All but a handful come from Mexico. Five years ago, they decided to get rid of the nacho chips, french fries, and soft drinks. Who would have thought that people would be asking their bartender to fix them a Pomtini? he said. He knows what I dont know. Im not going to live forever, even with the massive amounts of pomegranate juice Im drinking. Resnick picks up the water in Dudley Ridge, Vidovich says. In a valley of dead rivers, each one killed on behalf of agriculture, the aqueduct was the one river still alive. Somehow, 30 or 40 nuts arent compelled to drop. Sandridge Partners received federal farm subsidies totaling approximately $1.06 million last year, the largest of any agribusiness in the nation, landing it a headline role in this year's debate. Hes trying to play dumb, but I can see the sliest of grins peeking out from his mustache and goatee. Hes using it to irrigate his almonds and pistachios in Lost Hills. Id rather be unknown than known. He had recently read The King of California, and that got him thinking. If they pass a law saying I cant sell it, then I cant sell it. Once he finished grabbing the flow of the five rivers that ran across the plain, he used his turbine pumps to seize the water beneath the ground. No stranger enters this zone unless its to get rid of a body or dump waste from cooking meth or drown a hot car. Vidovich is gobbling up all the parcels he can so he can keep on pumping, Mitchell said. Ive never given an interview to a newspaper or magazine before. Thats why he built the pipeline. She had her own bookabout her genius as a marketergoing. He launches into a CFOs riff on the pistachio market. Stephen Vidovich retired but kept a watchful eye on the company, getting daily reports and giving advice, John Vidovich told the San Jose Mercury News after his fathers death. The State Water Project, for the first time in six years, delivers surplus flows. His face is still blank. The land to him isnt real. He came to California in the 1950s to remake himself. A plume of dust joins up with other plumes of dust until the sky over the valley turns sickly. 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. In fact, the piece is called A kingdom from dust. Its a pretty dry place right? This drought has brought Stewart to his knees. The state of California has adopted a new law that finally regulates the pumping. 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. Where he takes the water is none of my business., Hes taking it into his orchards in Kern. 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. No. The stacks of bottles gave him no answer. California growers, in the grip of drought, have produced 900 million pounds of the green nut. But she cannot remember the last time she or Manuel or their children drank it. This is Lynda.. There are plans, crazy as it sounds, to take out 10,000 acres of almonds. Still, he was starting to think about his legacy, and thats why he finally agreed to meet with me. The POM tanks, Im told, are backed up with a three-year supply. My father, born in a vineyard outside Fresno, was a raisin grower before he became a bar owner. It would involve a public permitting process and be very difficult, not to mention expensive, both men said. "I don't want to make any. SGMA refers to the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act passed in 2014 that mandates water basins be in balance by 2040. 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. The new plant, the size of seven super Walmarts and built at a cost of $300 million, rises out of a clearing like an apparition. Hes a 61-year-old developer who grew up on a farm in Sunnyvale in the heart of what would become the Silicon Valley. Somehow, it made its way to Lynda. The farmers there are raising almost 1 million acres of crops, and fewer than half these acres are irrigated with flows from the Kern. Water fight between two of Valley's largest growers heads to court I gaze out the passenger window, looking for the glint of the pipeline. He grew up in New Jersey, where his father ran a bar. The making of a billionaire over the next half-century was a series of dots that connected in the California sunshine. Because Lupe had no papers, she followed the coyote for many more miles until they reached a steep pass. I cross the Tulare County line heading south into Bakersfield, and there in front of me, for no eye to miss, stands the Wonderful Citrus complex with its four-story storage building designed in the shape of an almighty box of Halo mandarins. And then it hits me when I reach the road to Weedpatch, where my grandfathers story in Americaa poet on his hands and knees picking potatoesbegan. Scott: And of course that could have serious implications for these workers. Past Delano and the first vineyards that Cesar Chavez marched against. According to sources, an application for a proposed feedlot and slaughterhouse was submitted last month. A minute later, I reconnect with the pipeline and pursue its length for a football field. The shiny red orbs, three months shy of harvest, pop out from the bright green leaves like bulbs on a Christmas tree. Ive learned that I have to be diversified in my water, Vidovich said. 