Highway 46 shoots past Resnick almonds and takes you straight into town, population 1,938. This is the closest to hills it comes. You dont believe me?, No, I believe you, Resnick says. Amy Scott: Theres a stunning aerial photo in the magazine that shows these green green trees surrounded basically by dust. Now theres something here. On Oscar night, she handed out free samples to the stars at the Vanity Fair party. A piece of pipeline south of Stratford rests in the arm of a piece of heavy equipment on Dec. 16, 2021. 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. If only Eve had offered Adam a pomegranate instead of an apple, Lynda wrote, every day could have been a holiday.. This road ends abruptly at the rise of a second fence. And then what happens in drought is there is this desperation to keep it going. On this same stretch of 99, I once wrote a story about farmworkers who moonlighted as meth cookers to make ends meet. He sold a chunk of land to the builders of Sunnyvale and decided he could develop the rest himself. Contact 2? I exited my car and approached the entrance with its 14-foot columns and wrought-iron balustrades. He has plenty of well water in the northern part of Kings County, outside J.G. Well, maybe just a little guilt, but thats Jewish. He said the prod for all their giving in Lost Hills happened in Aspen, of all places. To manage the disease. 2023 Minnesota Public Radio. Angiola has become a critical element of Vidovichs water moves, transferring water across the Valley for additional sales, so much so that it put him and the district in hot water. Right there in the big canal of the Dudley Ridge Water District. His accountant suggested he buy apartments. He had no intention of farming it, either. It was the early 1900s, and his grandfather and grandmother decided to secure passage to America. Hes carrying 55,000 pounds of crop in two swaggering trailers open to the sun. The aqueduct brings the water, yes? I now hear whispers of water belonging to farmers two counties away being pumped out of the ground and hijacked in the dead of night to irrigate the nuts of Lost Hills. The believer and the skeptic do their tussle inside my head. The truth a mercenary has landed on. The nut must be hurried from bin to truck to processing plant to keep it from discoloring. Ive never given an interview to a newspaper or magazine before. When Resnick plants, he plants his trees wall to wall. It becomes scorn because they cant allow it to become pity or self-hatred. Lupe says no one in her family, and none of her friends living in the trailer park or on the other side of town, drinks the water that comes out of the pipe. Being healthy is a choice. The stacks of bottles gave him no answer. The helicopter buzzing started in February, scattering cattle. 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. Whos it going to? He blames Iran. As the head of a quasi-public agency, he knows he cant completely blow off my questions. Boswell had done for the town of Corcoran. John Vidovich lives in Los Altos, CA; previous city include San Jose CA. Only after the media were alerted did Stewart and Lynda claim to have discovered the clear-cutting. But the smaller farmer still uses a pruning shears to make his most important cuts. His grandfather, who came to California from Croatia in 1908, got his start with 10 acres of cherries and apricots in Mountain View. 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. There have been several instances where damaged equipment has reduced flows, he said. Lemoore Council likely to respond to proposed feedlot near Lemoore and 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. He does enough farming in the area to make it look like hes a farmer. Theyre listening with their heads bent down. They're drought's best buddies." John Vidovich will tell you he's the interloper who came over the other mountain, the Coast Range. Lets call it what it is, he says. ! it says. In a profile written by Lois Henry, then of The Bakersfield Californian now writing exclusively for her own service SJVWater, Vidovich readily acknowledge the acrimony the sale caused. Because Lupe had no papers, she followed the coyote for many more miles until they reached a steep pass. Title. His father grew grapes, cherries, and apricots in the Santa Clara Valley back when Stanford University still had a reason to be known as The Farm. The pistachio trees in Wonderful number 6 million. He packed his bags and left his wife and kids. I meet up with the Wonderful field man who first tipped me off to the pipeline. EIN: 41-0953924. This is the west end of Lost Hills, the extraction end. Stewart and Lynda created a new brand, the Halo, from the same variety of mandarin. Just get started became one of his guiding principles. Main Street is Highway 46, which slices through the middle of town. Everything about our physical selves, Lynda believes, begins in our guts. What if he dropped his lawsuit and the two of them worked together to solve their water problems? He wonders what agriculture will look like in western Kern in ten years. He doesnt know what pipeline means. 