I learned back then that our farmers thought the whole world was out to screw them. Or at least this is what I can glean through the car window. No rain in five years. He purchased his first 640-acre section in the late 1970s and kept adding more sections of almonds, pistachios, pomegranates, and citrus until he stretched the lines of agriculture like no Californian before him. Theyre droughts best buddies.. As the nuts pour down onto the roof of the catcher, the operator shifts the trough so that it becomes a conveyor belt. The matter was headed to court when Vidovich paid a visit to Resnick. In the trailer next door, Lupes cousin Margarita lives with her husband, Selfo, and their three young children. I exited my car and approached the entrance with its 14-foot columns and wrought-iron balustrades. Scott: How sustainable is this operation given that California only recently came out of a long drought and may actually be headed there again soon? Lets meet again in two weeks, he said. 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. At the time we were handing out college scholarships in the valley, but Lynda decided it wasnt nearly enough. A year and a half after hearing Sandeland in the wake of Giblers storyLynda kicked into high gear their mission to save Lost Hills and several other farmworker towns where Wonderful operated its orchards and processing plants. When its Pablos turn, he hands Hussein a check for $437, and Hussein counts out $433 back to him in cash. 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. Hes carrying 55,000 pounds of crop in two swaggering trailers open to the sun. Of all the wonders of Wonderful, this is the one I find most mystifying. Each time I called, his secretary hung up the phone. And, yes, that takes water. Vidovich went on a shopping spree. Im 80 years old. Fussing with one input or another, he can produce 3,500 pounds of nuts an acre. What spikes blood sugar more than a can of Coke? Arax: That is the question that you know Im dealing with in this magazine piece. Just ahead I can see the last section of pipe throwing a cascade of white water into a main canal belonging to the Lost Hills Water District. John Vidovich is scion of his family's development firm, De Anza Properties, which owns Rancho Shopping Center and is renovating Los Altos Gardens. 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. They knew little about the company except it was selling its keepsakes for five times the amount Teleflora was. He only needed to find groundwater from another basin to replace the state aqueduct water he had just sold. I walk up and reintroduce myself. And Vidovich ended up pumping water an extraordinary amount of water out of. Lynda believes that if theyre enticed in the right direction, the 1,300 workers might choose to prepare the same healthy fare at home. Yet Vidovich said he is not personally a booster of the farm bill, and that his company might be better off without it. Who anticipates that you cant fill a water bank for six or seven years?, Come on, I say. California is free to return to its amnesia. The fight between the Tulare Lake Canal Company, controlled by the J.G. Vidovich, in 2009, according to media reports, sold the rights to 14,000-acre-feet of state water from a Kings County water district to southern California for $73 million. For college, he picked California Polytechnic in San Luis Obispo over the hill and majored in agriculture business. Each mound is fed into an even bigger machine whose teeth pulverize the trees and make sawdust. He was dressed in the latest slim-fit style. Food and Beverage Manufacturing . No bee can penetrate the shield, and his mandarins remain seedless. At issue? Share with Us. Section, block, and row dont compute; he has to direct me by cellphone and guideposts. This was Lost Hills before Lynda got involved. I call the manager of the Lost Hills Water District. The sober man died. Anzaldos grandfather came from Guadalajara in the 1950s as part of the bracero farmworker program. A good deal of sunshine. My grandmother said it was his leftist politics that ate up that vineyard and the ones that followed. "I think what they're doing is, there's a lot of issues with the farm bill, so they're trying to find scapegoats.". Instead of trying to sell the fruit as a piece of fruit, they squeezed its seeds into POMWonderful. He doesnt know about the pipeline. The knoll begins to rise. In the late 1970s, he went looking for a hedge against inflation. But I couldnt have picked a more cinematic name than Lost Hills. 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. One cousin arrived only last week. I gaze out the passenger window, looking for the glint of the pipeline. Read our full comments policy: losaltosonline.com/comments, $5.00 Six hundred pistachio growers in blue jeans isnt her usual crowd. When he materializes onstage, he is wearing narrow black jeans, a black mock turtleneck, and a dark jacket. Angiola agreed not to pump more than 36,000 acre feet a year, or more than 130,000 acre feet in any consecutive five-year period. She didnt understand his drive. A husband and wife sharing the reins is rare for corporate America, rarer still for industrial agriculture. Its gone. A pump is shooting water out of the canal and into the Rain for Rent pipes. Sports and playground activities are prohibited at the beach, picnic areas are closed, and masks must be worn by all visitors. Did it teach him any lessons? 