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. Later, Page would run for and win a seat on the Kern County Water Agency board. 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. But if its the tube that Im looking to follow, I must drive through the almond grove. This is a magnitude of intervention that no other agricultural company in California has ever attempted. This isnt the Lynda posing for photos with Barbra Streisand. Vidovich says the animus against him goes back to his 2009 sale of State Water Project (SWP) contract rights tied to land he owned in the Dudley Ridge Water District in Kings County. Like many billionaires, he didnt have a decent explanation for his fortune. For the next two or three seconds, the almonds pour down like hail. Past McFarland and the high school runners who won five state championships in a row in the 1990s. Theres a mythology out there that Angiola is stealing water, he said. 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? Conceived by Lynda, it cost one fortune to build and a second fortune to light up. He had no intention of farming it, either. 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. John Vidovich - Sandridge Partners, L.P., Buttonwillow, California At age 81, he's gotten so big, he doesn't know how big. Then some of the money we save goes to pay the coyote. Marketplace host Amy Scott spoke with Mark Arax, who wrote an articlein The California Sunday Magazine about the Wonderful Companys farming business and issues of sustainability in the Central Valley. It was the early spring of 2008, and this time his secretary didnt hang up on me. "I have sent my opinion to three county supervisors and our city manager. Vidovich has long been at odds with. Theyre either working in the heat or hiding from the heat. They planted the first 640 acres, half the pomegranates in the country at the time, knowing there was zero market. She described commodity programs as making up less than 13 percent of the farm bill. Its not the fidget of boredom. Too many pomegranates. None of the sales taxes go to City Hall because Lost Hills isnt a city. Thats a billion-dollar crop. "The plan is to hold a special meeting on Tuesday, then submit," he explained to The Leader via a text. Right there in the big canal of the Dudley Ridge Water District. It comes out to $2,000 a month. use no threatening or hateful language. Yet he doesn't think the farm bill in its present form is going to achieve its protectionist goals. According to some observers, the facility is expected to hold a 1,000-cow feedlot (which can be developed upwards of 12,500 animals) and a slaughterhouse at the proposed site, within spitting distance of the city of Lemoore and West Hills College Lemoore. There before me, two aluminum pipes, side by side, 12 inches in diameter each, slither in the sun. I saw her a few months ago. Though the project is billed as flood control, the agreement also allows Vidovich to move groundwater. Because the urban places would pay a hell of a lot of money for it. PRIVACY POLICY. Ive never seen her up close, never watched her in action. John Vidovich - Summer Diaspora Business Trip 2017 - YouTube For half my life, I never stopped to wonder: How much was magic? Already, the high school is filled with hundreds of students bused in from farmworker towns that are among the poorest communities in the West. He commands his realm, and she commands hers, and he takes care to mind the line. 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. Or at least this is what I can glean through the car window. Through it all, Marketplace is here for you. 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. Selfo works 50 hours a week as an irrigator. California showed me why.. But for every good-sized fruit, theres a bunch that never sized up. Resnick is giving him one of his looks. The three of them spent two weeks of all-nighters making copies. Well still make money.. I walk up and reintroduce myself. Lupe excuses herself to prepare dinner. My old well cant compete with his new wells. Movies. On the shallow bottom, the women fished mussels and clams with their toes. I dont know. To manage the disease. When he was told there were fields upon fields, he did not believe there could be this many fields. The matter was headed to court when Vidovich paid a visit to Resnick. He points to the young almond trees that envelop his 20 acres like a siege. From a safe, Ellsberg had lifted the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of how successive presidents lied to the public to cover up the failings of the Vietnam War. 