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. He wouldnt know one of his Valencia orange groves from one of his Washington navel orange groves. Lynda believes that if theyre enticed in the right direction, the 1,300 workers might choose to prepare the same healthy fare at home. He says he doesnt feel sorry for Resnick. Do they sense the shaming about to come? California growers, in the grip of drought, have produced 900 million pounds of the green nut. Ousted L.A. fire marshal claims corruption among city fire inspectors 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. The fight between the Tulare Lake Canal Company, controlled by the J.G. But its just a cover for taking water out.. Wonderful, by contrast, shoots for the middle. Within the confines of the settlement with Pixley Irrigation District, he continued to move water out of Angiola and into Dudley Ridge. The city of Los Angeles, by comparison, consumes 587,000 acre-feet. 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 . Recommended for you Videos 4:28. It was a hit. Ron DeSantis isn't returning his calls . One year, it delivers 900,000 acre-feet of snowmelt. All of it was Lyndas doing, of course. Boswell, Vidovich is heir to a real estate empire. A woman named Lupe is standing above me on the wooden stairway that climbs to the front door of her trailer. But he got too big. Its gone. Hed been diagnosed with early prostate cancer and had no doubt that the juice was keeping him well. Like many billionaires, he didnt have a decent explanation for his fortune. That still leaves the majority of the workforce beyond his cajole. Ag Giants Boswell, Vidovich Sling Mud at Each Other No one pushes their product harder. It was this persistence and, above all, good timing that explained his bigness. Selfo works 50 hours a week as an irrigator. Boswell territory. 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. If he had his druthers, he said, hed still be living in a little ranch house in Culver City. Let the smaller grower walk among his trees and farm by the row. Everyone knew where it was going. He was about my size, but he was very tough. All Access Digital offer for just 99 cents! 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. Perched up there, a queen might peek out and utter, Let them eat cake, Lynda once said. He doesnt feign surprise when I tell him about the pipeline, but he dismisses it as a private matter between private parties. In the years of plentiful rains and heavy snowmelt, the bank fills up with more than 1 million acre-feet of stored water. 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. Billionaire GOP donor says DeSantis won't return his calls The shelves spill piatas, gloves, hats, pruning shears, and loaves of Bimbo white bread. He isnt farming dirt. The rain of almonds has moved on to the next tree. John, his oldest son, had served in the military as an intelligence officer and graduated from Santa Clara law school. You sure this isnt 18 tons an acre? he says, goading. Theyre now building an $80 million charter-school complex in Delano, just down the road from Cesar Chavez High. The land is turning to salt. Every last tree has been torn out of the ground. Presently, John Vidovich is Vice President & Sales Director at The Student Loan Corp. Im a billionaire. Hes got an awful temper hes trying to control through Kabbalah. For the next two or three seconds, the almonds pour down like hail. Native Americans fished from reed boats. 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. It would return as tule fog to remind the white man of his theft. 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. In a region of wall-to-wall plantings, one of the walls is crashing down. LOIS HENRY: Water conspiracy or just poor optics? More than one ballad was about the valley, so he came to Fresno. In the distant background, under the gaze of a 10-foot-tall marble goddess, sat Stewart in a gold-skirted chair, head down. Here and there my boots crunch down on the dried remains of pomegranates that look like small pieces of scat dropped by a coyote. The speech of his parents and grandparents, the Yiddish-inflected New York with its humors and cut-to-the-quick impatiences, had not left his own speech in the half-century since hed come to California. Theyve always been able to bully anyone, he said. Its going to be what its going to be. The next year, it delivers 300,000 acre-feet. By the eighth day of harvest, the sun is gone. The baby is now a 20-year-old student at Bakersfield College. A Kingdom from Dust The California Sunday Magazine Vidovich, meanwhile, is accusing Boswell-backed groundwater agencies of dragging their feet on pumping reductions to the point their actions could sink the small, rural town of Corcoran up to another 11 feet. How can this be? I notice she keeps the water running for a long time. Ex-Fire Marshal Sues City, Alleges Quid Pro Quo Deal - LA Weekly Tender sprouts poke out of the dry soil, and I bend down to feel their prickle. She is twinkling from earlobe and finger. 