A woman named Lupe is standing above me on the wooden stairway that climbs to the front door of her trailer. Fifty-three percent of our employees are obese, and 12 percent of them have diabetes., The growers start to fidget. The graders, sorters, and beeping forklift drivers head to an immaculate caf, where the Wonderful Saladroasted chicken, mixed greens, cilantro, pistachios, and slices of mandarin in a blue cheese vinaigrettesells for $3. Vicente Fernndez, the king of Ranchera music, is crooning to no one, but it wont be this way in 30 minutes, Hussein tells me. The bureau happened to be my house in northwest Fresno. His father was 3 years old at the time. 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 believer and the skeptic do their tussle inside my head. I turn back around and find Route 46, the road that killed James Dean. Together, the Resnicks have wedded the valleys hidebound farming culture with L.A.s celebrity culture. The plastic unfurls across the grove like a giant roll of Saran Wrap. They resent howhe sold $73 million worth of water rights to Mojave Water Agency in Southern California. He knows what I dont know. On the south end stands the Wonderful Community Center, where residents are urged to attend thrice-weekly Zumba and core-training sessions, healthy cooking classes, and weekend cultural outings featuring the likes of Americas Premier Latino Dance Company. Both GSAs, along with three others in the Tulare Lake subbasin, submitted a single joint groundwater plan. She is the brander of the empire, the final word on their Super Bowl ads, the creator of product marketing. All Access Digital offer for just 99 cents! This is one of the ways the Nut King and the Pomegranate Queen are defying the California drought. 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. Through it all, Marketplace is here for you. On the way out of the market, Pablo buys a case of Pacifico. He kept planting more and more trees. The image of water moves on and on through miles of western Kern. 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. Pink and white oleanders divide the highway, and every third vehicle that whooshes by is a big rig. A cross of Jesus hangs from the bedpost. Along with paying a quarter-million for recharging the aquifer, with the terms including a restriction on pumping of up to 36,000 acre-feet annually, or 130,000 acre-feet within a five-year consecutive period and a separate restriction that the district, nor its members, move water outside of Tulare and Kings counties. 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. The truth a mercenary has landed on. As the nuts pour down onto the roof of the catcher, the operator shifts the trough so that it becomes a conveyor belt. His first wife, the mother of his two sons and daughter, told him she was quite happy living in their $30,000 condo in Culver City. Made of durable plastic, the pipe would be buried four feet below the bottom of the canal, with a foot-deep cement barrier to protect both. It wont hurt the canal, he said. Some of them have paid $12,000 to buy their trailers and spent thousands more to fix them up. More recently, he earned $40 million in an easement deal with a water bank and exchange that seeks to siphon flood water out of a Kings County canal for storage in Kern County. He called it fake junk, sued, and won. If the workers doubt the benefit of the enzymes from apple cider vinegar, video banners stream a continuous message of bad food habits to be broken and body mass indexes to be measured and met. 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. 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. But, until now, nobody had the money to fight back.. But this wasnt the Resnick Pavilion at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The farmer isnt here to smell the cracking open of wood, the ripping open of warm secret earth. This is a forgotten community. Nothing will stop the houses. Lynda built sidewalks and storm drains, the new park and community center, and repaved the roads. If you study his moves, you can see a method to the acres he is accumulating. Four thousand peoplemore than double the number on the highway signlive in town, and three out of every four rely on a payday from Wonderful. Sitting in his mansion in 2008, he already counted more than 100,000 acres of orchards across five counties. A California developer, farmer, and water buyer, John Vidovich, is seeking approval to build a beef feedlot and processing plant near Lemoore on what appears to be a 789-acre project located along Highway 41, just south of Highway 198. . He brought great ideas to the table and helped make and then execute tough choices. See All Contacts. The rent is $540. On the way out, the voice in their head, Lyndas voice, goads them to give one more hour to the Wonderful Fitness Center. Every last tree has been torn out of the ground. . But not even the two projects working in perfect tandem can defy drought. John