At age 81, he's gotten so big, he doesn't know how big. Drought turning to floodit is the story of California. The aqueduct was built with tax money, yes? Add onion, garlic, and bell pepper to the pot; cook, stirring constantly, until onion has . By then, Wonderful, if it still exists, will be a portfolio run by men even farther away than Beverly Hills. Even if I were to move water and sell it, it would be to farming operations.. He landed a steady job with a big grower and a year later paid a coyote $5,000 to bring Lupe and their baby son to Lost Hills. The four grandchildren have visited the orchards once or twice. Its John Vidovich. Anzaldos grandfather came from Guadalajara in the 1950s as part of the bracero farmworker program. What the Resnicks were doing for Lost Hills, though, was a level of philanthropy I had never witnessed in the valley. Theyll take home $11 an hour for their labors. He packed his bags and left his wife and kids. A good deal of sunshine. Look, these farmers go back two, three, and four generations. 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. Theyre coming up with ideas that might lead to an even bigger drop in the number of employees with diabetes. But that still doesnt mean that most people in town can afford to eat here. Second, Im a farmer, Vidovich says. She is small with lively brown eyes and a sweet but confident voice. Hes a decent guy making $216,000 a year who doesnt pretend that he isnt beholden to Wonderful. The river is nothing if not fickle. At this point, he said, he uses about 30 percent of his land for farming and 70 percent for water. According to sources, an application for a proposed feedlot and slaughterhouse was submitted last month. The Resnicks brought him aboard in 1999, and now he works alongside Lynda and consults daily with the company chef. Bankers and their fair-weather financing exasperated Resnick. They thwack back. Its California., Sure. Subscribers support the Los Altos Town Crier please log in or subscribe to continue reading. They dont do agribusiness. He had none of his fathers sentimentality. I meet up with the Wonderful field man who first tipped me off to the pipeline. This last-ditch water in Lost Hills wont make everything right. 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 got another meeting to attend. We cant insist on wellness the way we can insist on plant safety. Ultimately,youre going to dry up that aquifer under the earth, and thats whats happening now. He wouldnt know one of his Valencia orange groves from one of his Washington navel orange groves. 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. Young men and women from Teach for America will do their two-year stints at the complex and live in village housing. Ive never given an interview to a newspaper or magazine before. Why not we start with an extended interview or two? I offered. 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. I had not seen any. What do you need to know, sir?, Whats it been like here during the drought?, Drought, no drought, makes no difference. 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. When I look around here at what weve built and then look back at my life in New Jersey, I think, How did it happen? For one man and woman to build something like this would be almost impossible today.. If anyone doubted the health benefits of the juice, they spent more than $30 million in research to prove that it fought heart disease and prostate woes. For the promotions of the upcoming Keanu Reeves movie the makers are revealing exclusive posters for the feature made by handpicked artists around the world. And in fact these guys were able to squeeze and buy water in the open market, and do a few other things to keep their crops going and they were in the midst of drought. The tule fog sets down again in the valley. 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. I take out my cellphone and swipe across Google Maps. 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. Because the road ends here, there is no physical way to follow the canals flow. He had left for the cornfields a few minutes before the killings.. The state of California has adopted a new law that finally regulates the pumping. In the summer of 2010, hed spent several days documenting the deplorable conditions of the modern company town. Big fish eat the small fish here. In my lifetime alone, California has gone from 13 million people to 40 million people. 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. Mark Arax: Yeah. Those figures dont include recent land purchases hes made in the Kern Delta Water District and Fresno Irrigation District both areas Sandridge is targeting for even more land purchases because of its solid rights to the Kern and San Joaquin rivers. for rent by owner sacramento craigslist; coleman . 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. Theyre either working in the heat or hiding from the heat. But this outwardly unassuming multimillionaire has become a lightning rod of controversy. Because of a lack of water? I ask. Wow. He spends much of his off hours fixing it up. For the next two or three seconds, the almonds pour down like hail. 