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. When it goes into full effect, in a decade or two, more than a million acres of cropland across the valley will have to be retired. Notices were sent to the oversight agencies, including the City of Lemoore, Caltrans, and other relevant agencies. It hardly ceases for the next five months. Phone Number: (724) 495-**** John T Vidovich, age 84 View Full Report Address:***** Butternut Ridge Rd, Elyria, OH. It moves in a wave from trunk to limb to nut and back down to earth. Use the 'Report' link on Each mound is fed into an even bigger machine whose teeth pulverize the trees and make sawdust. Vidovich says he uses that Angiola groundwater to farm in Dudley Ridge, so the groundwater isnt leaving its home basin. Days Inn or Motel 6. 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. The bowls on her kitchen table are filled with grapes, berries, bananas, and red and green bell peppers. Since the middle of the drought, the price of almonds has dropped almost by half. His grandfather Resnick had fled the Ukraine in the wake of another killing of Jews by Cossacks. 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. A van pulls up to the curb, and the door slides open. "Would I build there if I had the money? He called it fake junk, sued, and won. Resnick dipped into his savings from his job at a mental hospital and went in half on the machine. Often an equal amount of water splits south, wreaking havoc on farmland in the old Tulare Lake bottom, about 60 miles northwest of Bakersfield. 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. The baby is now a 20-year-old student at Bakersfield College. He had an industrial machine, hardly used, that scrubbed and waxed floors. If I follow them north through Resnick pomegranates, I can find out where the water is coming from. Lynda built sidewalks and storm drains, the new park and community center, and repaved the roads. He was in the mood to gamble. Did it teach him any lessons? So the way Pablo uses own isnt necessarily a pejorative. 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. One hundred and twenty thousand acres of nuts and fruits and berries in California and still counting. Subscribers keep our independent community news in business. By the time they returned to Beverly Hills, he had lost interest in a book about his life, at least one that I might write. None of this is my idea. The men and women who planted, irrigated, sprayed, and picked our crops were phantoms. 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. Inside, a Wonderful media specialist sees that Resnick needs to be rescued. My life is about California. 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. 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. The July sun is a scorcher, and I fuss with the dial on the AC long enough to blow past the towns one stoplight and the aqueduct, too. Its just smart business. As far as the company can tell, no active salmonella has ever traced back to the plant. There is also an existing subdivision just southeast of the college near Highway 198 (Cimmaron Park). For now, shes playing country western music on the sound system and trying to lure a combination of oil-field workers, supervisors at Wonderful, and travelers driving the last miles of James Dean. They went to law school together and joined the same program in the Navy reserves. Vidovich is, after all, a powerful landowner in the Central Valley. My dust cloud tells him Im getting close. The boss showed him a storeroom filled with chemicals tossed here and there and told him to bring order to the mess. I cut across Twisselman Road to the pipeline gliding along the aqueduct like a silver snake. He and the Resnicks had fought an ugly legal battle that tore their Cutie brand in two. Their houses made from railroad boxcars have been painted purple, blue, yellow, and gold. The next year, it delivers 300,000 acre-feet. Sandridge Partners, L.P. Business Data I roll past Tulare, where every February they hold the biggest tractor show in the world, even bigger than the one in Paris. I turn back around and find Route 46, the road that killed James Dean. Like a lot of empires, it comes to an end., So what about you? I ask. ! it says. One year, it delivers 900,000 acre-feet of snowmelt. He is also known for his water deals. The concept changed the industry. I dont know how Hershey did Hershey, Pennsylvania, but Lynda is present in every painted sunburst, every planted flower, every blade of grass. Plastic drip-irrigation lines stick out of the ground at wrong angles. The proposed project has raised local eyebrows. I did sell water out of Kings County to an urban user and people didnt like it, Vidovich said. The grass is a color green on the verge of blue, and the cutouts for trees are razor etched. Im actually not supposed to talk about it.. The man and his pincers cant be bothered. The front gates of the 25,000-square-foot Beaux Arts mansion on Sunset Boulevard magically opened without a guard giving a nod. 