking a half-foot a year. That was four years ago. Hes got another meeting to attend. They knew little about the company except it was selling its keepsakes for five times the amount Teleflora was. The bowls on her kitchen table are filled with grapes, berries, bananas, and red and green bell peppers. I ask her if she is concerned about wasting water, given the drought and the distance the water has traveled20 miles from a well in Wascoand that the cost goes up the more they use. He lingers in the crowd long enough to shake hands with a friend from Bel-Air whos planting thousands of acres of pistachios in the worst ground of Tulare Lake. Like the waters of the lake, the indent of the Resnicks will recede from the land, too. Hes smiling but speaks only Spanish. The aquifer either doesnt exist or is so befouled by salts that the water is poison. Im down, Stewart, he protests. He could collect the rents while he slept. He accused Resnick in 2008 of using various shell companies to monopolize control of the Kern Water Bank. The pipeline will pose a constant and continued threat to the easements function, compromising the structural integrity of the easement through saturation and subsidence or by negligent maintenance, wrote attorney Leonard Herr. The matter was headed to court when Vidovich paid a visit to Resnick. John Gibler, a freelance journalist, found Lost Hills a year before Lynda. 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. The brick-hard ground cant be bought. Typically, each pound sells wholesale for $3.75. Tender sprouts poke out of the dry soil, and I bend down to feel their prickle. As you know, our philosophy at Wonderful is doing well by doing good. But western Kern has no groundwater to draw from. I would have worn my Levis, he says, but Lyndas here, and she thinks I dress like a bum. Were standing in the sun outside the plants corporate office, a building whose clean lines and retro furniture wear the imprint of Lynda, too. Today, the highest bidder may grow crops in the region. One more bin, a post reads. Then one day, he was trying to find a marketing person and got a call from Lynda Sinay, who worked in advertising. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation. Title. One out of eight has diabetes. From the vaulted ceilings with gold-leaf moldings hung two blown-glass chandeliers. Both GSAs, along with three others in the Tulare Lake subbasin, submitted a single joint groundwater plan. She remembers handing the boy to her sister-in-law, who carried phony papers, and watching them cross by bridge into California. The making of a billionaire over the next half-century was a series of dots that connected in the California sunshine. You have no idea the people on my VIP list who drink it. How much bigger can agriculture get. Theyre now building an $80 million charter-school complex in Delano, just down the road from Cesar Chavez High. Stewart would deny that Giblers reporting played a part in their philanthropy. I exited my car and approached the entrance with its 14-foot columns and wrought-iron balustrades. Tell me, he asked, though it wasnt entirely a question. Highway 46 shoots past Resnick almonds and takes you straight into town, population 1,938. On more than 150,000 acres 132,000 in Kings County alone, according to ParcelQuest the company grows, processes and sells cotton, tomatoes, wheat, alfalfa and seed crops. Already, they are paying $69 a month to the local utility district. 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. None of the sales taxes go to City Hall because Lost Hills isnt a city. Business got so brisk that he bought two trucks and hired crews. In Lost Hills, they call her Lady Lynda. She shows up in high fashion and stands in the dust and tells them about another charter school or affordable-housing project she is bringing to them. Either way is a trespass. He did this first in the name of wheat and then beef, milk, raisins, cotton, and nuts. For farmers who rely on water from the Kings River, the answer winds up as some shade of yes.. By the eighth day of harvest, the sun is gone. Its his pipe, not mine. The courtship of Stewart and Lynda went fast. State or federal water isnt enough. Wonderful is getting smaller, he says. On a fog-drip night in January 1972, two men walked into my fathers empty bar with gloves on and shot him to death. 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. Thats our goal. Month after month, she made ends meet on a $1,600 budget. A minute later, I reconnect with the pipeline and pursue its length for a football field. A plume of dust joins up with other plumes of dust until the sky over the valley turns sickly. Resnick, he says. Six hundred and forty acres dont look like 640 acresa square mileuntil they start ripping out the trees. The hospital, senior citizens center, and football stadium all bore the signature of his giving. Thousands of Wonderful acres lay bare. His accountant suggested he buy apartments. Uneasy about the slow plan to siphon Valley water for Southern California, farmers and water managers are worrying about a large land owner in the region. On the day the trees fall quietly upon the orchard floor, no one is here but the Mexican on his tractor. John Vidovich walks through his almond orchard near Wasco and explains the spray irrigation system he uses. His 15 million trees in the San Joaquin Valley consume more than 400,000 acre-feet of water a year. Im not going to live forever, even with the massive amounts of pomegranate juice Im drinking. Not long before, Vidovich was trying to grab water from Resnick, not give it. Wow. He hired Bert Steir, a Bostonian with a Bronze Star from the Second World War and a degree from Harvard, to come west and work his deals. But when your neighbor is going to lose his crop, you do what you can to help him., I tell Vidovich this sounds almost charitable. ! it says. But this outwardly unassuming multimillionaire has become a lightning rod of controversy. Hes never driven a tractor or opened an irrigation valve. I meet up with the Wonderful field man who first tipped me off to the pipeline. Fifty-three percent of our employees are obese, and 12 percent of them have diabetes., The growers start to fidget. This water basically came from a land owned by someone whos also a near billionaire a guy named John Vidovich. In court, Boswell also warned about the pipelines potential use, suggesting that water could eventually end up in Southern California. When he was told there were fields upon fields, he did not believe there could be this many fields. 