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. The project would consist of a small reservoir, more like short-term storage cells, along the California Aqueduct just north of Kettleman City where floodwater off the south fork of the Kings River would be captured. His bar was a place for guys, Damon Runyontype guys., Resnicks pals were all Jewish kids from upper-class families, so it wasnt easy being the poorest one, the one whose father was a gambler and capable at any moment of losing the few comforts they had. Vidovich wrote out a check for the full amount, then went looking for the water to prop up Resnicks monopoly. The bill is a hot political item, as party members on both sides of the aisle try to secure perks for their own constituents potentially at a detrimental cost to taxpayers. Summer or not, theyre dressed in shirt layered upon shirt and the same no-name dusty blue jeans. I had finished the last chapter of The King of California, a book I wrote with a good friend about J.G. During paid breaks, they do their 15 minutes of Zumba, take a walk along a designated path, and munch on the free fruits and veggies put out for them. They point to three new pump stations along Angiolas main canal just north of the county line that have the ability to move 100,000 acre feet a year into pipes that head south and west. Gianquinto and Vidovich have repeatedly said that it would be nearly impossible for an individual to use state facilities to create a private water market using any water, let alone groundwater. In fact it should be getting smaller, more sustainable and thats what youre seeing play out on the land right now. In Kern County, one in two adults and almost one in five children are obese. "There is a national will to be self-sufficient in agriculture. Vidovich isnt the only pumper in that area, his supporters note. The baby is now a 20-year-old student at Bakersfield College. Wheres it coming from? Stewart gambled and won for many years. 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 father's death. He did little, if any, catting around. He had his hands on 65 percent of the nations crop. And then they pump more groundwater. Yeah, hes got a lot of money and hes been buying up land, makes some people nervous, Page said. Yes, critics agree, but Boswell uses that water to irrigate in the district. Im a billionaire. Hes got an awful temper hes trying to control through Kabbalah. The nut must be hurried from bin to truck to processing plant to keep it from discoloring. Then there was the nail in the coffin for folks like Pace and Mitchell when Vidovich appeared in a National Geographic film called Water and Power: A California Heist, which ran in mid-March and again on June 25. According to news reports, he owns Sandridge Partners, LP, a farmland investment firm that has accumulated more than 100,000 acres of Valley farmland in recent years. City of Sunnyvale NOTICE OF PUBLIC HEARING. To the growers, it must feel like a jab in the stomach. At one point, he was moving nearly 30,000 acre feet a year, according to Angiolas records. One mile, two miles, three miles, fourit keeps going until it reaches another county and back to one of the main canals in the Dudley Ridge Water District. His trees were drinking from the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project, from rivers and irrigation canals and the water bank. The compass in my car says Im headed east, but that means almost nothing inside a province of 15 million trees. Neves also added that there would undoubtedly be an effort to explore more reasonable sites for the facility, away from educational and city populations. 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. Many are here without documents, after all. When John Vidovich was appointed as fire marshal in September 2014, he was given the difficult task of cleaning up the city of L.A.'s stubbornly antiquated Fire Prevention Bureau, making it more . He started buying consistently in Kern, Kings and Tulare counties throughout the early and mid-2000s and continues to add properties sometimes at a blistering pace. It was going to houses. Chance of rain 80%.. Cloudy with periods of rain. But thats the way it is. 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. Still, none of it would have happened without luck., What he and Lynda had done with the wretched pomegranate was another matter. No bee can penetrate the shield, and his mandarins remain seedless. The boss showed him a storeroom filled with chemicals tossed here and there and told him to bring order to the mess. By . According to Lemoore's city manager, local officials will likely respond to the feedlot proposal at Tuesday's (Jan. 18) council meeting. 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. But I had some good people helping me.. Thirty-five percent of our pre-diabetic population has gone into the healthy range, she tells the team. The Kings is bone-dry as usual. She walks off the stage with Stewart. He was going to Vegas, hanging out with his own Damon Runyon characters, and making plans to get even bigger. Vidovich says his quote was clipped and sewn back together to make it sound bad. Its not the fidget of boredom. Id have to say that fully half of my success has been luck. Ive told them all no. 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. 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. Documentary film. John Vidovich will tell you hes the interloper who came over the other mountain, the Coast Range. The farmer isnt here to smell the cracking open of wood, the ripping open of warm secret earth. It gives me the luxury to keep on working. Too many pistachios. Resnick wanted no part in my story. The rain starts to fall, big, fat, slashing drops that feel like electricity on my open palm. Never mind that this is one of the most over-drafted basins in California or that the land is sinking a half-foot a year. It moves in a wave from trunk to limb to nut and back down to earth. They were actually harvesting record crops. So why hasnt this place gone to tumbleweeds? First of all, the myriad laws and rules that govern water wouldnt allow that to happen, they say. 