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. The agency did not balk at the price tag: $5,321 an acre-foot. Share with Us. After school and on weekends, wed clean and wax floors. Summer or not, theyre dressed in shirt layered upon shirt and the same no-name dusty blue jeans. 2023 Minnesota Public Radio. I follow him inside to a long line of workers that ends at a plastic window where Hussein sits on the other side, working the cash register like a teller at a race track. All I know is I dont want to split it up or sell it in some leveraged buyout. Giant pincers manned by a single worker grab the tree by the throat and start shaking. Lived In Aliquippa PA, Monaca PA. Related To Michele Vidovich, Amy Vidovich. 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. No water in the ground to make up for the missing government supply. Where the pipes butt up against Twisselman Road, a more clever bit of engineering is required. They have no way to grasp the $50 million to $80 million a year that the Resnicks say they are spending on philanthropy. But he did pass and was admitted to the bar in 1980 at the age of 24. 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. Perched up there, a queen might peek out and utter, Let them eat cake, Lynda once said. So how do we do even better next year?. Arax: They lose their livelihood. "There's the argument that to get rid of (farm subsidies) entirely might eliminate the small, inefficient farmers.". The suit alleges that then-Fire Marshal John Vidovich implemented an "Operation Catch-up" program in which he used untrained and inexperienced inspectors to perform duties after media reports that the LAFD had thousands of overdue inspections. The giant J.G. Two strains of salmonella found in their pistachios had caused a multistate outbreak of illnesses. 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. However, Vidovich has been somewhat of a welcome presence to some in Kings County. Hes planting ground that no one has ever planted before. What to give a grieving widow and her five children in Lost Hills but drinking water? 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. John Vidovich and the Discover executive team are rated an A- by 65 employees. 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 wildfires cant be far behind. Not the people. Its John Vidovich. Whos it going to? I try again to pin him down, but hes a man who likes to think of himself as wily. "I think what they're doing is, there's a lot of issues with the farm bill, so they're trying to find scapegoats.". 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. Mobil and Texaco and Prudential Life were willing to practically give the ground and trees away. Be Proactive. He made friends everywhere he went, John Vidovich told the Mercury News in 2007. If he were on the scene today, hed have to add sashed Queens to the list. This is the west end of Lost Hills, the extraction end. In my lifetime alone, California has gone from 13 million people to 40 million people. He lives down the road in Wasco, the Rose Capital of America, though the roses, too, have turned to nuts. Except when you plug John Vidovichs name into the equation. Hurley, who also serves as general manager of Green Valley, said that basin, which is separate from the Tulare Lake basin, is actually in balance. To do that, the state requires each area to form Groundwater Sustainability Agencies (GSAs) to account for whats going in and coming out of the aquifer. It gives me the luxury to keep on working. Water fight leads to $128.6 million award | Local News In the late 1970s, he went looking for a hedge against inflation. Anzaldos grandfather came from Guadalajara in the 1950s as part of the bracero farmworker program. Kings County Supervisor Joe Neves, whose district would contain the proposed feedlot and slaughterhouse, suggests that the process for approval is just beginning. He was a small, trim man, no more than 5 foot 5, in his early 70s with thinning silver hair and brown eyes rimmed in pink. The Cutie and the Halo are now warring in the fields outside the Visalia Convention Center. By car and foot, I trace the silver pipeline as it creeps north through Wonderful pomegranate orchards. When the mansion was built in 1927, it was known as the Sunset House. It was kind of a crutch in case I flunked, he said. One more bin, a post reads. I applaud, too. Hes farming water. We rely on your financial support to keep making that possible. He certainly looks the part in his well-worn jeans and checkered shirts. I enter an equipment yard where a Wonderful farmhand is standing next to a tractor. The punitive damage portion, about $73 million, was overturned on appeal and the case has been sent back to Kings County. Through the haze I can see the knoll of the aqueduct come closer. Each square-mile section is divided into blocks, and each block counts a precise number of rows. 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.

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