Vidovich will tell you hes the interloper who came over the other mountain, the Coast Range. The citrus is still handpicked but all the nuts are machine picked, and thats idled workers as well. John Vidovich is 67 years old and was born on 11/23/1955. She wasnt content to pursue the usual list of wealthy businessmen as clients. No whistle shouts mealtime in the modern-day company town. Boswell says no 2022-08-07 - By Lisa M. Krieger and Veronica Martinez Staff writers . Shes now providing tutors and counselors in every region of California to boost the graduation rate. Instead, Southern California water users in the arid desert municipal and industrial alike now hold the rights. He was headed to the fields at the same time that another farmworker, drunk on beer, was coming home from the fields. He did this first in the name of wheat and then beef, milk, raisins, cotton, and nuts. I had not seen any. Nothing changes. 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. Valuable research and technology reports. Stewart tries to interrupt, but hes not the boss in this room. Boswell II started the Boswell company. He and Lynda wanted to run their own ads for their own brand. Contact 4? Background details that you might want to know . 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 Federal Trade Commission found Wonderful guilty of false advertising and ordered the Resnicks to stop claiming that POM cured heart disease and erectile dysfunction. He saved up a down payment for a raisin ranch west of Fresno, where my father was born in the worst of the Great Depression. Contact 2? It was true that agriculture had been selling state project water to cities for two decades. And so I began with slaughter and madness and then moved on to bartenders for fathers. And the Resnicks run the place, thats where this story gets conflicted and very complicated because in the last five to eight years they have committed millions and millions of dollars to making this place better educating the children, helping the workers deal with obesity and things like that. U.S. immigration has little say-so here. And state groundwater regulations restrict the drilling of new agricultural wells. He launches into a CFOs riff on the pistachio market. Brad Steinwede. Because, while he does farm thousands of acres of pistachios, almonds [] We send money home each month to our families left behind, Lupe says. This last-ditch water in Lost Hills wont make everything right. Theyre dusty with San Joaquin dirt. They're drought's best buddies." John Vidovich will tell you he's the interloper who came over the other mountain, the Coast Range. 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. Resnick has saved the front seat for me. There is nothing here, one of the townsfolk told Gibler. This doesnt count the 21,000 acres of grapefruits and limes hes growing in Texas and Mexico. He had his hands on 65 percent of the nations crop. Boswell Company. That company led to another company, and he soon owned half the commercial alarm accounts in Los Angeles. And you know why? Thats on top of managing 100,000 acres of farmland and sitting in on Valley-based water boards. He was about my size, but he was very tough. His trees were drinking from the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project, from rivers and irrigation canals and the water bank. "Water rights are like democracy," he told Forbes in 1989. So he started laying pipes last December. So so sleepy, says another. And its even worse for the children in Kings County. In the trailer next door, Lupes cousin Margarita lives with her husband, Selfo, and their three young children. 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. Each square-mile section is divided into blocks, and each block counts a precise number of rows. At age 81, hes gotten so big, he doesnt know how big. I grew up in the suburbs where our playgrounds were named after the pioneers of fruit and canals of irrigation shot through our neighborhoods to the farms we did not know. China (including Macau and . But this can lead to conflict and distrust. Hes planting ground that no one has ever planted before. It wouldnt even make a couple of sections of his almonds. She remembers handing the boy to her sister-in-law, who carried phony papers, and watching them cross by bridge into California. Lynda sent the first batches of POM, week after week, as gifts to David Bowie, Rupert Murdoch, and Disney head Michael Eisner. The fog is our history. They thwack back. Not a single penny was put in that piggy bank.. The net return on the pistachio proves that Wonderfuls dominance in the market has benefited every grower in the room. Summary. His father bought a neighborhood bar and ran it with the same iron fist with which he ran the house. Its gone, I say. But theres none for his precious corn, almond and pistachio trees in the south county and, because of new restrictions, he cant simply drill a new wellthere. Did it teach him any lessons? All but a handful come from Mexico. Thousands of Wonderful acres lay bare. He had none of his fathers sentimentality. He told his neighbors to alter the flight of the bees or hed sue them for trespassing. I take out my cellphone and swipe across Google Maps. 