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. Hit enter to search or ESC to close. He went out and bought an alarm company. Every time I see it, Im inspired and proud of what weve been able to accomplish in such a short amount of time. He was a big drinker, a big liver who loved the fast life. No water in the ground to make up for the missing government supply. His accountant suggested he buy apartments. It isnt a lot of water., Im not going to give you the numbers. Unlike many other billionaires, they could poke fun at themselves. The net return on the pistachio proves that Wonderfuls dominance in the market has benefited every grower in the room. All this stirring up is a consequence of mechanization. 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. The extraction of water beneath the lake bottom wont last forever. How much bigger can agriculture get. When it doesnt come, he finds a way to make it come. He spits tobacco juice into the empty can of Rockstar. He bought 20,000 acres in the Tulare Lake basinland that not even Boswell dared farm. Nothing changes. Vidovich continues to run De Anza and in a surprisingly hands-on manner. Id rather be unknown than known. He had recently read The King of California, and that got him thinking. Chance of rain 100%. The City of Lemoore is one such agency obligated to respond. Lynda is also mapping out a farm-to-food program where students will grow fruits, vegetables, and grains on a plot of village land. How come?, We dont need it anymore, he whispers., Back at the plant, Lynda is meeting with Wonderful doctors, nurses, and farmworkers. A few weeks later, I found myself riding up the elevator of a high-rise on the Westside of Los Angeles. Have we gone too far? So much snowmelt comes down the mountain that it nearly takes out Oroville Dam. He said he bought his first parcel here in 1994 when he invested in a foreclosed property in Kings County. My dust cloud tells him Im getting close. It was simply a place to park some money and have another opportunity. He drove to Delano, the farm town where Chavez and his union had made so much trouble and history. Whether those pipes end on Vidovich lands or Resnicks is hard to know. We pile back into the van and head up the road. I remind him of the time we spent together eight years earlier in his Sunset House. A worker can still order a hamburger, but its half the size of the old hamburger and costs $6twice what the wild salmon served with creamed leeks and raw asparagus salad costs. 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. We hope that you continue to enjoy our free content. From the vaulted ceilings with gold-leaf moldings hung two blown-glass chandeliers. China, for one, prefers the Iranian pistachio. Its bringing water from the Dudley Ridge Water District in Kings County. He was headed to the fields at the same time that another farmworker, drunk on beer, was coming home from the fields. Vidovich is known in the area for his political activity as well as his development projects. Before we go much further, you should probably know a little more about Vidovich. Or at least thats the way Vidovich puts it when I finally reach him. The fog is our history. One of the first things he did with his monopoly was kill the California Pistachio Commission, the industrys marketing group, by yanking his funding. With that insight, he sold the company for $2.5 million and went into the security guard business. "There is a national will to be self-sufficient in agriculture. Lived In Aliquippa PA, Monaca PA. Related To Michele Vidovich, Amy Vidovich. He was going to Vegas, hanging out with his own Damon Runyon characters, and making plans to get even bigger. Its John Vidovich. Somehow, 30 or 40 nuts arent compelled to drop. They were selling 2,500 acres of oranges and lemons and a packing house for a third of their appraised value, Resnick said. The Federal Trade Commission found Wonderful guilty of false advertising and ordered the Resnicks to stop claiming that POM cured heart disease and erectile dysfunction. Sandridge Partners received most of its subsidy for upland cotton production but also received payments for growing six other commodities. Stewart tries to interrupt, but hes not the boss in this room. In fact, Vidovich frequently moves water by pipeline, Pace said, pointing to a massive line Vidovich installed that appears to take Angiola groundwater through his Dudley Ridge lands. John Vidovich just wants to farm, he says. But you take some risks in business. Hes not only able to irrigate his nut trees with an imported flow of groundwater40,000 acre-feet in some years. No whistle shouts mealtime in the modern-day company town. "We're just in the preliminary parts of planning for this," he said. It was true that agriculture had been selling state project water to cities for two decades. Movies. A flour tortilla. And one of the things he was doing was sort of an off-the-books irrigation deal? Central Californias family raisin farms are drying up, Commercial bees, the unsung heroes of the nut business, Drought has California farms destroying crops, rather than pay for water, A California farm battles drought: Were out here trying to survive, Farm country frets over impact of John Deere strike, Inside the trial of Theranos Elizabeth Holmes, Californias drought takes a toll on the states clothing manufacturers, Your donation today powers the independent journalism that you rely on. In fact, his detractors call him the single greatest threat to Central Valley farming ever to come down the pike. One of his frat brothers was a wealthy kid whose father ran a janitorial business. Photo courtesy of Trent Davis Bailey/The California Sunday Magazine. He sat behind a desk without clutter and stood up to shake my hand. When the clamps let go of the trunk, 8,000 almonds, green outer shells wilted and partly opened, the meat inside a wooden womb, lie scattered on the flat dry earth. 