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. She is the brander of the empire, the final word on their Super Bowl ads, the creator of product marketing. If that happens, theyll go down the highway, and hell lose the $1 he takes for every $100 worth of their checks. They resent howhe sold $73 million worth of water rights to Mojave Water Agency in Southern California. 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.. The project seemed simple: Using existing canals and new 48-inch pipe, he would ship water 10 miles from his property in Lemoore to property south of Stratford. The POM tanks, Im told, are backed up with a three-year supply. I had finished the last chapter of The King of California, a book I wrote with a good friend about J.G. The front gates of the 25,000-square-foot Beaux Arts mansion on Sunset Boulevard magically opened without a guard giving a nod. Lynda has a son who works as a musician and a son who suffered a birth trauma and lives in a care facility. 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. I call the manager of the Lost Hills Water District. Jun 27, 2007. 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. Im driving too fast for the ruts in the road. 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. Vidovich did not immediately respond . 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. Its my property, and I have a right to cross.. I grab my notebook and walk up to one of the vans. 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. The buyer? It was the early 1900s, and his grandfather and grandmother decided to secure passage to America. Thats why he built the pipeline. 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. But its just a cover for taking water out.. Like his father, hes an intensely private businessman. To get there, the pipeline has to cross under a Boswell-controlled canal. If you study his moves, you can see a method to the acres he is accumulating. It isnt a lot of water., Im not going to give you the numbers. The shiny red orbs, three months shy of harvest, pop out from the bright green leaves like bulbs on a Christmas tree. He yanks and pulls, and it finally comes off, throwing him a foot backward. The grass is a color green on the verge of blue, and the cutouts for trees are razor etched. John was vital in helping the company's executive group reposition its strategy. I think I paid $9 million. Relatives arranged his passage, paying the coyote the new rate of $12,000. I leave Gabbys and follow a winding concrete path through the new Wonderful Park. But nobody didnt like my dad.. The farmer isnt here to smell the cracking open of wood, the ripping open of warm secret earth. The wide-open middle of California did its lullaby on me again. The highway runs two lanes here, three lanes there, through miles of agriculture broken every 20 minutes by fast food, gas station, and cheap motel. Resnick grabs at a pomegranate that might win a blue ribbon at the fair and tries to twist it free. 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. No ones going to get fired for bringing home 2,500 pounds of nuts an acre. They were hardly the first rich people to use patronage to try to wheedle a citizenry toward their idea of a better life. His real estate empire became big enough to bring aboard each of his four children. Lets call it what it is, he says. She delivers it in classic Lynda style. At the east end, where the highway meets Interstate 5, the traveler gets a choice. He wants his fair share, but he wants everybody else to prosper, too.. Shes designing the school. No water in the ground to make up for the missing government supply. All I know is I dont want to split it up or sell it in some leveraged buyout. He ran the city's Fire Prevention Bureau, oversaw more than 150 employees and won awards from Mayor Eric Garcetti . His grandfather, who came to California from Croatia in 1908, got his start with 10 acres of cherries and apricots in Mountain View. Feudal. The abundance of that water in good years has created this overreach of agriculture. Theyre just mad Im here, he said. His father met his mother, the cantors daughter, and they married. The Boswell company, their attorneys and Tulare Lake Canal Company president Mark Unruh did not respond to repeated requests for comment. If the pipeline failed and the canal collapsed, precious well water would be lost, the company asserted. Arax: They lose their livelihood. 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. The truck driver hits the wide open of Highway 33 and traces the serpentine of the aqueduct. California growers, in the grip of drought, have produced 900 million pounds of the green nut. A parched Southern California suburb looking to keep up with a booming population. Of all the wonders of Wonderful, this is the one I find most mystifying. We had gangs and murders, but thats better, too., He has come to El Toro Loco to cash his check and buy some beer. More often than not, it is hauling away some piece of the valleys bounty. Thats 281 square miles. I look back at Resnick. So now theyre doing everything they can to frustrate my ability to utilize the property, said Vidovich. The tule fog sets down again 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. Theyve always been able to bully anyone, he said. Main Street is Highway 46, which slices through the middle of town. The colors turn brilliant in the light made spectacular by the particles of dust. Theyre paying $340 a month for its privilege. If he knows what hes doing, the shears can make a thousand more pounds an acre.. Giant pincers manned by a single worker grab the tree by the throat and start shaking.
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