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. What if the endless days without rain become endless years? Only after the media were alerted did Stewart and Lynda claim to have discovered the clear-cutting. He doesnt know about the pipeline. But if its the tube that Im looking to follow, I must drive through the almond grove. The 20-year-olds look like 20-year-olds; the 30-year-olds, like 40-year-olds; the 40-year-olds, like 60-year-olds. 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. 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. On this same stretch of 99, I once wrote a story about farmworkers who moonlighted as meth cookers to make ends meet. 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 company is now run by son Jim, or J.W., 69, who lives 2.5 hours away from this dusty valley in a palatial home in the wealthy Southern California town of La Caada Flintridge. Vidovich did not immediately respond . His strategy, and his Silicon Valley wealth, arouse both admiration and suspicion in this rural community. Hes not only able to irrigate his nut trees with an imported flow of groundwater40,000 acre-feet in some years. He had an industrial machine, hardly used, that scrubbed and waxed floors. They had survived the drought. The Wheat King begets the Cattle King, and the Cattle King begets the Cotton King, and the Cotton King begets the Nut King and Pomegranate Queen. If he sticks even a toe onto her turf, says a former business partner, she gives him a look that sends him right back.. Then he motions to Lynda, whos standing off to the side of the light-dimmed stage. 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. The making of a billionaire over the next half-century was a series of dots that connected in the California sunshine. She seems a little nervous waiting in the wings. Thats our goal. Where gravity needs a boost, the pipes run atop wooden crates used to pack boxes of fruit. Theyre paying $340 a month for its privilege. It will carry his private water on his private land, never leaving the regions geological basin. Shoving aside the coins, they introduced a Scarlett OHara doll that, by itself, raked in $35 million in sales. 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. Do you know what I am? Not a single one of them wants any part of Wonderful. Nearly a third of the harvestthe nuts grown by Wonderful, the nuts grown by hundreds of farmers who belong to the Wonderful brandwill come through these gates. Frankly, Im having too much fun to think about retiring., Even if he were inclined to wind down, he had no successor in mind. Or at least this is what I can glean through the car window. Im here to show the farmer that ags footprint needs to get smaller.. I remind him of the time we spent together eight years earlier in his Sunset House. Vidovich has more than one reason to be evasive. This is the first installment of a new SUNLIGHT Series: Kings of the River, a review of the machinations and battles on the oft-overlooked Kings River. Support. For a long time, she got no credit. Ive never seen her up close, never watched her in action. 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. Ron DeSantis isn't returning his calls . They planted the first 640 acres, half the pomegranates in the country at the time, knowing there was zero market. My grandfather, a survivor of the Armenian genocide, traveled 7,000 miles by ship and train in 1920 to find out if his uncles exhortationThe grapes here are the size of jade eggswas true. Damn, if he doesnt look even younger and more fit than the last time I saw him eight years earlier. 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. Boswell told me what a fool he and his forebears had been for wasting water, sun, and soil in California to raise fiber, of all things. I dont know. You cant be exporting groundwater from one basin to another., Whatever water hes taking, its too little, too late.. Bernard, whats happened? Before he died at age 86, J.G. Now Lynda herself stands before us, a single light over her head. The courtship of Stewart and Lynda went fast. You sure this isnt 18 tons an acre? he says, goading. Welcome to San Antonio del Norte, he says. 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. 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. Hes using it to irrigate his almonds and pistachios in Lost Hills. Vidovich, who has declined to sign paperwork ensuring his pipeline wont cause harm, filed a lawsuit alleging trespass. The ancestral Tulare Lake was once the master of this valley, a catch basin for four mighty rivers the Kern, Tule, Kaweah and Kings flowing down from the Sierra.
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