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. Thats why hes in trouble., So he makes a deal for private water?, Yep. Thats why he built the pipeline. During the drought, the Boswell Company has drilled 52 holes into the old lake bottomseven of these wells reaching a depth of 2,500 feet. The water is filtered for arsenic, boron, and other salts, and the monthly tests show no violation of state or federal standards. Your account number is your one-line street address as printed on your newspaper use normal capitalization. When you first meet John Vidovich, everything from his ball cap to his dirty boots tells you, Positive Cases Among Kern Residents: 310,095, Recovered and Presumed Recovered Residents: 305,002, Percentage of all cases that are unvaccinated:71, Percentage of all hospitalizations that are unvaccinated:83.13, Source: Kern County Public Health Services Department. From now on, theyll grow on land that offers a double protection against drought. Down the great aqueduct, by freight of politics and gravity, came the excess waters of the Sacramento River. Anzaldo grew up in Bakersfield and attended a Catholic high school where he played football and basketball. Giant pincers manned by a single worker grab the tree by the throat and start shaking. Why not we start with an extended interview or two? I offered. Hes getting ready to introduce Lynda, the main speaker, but first he wants to address the federal governments recent recall of Wonderful pistachios. I leave Gabbys and follow a winding concrete path through the new Wonderful Park. The four grandchildren have visited the orchards once or twice. Main Street is Highway 46, which slices through the middle of town. His real estate empire became big enough to bring aboard each of his four children. Rain likely. It was a curious statement but true. I did not name the town, Lynda says. All told, 36 men operating six machines will harvest the orchard in six days. What if I failed? The GSAs are supposed to set pumping limits to stop overdraft. Already, the high school is filled with hundreds of students bused in from farmworker towns that are among the poorest communities in the West. I didnt see our creation, much less the figures bent under the canopies of vine that our creation counted on. They planted the first 640 acres, half the pomegranates in the country at the time, knowing there was zero market. He recalled bidding on a construction project while studying for the bar exam. The rain starts to fall, big, fat, slashing drops that feel like electricity on my open palm. Past Oildale and the boxcar where Merle Haggard grew up. They issued a commemorative medal of Tiger Woods winning the 1997 Masters that offended the golfer. The idea of capturing Kings River floodwaters isnt new. Since international sanctions were lifted five years earlier, Iran has been crowding the market with its more buttery-tasting pistachios. No farmer ever is. But if he thinks youre defying him, hell start with, Nobody realizes the good Ive done for agriculture. Then he moves on to, Do you know who I am? Halfway through his solo performance, he interrupted his set to tell us a piggy bank had been set up by the exit to donate money to the hardworking men and women in the fields. When the concert was over, I took my wife and children backstage to meet him. I dont believe we should be sending water to LA, he said. The calculation and hubris inside it. Groundwater and floodwater are two very different things. Fallowing the farm until the footprint gets smaller and smaller. If Resnick retains every drop, he might squeeze 25 acre-feet of water a day out of both pipes. This is a magnitude of intervention that no other agricultural company in California has ever attempted. He told his neighbors to alter the flight of the bees or hed sue them for trespassing. All I know is I dont want to split it up or sell it in some leveraged buyout. The wall of Pacifico and 16-ounce cans of Bud is rebuilt daily. John Gibler, a freelance journalist, found Lost Hills a year before Lynda. We rely on your financial support to keep making that possible. His face is still blank. Pace gave a nod to Vidovich on that count. 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. Vidovich didnt have to wait long for a buyer to come calling. 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. 