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. 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. He is a San Joaquin Valley farmer from Northern California. LOIS HENRY: Fallout from water war continues as state mulls plans But she doesnt dictate this or that. Angelica would prefer not to get into the details of their financial arrangement. Contact 4? Ever since I was a kid, I have felt its pulla gravitational presence on the land and in my own story. It will carry his private water on his private land, never leaving the regions geological basin. View the profiles of people named John Vidovich. What if I failed? When Lynda learned that half the students receiving thousands of dollars in company scholarships were dropping out of school, she wasnt deterred. He grew up in New Jersey, where his father ran a bar. The sale got under the skin of valley farmers. The FDA sent a warning letter, and Wonderful pledged to study the chlorine levels in the bathing tanks. That was eight or nine years ago. He had moved out to Long Beach, bought some property, and built one of those new strip malls. No picking of crop agitates the earth like the picking of almonds and pistachios. Boswell Company. Thats our goal. His father bought a neighborhood bar and ran it with the same iron fist with which he ran the house. Each one blames the other, he said. But he wasnt looking for the monotony of steady. While some counties and water boards prohibit water exports, others dont. Ive told them all no. Look, I have no guilt. It comes out to $2,000 a month. Its artificiality had achieved a permanence; its permanence had created my California. His trees were drinking from the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project, from rivers and irrigation canals and the water bank. If Resnick retains every drop, he might squeeze 25 acre-feet of water a day out of both pipes. On the way out, the voice in their head, Lyndas voice, goads them to give one more hour to the Wonderful Fitness Center. We are sensitive to that. All told, 36 men operating six machines will harvest the orchard in six days. How can another record crop be sitting pretty on these trees? Due to the drought, this water would be impossible to replace, it said. His face is still blank. Then it hits me. Lupe and Manuel, like many of the residents, grew up next to each other in a pueblo called San Antonio deep in the state of Guerrero, a mountainous region of dramatic beauty. He wants his fair share, but he wants everybody else to prosper, too.. 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. The colors turn brilliant in the light made spectacular by the particles of dust. And when youve been as lucky as weve been, you start to think you can ride out drought, too., He did learn one lesson. Marketplace is a division of MPR's 501 (c)(3). Shoving aside the coins, they introduced a Scarlett OHara doll that, by itself, raked in $35 million in sales. Who is going to use it? said attorney Herr, according to SJV Waters Henry. Because of a lack of water? I ask. The leathery skin on the fruit has turned a nice orange-red. Theres Cheat Death for their antioxidant-rich pomegranate juice and Get Crackin for their pistachios and Untouched by Man for their Fiji water. If he knows what hes doing, the shears can make a thousand more pounds an acre.. But for every good-sized fruit, theres a bunch that never sized up. Resnick is giving him one of his looks. And so that water was feedingResnick pistachios and almonds and keeping them alive in the worst of the drought. His ego had gotten the best of him, he conceded. Veronica Martinez is the news librarian for the Bay Area News Group. California had passed a law intended to stop the rising of new towns in the middle of nowhere. It should be right here, but I dont see it. They planted the first 640 acres, half the pomegranates in the country at the time, knowing there was zero market. Being Wonderful means more than growing, harvesting, and distributing the best of the best. His second son is a psychiatrist. Too many almonds. Rubbish, said Vidovich, in a Los Altos office decorated with maps of his land holdings. . So in that time, we started cleaning windows, too. They named the business Clean Time Building Maintenance.
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