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. Resides in Beaver, PA. Laton Lions Club shows off at popular annual rodeo and parade held April 1-3, City officials say developer says he will not pursue a controversial 12,600-cow feedlot outside city's boundaries, City of Lemoore officials cite serious concerns about proposed cattle feedlot, Lemoore Council likely to respond to proposed feedlot near Lemoore and college, Photo Gallery: NAS Lemoore aviators conduct change of command while in the air, Naval Air Station Lemoore to get new Carrier Air Wing commander in December. All the rest of that stuff its just jealousy and innuendo, jealousy and innuendo, jealousy and innuendo.. Seventy-five years ago, writer Carey McWilliams, in Factories in the Field, lambasted the ribboned Dukes and belted Barons of California agriculture. Resnicks billions rely on his ability to master water, sun, soil, and even bees. Its artificiality had achieved a permanence; its permanence had created my California. She tells me her not-so-silent partner is Lady Lynda, who was so bothered that Lost Hills didnt have a sit-down restaurant of its own that she sought out Angelica. The highway runs two lanes here, three lanes there, through miles of agriculture broken every 20 minutes by fast food, gas station, and cheap motel. During the holiday season, they sent out 4,000 gift boxes to their nearest and dearest friends filled with their fruits and nuts, along with a card of the two of them dressed in skin-colored body stockings, posing as Adam and Eve. Sandridge Partners received most of its subsidy for upland cotton production but also received payments for growing six other commodities. Most everything that can be touched in this corner of California belongs to Wonderful. Every river busting out of the Sierra was bent sideways, if not backward, by a bulwark of ditches, levees, canals, and dams. I catch Highway 99 in rare somnolence. What can I say? The baseballs will be crushed into juice. Lupe gave birth to two daughters, U.S. citizens, who are now 11 and 6. You rely on Marketplace to break down the worlds events and tell you how it affects you in a fact-based, approachable way. He recalled bidding on a construction project while studying for the bar exam. He leveled its hog wallows, denuded its salt brush, and killed the last of its mustang, antelope, and tule elk. The Yokut had a saying that when the farmer drained the last drops of snowmelt from Tulare Lake, the water would return. From the east side of Tulare County to the west side of Fresno County, theyre planting more nuts and Halos. If that happens, theyll go down the highway, and hell lose the $1 he takes for every $100 worth of their checks. He can mix this private water with his leftover state water and ship it to at least one stranded neighbor who will pay the price. A woman named Lupe is standing above me on the wooden stairway that climbs to the front door of her trailer. It isnt going down because he wont let it go down. They were hardly the first rich people to use patronage to try to wheedle a citizenry toward their idea of a better life. This was the same distancegeographic, psychicthat allowed him and Lynda to clear-cut the oaks and to kill the independent pistachio commission, to grab a water bank that belonged to the state and to pretend for 30 years that Lost Hills wasnt a place of dire need. If you already have a subscription, log in or register for an account on our website to continue reading.Click here if youre having trouble accessing your subscriber account. And, you know, at some point in time that water is in risk of going to an urban area. Look, I delegate a lot of things, obviously. Ive learned that I have to be diversified in my water, Vidovich said. I cut across Twisselman Road to the pipeline gliding along the aqueduct like a silver snake. He and Lynda wanted to run their own ads for their own brand. Then the autumn of 2016 arrives with the strangeness of clouds. Three dogs, part pit bull, the menacing part, have given up on the shade and lie on the open road. I get out of the car and walk down an embankment. She washes two kinds of lettuce and cuts up fresh papaya to mix into a salad. Ive never seen her up close, never watched her in action. Before he left her to cross alone, he gave her soda, water, chips, and Cheetos. Residential. 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. Even the community water tank is painted baby blue with a big sunflower. Then the drug cartels took over the countryside and planted poppies. LOIS HENRY: Is John Vidovich planning to sell off the valley's lifeblood? We had gangs and murders, but thats better, too., He has come to El Toro Loco to cash his check and buy some beer. On the way out of the market, Pablo buys a case of Pacifico. And, yes, that takes water. "When commodity prices are at record highs, it is irresponsible to increase government subsidy rates for 15 crops, subsidize additional crops and provide payments that further distort markets.". How can this be? If only Eve had offered Adam a pomegranate instead of an apple, Lynda wrote, every day could have been a holiday.. Winds WSW at 10 to 20 mph. 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. Too many pomegranates. Kingdom. Be respectful, truthful, and John Vidovich. A dozen or so U.S.-grown crops are traded as commodities on the stock market, and the greatest subsidies go to corn, wheat, cotton, soybean and rice. Angiola was rehabbing old wells, drilling new ones and installed a large pipeline. Manhattan was 30 minutes in one direction; the Jersey Shore, 30 minutes in the other. The Iranians dont irrigate their trees. His father worked as a truck driver, transporting crops to the city. Every time I see it, Im inspired and proud of what weve been able to accomplish in such a short amount of time.