We'd love to hear eyewitness Between March and May of this year, 25 new sales were recorded in Kern alone, according to ParcelQuest, a web service that tracks real estate deals by county. As the growers punch more holes into the ground looking for a vanishing resource, the earth is sinking. The south valleyits people and poverty, its obesity and diabetesis her newest mission. Bruce Springsteen turned it into a song on his Ghost of Tom Joad album. Im down, Stewart, he protests. Through Sandridge, Vidovich owns about 130,000 acres with 38,500 acres in Kern, 82,000 acres in Kings, 9,500 acres in Tulare and 300 acres in Fresno county, per ParcelQuest. Young men and women from Teach for America will do their two-year stints at the complex and live in village housing. Lynda believes that if theyre enticed in the right direction, the 1,300 workers might choose to prepare the same healthy fare at home. Welcome to the club. Hes thankful to the Resnicks, especially Lady Lynda, for that. The hillocks that existed back in Yokut Indian days were flattened by a hunk of metal called the Fresno Scraper. Vidovich is known in the area for his political activity as well as his development projects. 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. And its that groundwater part of Semitropics agreement with Vidovich that is raising hackles along with eyebrows. There before me, two aluminum pipes, side by side, 12 inches in diameter each, slither in the sun. They have no way to grasp the $50 million to $80 million a year that the Resnicks say they are spending on philanthropy. A pair of those eyebrows belonged to former farmer and three-term Kings County Supervisor Tony Oliveira, who served from 1999 through 2010 and didn't find out about the upcoming project until Jan. 11. The wildfires cant be far behind. I dont know. You and I look at this meal, he says. State water dwindling year after year. But that money enabled me to go into Angiola (a water district in Tulare County) and have other water sources.. Even as the supplies of federal and state water have dropped to near zero, agriculture in Kern keeps chugging along, growing more intensive. They may have been associated with this organization before or after these years as well. The land is turning to salt. 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. 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. What was so disappointing and alarming was that West Hills College and other educational institutions in the area are not considered agencies of required notification and (that) needs to be amended," said Oliveira. This amounted to 14,000 acre-feet. Neighbors dont tell on neighbors.. Or at least thats the way Vidovich puts it when I finally reach him. I grab my notebook and walk up to one of the vans. He found it. All this stirring up is a consequence of mechanization. What market share has been lost in Asia and the Middle East, the company is looking to get back in Mexico with its spicy Latin line of nuts. Thats 281 square miles. In the trailer next door, Lupes cousin Margarita lives with her husband, Selfo, and their three young children. How much water are we talking about?, Id rather not get too specific. 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. 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. He went out and bought an alarm company. It was true that agriculture had been selling state project water to cities for two decades. Get an email notification whenever someone contributes to the discussion. In a region of wall-to-wall plantings, one of the walls is crashing down. He points to the young almond trees that envelop his 20 acres like a siege. Whatever remains is not nearly enough to make up for the shortfall of imported water from the state. Theyre dusty with San Joaquin dirt. But not even the two projects working in perfect tandem can defy drought. He sold a chunk of land to the builders of Sunnyvale and decided he could develop the rest himself. "Ten percent of farmers get 70 percent of the payment," Perez said. It was going to houses. Cotton still grows on the lake bottom, but less and less each year. Notifications from this discussion will be disabled. Nowhere to turn, I turn back around and roll down my window. Posted on August 6, 2018 Bakersfield Californian. The shelves spill piatas, gloves, hats, pruning shears, and loaves of Bimbo white bread. As far as the company can tell, no active salmonella has ever traced back to the plant. Yet Vidovich said he is not personally a booster of the farm bill, and that his company might be better off without it. I meet up with the Wonderful field man who first tipped me off to the pipeline. Lupe knocks on his door, and he invites us in. Eli Lilly announced a cap on insulin costs. Yes, theyre still delivering water. It comes out like pee, says her 11-year-old daughter. 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. I steer toward the almonds, past a row of worker housing and a main gate. While fans often love to make their own posters inspired by the franchise, the new artwork is taking various facets of the franchise and highlighting it from the artist's . The dam ends up holding and the levees, too. That little red string is supposed to remind him to count to ten. She washes two kinds of lettuce and cuts up fresh papaya to mix into a salad. Along a fan of the Kings River, a raisin farmer in Selma shows me his well thats coughing up sand. Both men saw Hurleys involvement in numerous local districts including Angiola, Deer Creek Storm Water District, Green Valley Water District and the Tri-County Water Authority, a newly formed GSA, as more Vidovich control. Im sure I knew we had a pipeline in there. When I got out of law school, I probably had 100 people I was employing.. I stick to the left lane and try to stay ahead of the pack. Look, I delegate a lot of things, obviously. She is small with lively brown eyes and a sweet but confident voice. One of the most dramatic alterations of the earths surface in human history took place here. Vidovich shrugged it off, saying the flaw amounted to putting the descriptions on the wrong pages and quickly appealed. Inside, a Wonderful media specialist sees that Resnick needs to be rescued. 