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. Deadly in the rush of harvest, deadly in the quiet of fog, deadly in the blur of Saturday nights when the fieldwork is done and the beer drinking becomes a second humiliation. He did little, if any, catting around. Twine strung trailer to trailer hangs with the laundry of fathers, mothers, and children. A judge found this past March that the initiative was flawed because Vidovich used his own project description instead of the neutral description by the Cupertino city attorney. Frankly, Im having too much fun to think about retiring., Even if he were inclined to wind down, he had no successor in mind. The Wonderful Company is located in Californias Central Valley where droughts hit frequently, but that hasnt stopped the company from harvesting record crops. A bunch of trees are going dry, he says. My health, knock on wood, is good. Resnick also has lands just south of the Kings/Kern county line in Lost Hills and many of Vidovichs detractors believe thats where a lot of that Angiola groundwater is going. Now, Pace said, Vidovich will do the same thing on a larger scale by moving Kings and Tulare groundwater to Kern County. Thats 281 square miles. She had recently divorced and wasnt about to settle for a life in Culver City. Resnick dipped into his savings from his job at a mental hospital and went in half on the machine. "Would I build there if I had the money? How much water are we talking about?, Id rather not get too specific. There are often laws binding it to a basin. Still, he was starting to think about his legacy, and thats why he finally agreed to meet with me. Every mogul, every movie star. If that happens, theyll go down the highway, and hell lose the $1 he takes for every $100 worth of their checks. I turn back around and find Route 46, the road that killed James Dean. Vidovich threatened that all FPB members critical of "Operation Catch-Up" or who spoke to . The neighborhoods didnt have sidewalks; when it rained, the kids had to walk to school in the mud. The baby is now a 20-year-old student at Bakersfield College. A portion of his wages will be set aside each month to pay down the debt. His many land purchases and involvement on water boards are all about farming, not selling water to L.A. As featured on. He called it fake junk, sued, and won. Thousands of Wonderful acres lay bare. Before he died at age 86, J.G. Now theres something here. It becomes something else as soon as they encounter their workers in another guiseas a fellow shopper at Costco or as the parents of the kid who goes to school with their kid. Ive done no big wrong in my life that would cause me to have any. Sandridge Partners, L.P. Business Data Lynda built sidewalks and storm drains, the new park and community center, and repaved the roads. Why not send him an email? the secretary suggested. Sure enough, cozied up next to the bank of the aqueduct, I see a glint. Example: 138 Main St. Down a rutted road, 100 trailers with foundations dressed in plywood back up against an orchard. The borough measured no more than 2 square miles. It was a hit. Theres a mythology out there that Angiola is stealing water, he said. The city manager is in the process of coordinating a response, "said Gornick. Resnick wanted no part in my story. The biggest misconception about John is that he wants to sell water to LA, he said. Before he left her to cross alone, he gave her soda, water, chips, and Cheetos. Each bush is saddled with more than a hundred pomegranates the size of softballs and baseballs. Vidovich has long been at odds with. Lynda has a son who works as a musician and a son who suffered a birth trauma and lives in a care facility. I cash them the same. As a class of people, the farmers and real estate developers harbor a deep-down contempt for what they have built. Thank you for reading! Even the community water tank is painted baby blue with a big sunflower. 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. Coke, Gatorade, and Monster Energy are sky-high in sweeteners, but dont be fooled by that SunnyD, either. Past Delano and the first vineyards that Cesar Chavez marched against. 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.. At one point, he was moving nearly 30,000 acre feet a year, according to Angiolas records. The junk scattered about could be a lot worse. The Tulare Lake Canal Company, controlled by JG Boswell Company, moved the equipment onto . But its just a cover for taking water out, Pace said. My head keeps hitting the sunroof. Promotional Rates were found for your code. Stewart refers to the occasional trek between Lost Hills and Beverly Hillsroughly 140 milesas a carpetbaggers distance. It seems even longer, he says, if you add in the psychological distance of being an East Coast Jew in a California farm belt where Jews are few and far between. PRIVACY POLICY. Cotton still grows on the lake bottom, but less and less each year. She deftly places her body between him and me. I meet up with the Wonderful field man who first tipped me off to the pipeline. His 15 million trees in the San Joaquin Valley consume more than 400,000 acre-feet of water a year. The grass is a color green on the verge of blue, and the cutouts for trees are razor etched. To manage the disease. The tumbleweeds on open ground give you a peek into what Lost Hills looked like before the aqueduct made a river here. Too many almonds. He sold rights to more than 14,000 acre feet a year to the Mojave Water Agency in San Bernardino County for a headline-grabbing $73 million. He did this first in the name of wheat and then beef, milk, raisins, cotton, and nuts. 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. The pizza dough is cauliflower, too. 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. They are still paying off the $27,000 debt to relatives who hired the coyote. Angiola was ordered to stop pumping and eventually the districts came to a settlement.