650) 397-5213 with any questions or to learn more. It becomes scorn because they cant allow it to become pity or self-hatred. California growers, in the grip of drought, have produced 900 million pounds of the green nut. The idea of capturing Kings River floodwaters isnt new. He made friends everywhere he went, John Vidovich told the Mercury News in 2007. The oldest of five children, he came from Mexico when he was 18. Somehow, 30 or 40 nuts arent compelled to drop. Lupe excuses herself to prepare dinner. The water is cold, clean, and salty, though not too salty for a desperate man. Vidovich has been buying land in the Central Valley for more than 20 years. Hes planting ground that no one has ever planted before. Its California., Sure. Every mogul, every movie star. Theyre coming up with ideas that might lead to an even bigger drop in the number of employees with diabetes. My health, knock on wood, is good. Kings Officials Unhappy About Water Proposal, Local Water Guys Eyeing Kings River Flood Water. Hes using it to irrigate his almonds and pistachios in Lost Hills. Theres a lot happening in the world. The miles clock by not as road but as story. I notice she keeps the water running for a long time. Through it all, Marketplace is here for you. Vidovich, he said, is just the new water baron on the block, thats all. He worked as a gardener in Los Angeles and then heard about the almond trees on the other side of the mountain where the living was so much cheaper. I look back at Resnick. I feel his gaze going past me, his voice turning oddly sentimental. Brown oxtail in batches and set aside. What is the phone number of Vidovich John - De Anza Properties? At the time, I was heavy with state water but the state water had low allocations and I had no other water source over there (Dudley Ridge land in western Kings County).. Because the more you invested in your employees and their communities, the more productive they became. Sorry, no promotional deals were found matching that code. The farmer moved the rain. 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. Observers worry that Vidovich plans to pump Kings and Tulare counties dry, park that water in Kern County and then sell it to the highest bidder in dry years, leaving a once-thriving farm district barren. John Vidovich will tell you hes the interloper who came over the other mountain, the Coast Range. 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. Not a single penny was put in that piggy bank.. Typically, each pound sells wholesale for $3.75. Contact Eliza Ridgeway at [email protected]. Rainfall near a quarter of an inch. If I want to know more, I need to talk to Lupes brother, Gustavo, who has worked as an irrigator at Wonderful for five years and knows what the company is planning for the future. Wheres it coming from? We changed the culture of safety, and we think we can do the same with health, Anzaldo says. Whether he realizes it, hes part of the biggest pistachio harvest in history. However, first-term councilmember Frank Gornick, West Hills College's longtime chancellor and one of the guiding forces behind the expansion of the college in Lemoore, says he isn't opposed to a feedlot and processing plant. 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. use no threatening or hateful language. These books indicate who obtained the land, and include a physical description of the tract and where the land is located. He was in the mood to gamble. In fact, his detractors call him the single greatest threat to Central Valley farming ever to come down the pike. It exists as one thing they can almost rationalize out in the fields. Each square-mile section is divided into blocks, and each block counts a precise number of rows. He paved over the last orchard in the Santa Clara Valley with some apartments and then went looking for another valley where he might build his own empire. Plastic drip-irrigation lines stick out of the ground at wrong angles. FAMILY OFFICE MARKETPLACE. The plastic unfurls across the grove like a giant roll of Saran Wrap. Resnick picks up the water in Dudley Ridge, Vidovich says. He wanted to stay in the customer service business and heard from his doctor that Teleflora, the giant flower-delivery company, could be bought for a buyers price. I pull over into the dirt of a pomegranate orchard, the ancient fruit that the Resnicks have turned into POMWonderful, the sweet purple juice inside a swell-upon-swell bottle. The family takes showers in it, and she washes their laundry in it, and if she runs the water long enough, she will use it to wash her vegetables and cook her rice and potatoes. They plaintiffs' lawyers argued that Vidovich pursued the McCarthy water to offset the $73 million sell-off, even though he knew that it was already spoken for. He was tough on the outside. 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. More recently, he filed a voter initiative in 2016 to allow a 48-foot-tall hotel after the Cupertino City Council shot down a De Anza proposal for building a 105-foot-tall hotel in the western Santa Clara Valley town. Shes designing the curriculum.. He and Lynda decided in 1984 to buy the Franklin Mint, the maker of commemorative coins and other kitsch, for $167.5 million. We are horrified by the lack of regard for both neighbor and nature, and we hope that the community will accept our deepest and most sincere apologies and find it in their hearts to forgive us. They pledge to donate the 380 acres to charity. If he had his druthers, he said, hed still be living in a little ranch house in Culver City. No picking of crop agitates the earth like the picking of almonds and pistachios. It is flowing to a place of dire thirst. The wind kicks up dirt from the reap of oil and almonds, and the dust cloud carries back into town, raining down on the elementary school first. The Resnicks are growing again. Theres a lot of people who dont like me, but nobody didnt like my dad.. From the east side of Tulare County to the west side of Fresno County, theyre planting more nuts and Halos. 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. On the whiteboard in front of the weights, the big boys list their totals. But those deals were one water district selling to another water district. 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. He spends much of his off hours fixing it up. Giant pincers manned by a single worker grab the tree by the throat and start shaking. Whether those pipes end on Vidovich lands or Resnicks is hard to know. He thinks Ive understated the crop.. Ever since I was a kid, I have felt its pulla gravitational presence on the land and in my own story. I want to know that what we built will continue into the future.. In contrast, John Vidovich, who helms Sandridge, comes from a Silicon Valley farming-turned-developer family. He accused Resnick in 2008 of using various shell companies to monopolize control of the Kern Water Bank. Since international sanctions were lifted five years earlier, Iran has been crowding the market with its more buttery-tasting pistachios. According to published articles, Vidovich comes from a Silicon Valley family, and he bought his first Kings County property in a foreclosure in 1994. Other water districts contended it was much more. It would involve a public permitting process and be very difficult, not to mention expensive, both men said. You have permission to edit this article. When all three phases are finished, 1,800 students will be attending the high school, middle school, elementary, and preschool. In the Wonderful fields, he tells me, at least 80 percent of the workers carry no documents or documents that are not real. Seventy-five years ago, writer Carey McWilliams, in Factories in the Field, lambasted the ribboned Dukes and belted Barons of California agriculture. Who would have thought the two of them in cahoots? No bee can penetrate the shield, and his mandarins remain seedless. They just do what they want and you have to sue to stop em, Mitchell said. So the question before me was how are these guys farming? Theres a mythology out there that Angiola is stealing water, he said. Did it teach him any lessons? In December, Vidovich filed an application with the Kings County Planning Department for a slaughterhouse and a feedlot for up to 12,500 animals. He had his hands on 65 percent of the nations crop. It was Lynda who teamed up with the USDA to develop 21 new single-family homes and 60 new townhouses on a couple of acres of almonds that Wonderful tore out. The wall of Pacifico and 16-ounce cans of Bud is rebuilt daily. How can this be? City of Sunnyvale NOTICE OF PUBLIC HEARING. Though the project is billed as flood control, the agreement also allows Vidovich to move groundwater. If they were farmers, they were farmers who hung out with Tom Hanks, Steve Martin, David Geffen, Warren Beatty, and Joan Didion. What is indisputable is that over the past 20-plus years, Vidovich has quietly amassed more than 100,000 acres in the Central Valley, gaining footholds on numerous water boards, which has given him control over vast amounts of groundwater the valleys lifeblood. Surely, no one does this better than Wonderful? To change the microbial life in our digestive tracts and reduce inflammation that leads to disease, we have to reintroduce fermented foods into our diet. His story is the one Ive been carting around in my notebook for the past few decades, sure I was ready to write it after five years or ten years, only to learn of another twist that would lead me down another road. I dont know how Hershey did Hershey, Pennsylvania, but Lynda is present in every painted sunburst, every planted flower, every blade of grass. Vidovich wrote out a check for the full amount, then went looking for the water to prop up Resnicks monopoly. He was the bad guy in agriculture for no bigger offense than that he was big. Measuring the reach of the Resnicks, its tempting to lean on the hyperventilated language of the 1930s: Empire. The curriculum is being created by Noemi Donoso, the chief of education for the Chicago public schools before Lynda recruited her to Wonderful. To grow, Big Ag needed a bigger and more dependable supply. The choices for the Kern farmer now come down to two: He can reach deep into his pocket and buy high-priced water from an irrigation district with surplus supplies. Vidovich says he uses that Angiola groundwater to farm in Dudley Ridge, so the groundwater isnt leaving its home basin. With water from the delta becoming more unreliable, he said, farmers have to hoard land for the groundwater. Michelle Perez, an analyst for the activist watchdog Environmental Working Group, perceives the bill differently, arguing that because the subsidies are calculated on a per-acre basis, the cash infusions "provide liquidity to the largest, most prosperous farms, allowing them to outbid and outcompete their smaller, less prosperous neighbors. "A small farmer, if he gets his whole limit, it keeps him in business, whereas for us, it's a very small fraction of our revenue," Vidovich said. Mark Arax: Yeah. The State Water Project that allowed western Kern County to grow into a farming behemoth has given no water or very little water over the past three years amid the worst drought in California history. Now, Pace said, Vidovich will do the same thing on a larger scale by moving Kings and Tulare groundwater to Kern County. Then he motions to Lynda, whos standing off to the side of the light-dimmed stage. Theres not much left over, he says. My old well cant compete with his new wells. 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. Page had been a longtime board member of the Semitropic Water District and Vidovich wanted that kind of expertise. Im not going to live forever, even with the massive amounts of pomegranate juice Im drinking. All I know is I dont want to split it up or sell it in some leveraged buyout. John Vidovich just wants to farm, he says. When the rain returns, some of the ground will be replanted in pistachios, a tree that can better withstand drought. We produced a short documentary film. "We have one of the premier colleges in the country, and they want to put a slaughterhouse right next to it?