Shes designing the school. The vibration here isnt quite as vehement. Section, block, and row dont compute; he has to direct me by cellphone and guideposts. Hundreds of giant praying mantises standing on platforms of concrete are pulling oil from a Chevron field. 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. Pace farmed in the valley and partnered with Vidovich for a while. On Sleepy Farm Road outside Paso Robles, the Resnicks were looking to add 380 acres of wine grapes and build a small reservoir with groundwater. I then move to the far side of the orchard, where another worker, riding a huge mower, is kicking up an even bigger cloud of dust. 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 state of California has adopted a new law that finally regulates the pumping. Arax: This place called Lost Hills, it is kind of a modern-day company town not unlike Hershey, Pennsylvania. A large water pipeline being built near Lemoore in Kings County is raising eyebrows as much for its possible uses as for the name associated with its construction John Vidovich. Lets meet again in two weeks, he said. Look it, Im from Beverly Hills. The eye numbed by the tedium of orchards isnt prepared for the 1.3 million square feet of industrial assault, though the palm trees and roses along the perimeter try for a transition. Join us for a free, virtual event for International Women's Day on March 8! Second, Im a farmer, Vidovich says. This is Twisselman. He paid em three times what anyone else wouldve for their land and now theyre all gettin water because of his policies, Page said. His grandfather Resnick had fled the Ukraine in the wake of another killing of Jews by Cossacks. She wanted me to put our $5 million in an account, draw interest, and we could live happily on the 50 grand a year.. The harvest begins in January with one type of mandarin and ends in December with another type of mandarin and in between spills forth everything in your supermarket produce and dairy aisles except for bananas and mangoes, though the farmers here are working on the tropical, too. It specifically set aside $2.7 billion for water storage projects. Welcome to the club. Many are here without documents, after all. Im down, Stewart, he protests. Food and Beverage Manufacturing . You dont believe me?, No, I believe you, Resnick says. Maybe not since the wheat barons has the income disparity between farmer and farmworker been greater. No whistle shouts mealtime in the modern-day company town. In my lifetime alone, California has gone from 13 million people to 40 million people. 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. A member of the commission, on the eve of its demise, told me, Stewart wants to be a benevolent dictator. Theyre no longer in danger. Longtime Los Altos resident Stephen John Vidovich, founder of De Anza Properties of Sunnyvale, died of an apparent heart attack June 19 as he was driving a tractor on his property in the Cupertino hills, said his son John Vidovich. No farmer ever is. Stewart gambled and won for many years. He ran unsuccessfully for the Los Altos Hills City Council in 2006, served on the Santa Clara County Planning Commission and is former chairman of the Santa Clara County Republican Committee. Business got so brisk that he bought two trucks and hired crews. The farmer isnt here to smell the cracking open of wood, the ripping open of warm secret earth. One more hour and Im outta this fucking place.. 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. Vidovich is gobbling up all the parcels he can so he can keep on pumping, Mitchell said. 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. 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. Whether he realizes it, hes part of the biggest pistachio harvest in history. Every move Vidovich has made, through Hurley and other public water districts, has been about gaining control of water, they say. "Even with the subsidy, I think cotton is a losing battle," he said, predicting that the commodity would increasingly come from China. It was a curious statement but true. The water is filtered for arsenic, boron, and other salts, and the monthly tests show no violation of state or federal standards. I was prepared to knock on the door, but a housekeeper, flanked by two blow-dried dogs, greeted me on the front steps and led me inside. Ultimately,youre going to dry up that aquifer under the earth, and thats whats happening now. Do they sense the shaming about to come? The leathery skin on the fruit has turned a nice orange-red. The feedback were hearing is No. In fact, some of the workers think that we havent gone far enough., The workers arent around for a quick survey. Up and down the Central Coast, restaurants are boycotting their wines. Wild salmon and all these sides made from scratch. Mark Arax: Yeah. Domestic sales are up 42 percent over the past eight years, but foreign sales have stalled. Six hundred and forty acres dont look like 640 acresa square mileuntil they start ripping out the trees. Thousands of acres of pistachio trees now await the next flood. Their houses made from railroad boxcars have been painted purple, blue, yellow, and gold. why teaching is challenging yet rewarding I doubt the Resnicks have any idea of the fester that eats at this place, the shame piled on shame. Vidovich says he uses that Angiola groundwater to farm in Dudley Ridge, so the groundwater isnt leaving its home basin. Rather, it is the authority vested in Wonderful that counts. Later, Page would run for and win a seat on the Kern County Water Agency board. And he served two terms on the Santa Clara County Planning Commission, appointed once in 1990 and he again in 2010, igniting controversy among activists concerned about sprawl. This was Lost Hills before Lynda got involved. Taxpayers support the continued production of such commodities, at least in theory, through direct payments to farmers amounting to $5 billion last year under the direction of the farm bill. By the time he drove back, he was a citrus grower. A husband and wife sharing the reins is rare for corporate America, rarer still for industrial agriculture. He explains that Wonderful has grown too big to hassle such precision. 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. (Vidovich said he didnt think Sandridge had hit 100,000 acres, total, yet.). And so I began with slaughter and madness and then moved on to bartenders for fathers. Yet Vidovich said he is not personally a booster of the farm bill, and that his company might be better off without it. I notice she keeps the water running for a long time. He did little, if any, catting around. 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. 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. He kept planting more and more trees. Im 80 years old. What happens to Wonderful? A meat store, an auto repair, a pool hall, and an arcade pass for a commercial strip. We had gangs and murders, but thats better, too., He has come to El Toro Loco to cash his check and buy some beer. He did his internship at Alkaloid - the la. 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. Have we gone too far? It sure looks heavier than last year., Bernard smiles and nods to the others. The dam ends up holding and the levees, too. I sit in my car and wait in the parking lot. Its happening. The bosses wont speak of it, he says. Agriculture in the south valley has extended far beyond the provisions of its one river, the Kern. The farmer corralled the snowmelt and erased the valley, its desert and marsh. Theyll take home $11 an hour for their labors. Either way is a trespass. They both knew what they wanted. The hillocks that existed back in Yokut Indian days were flattened by a hunk of metal called the Fresno Scraper. It would return as tule fog to remind the white man of his theft. Lynda assisted her with the design and color scheme but otherwise has remained hands-off. Unlike many other billionaires, they could poke fun at themselves. He has painted the interior and put down two new patterns of linoleum, one to mark the living room and the other to mark the kitchen. We saved the best for last, he says. The abundance of that water in good years has created this overreach of agriculture. The great drought is officially over. At issue? The agency did not balk at the price tag: $5,321 an acre-foot. He does enough farming in the area to make it look like hes a farmer. San Antonio south doesnt exist anymore. He is a small, good-looking man with a patch of black hair under his lip. 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. But a pipeline, which Vidovich is allowed to build under the Semitropic agreement, could span that distance. I cut across Twisselman Road to the pipeline gliding along the aqueduct like a silver snake. 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. Vidovich used the $73 million in 2010 to buy nearly 75 percent of the land in the Angiola Water District. Selfo works 50 hours a week as an irrigator. LOIS HENRY: Is John Vidovich planning to sell off the valley's lifeblood? This isnt the Lynda posing for photos with Barbra Streisand. I look back at Resnick. She remembers handing the boy to her sister-in-law, who carried phony papers, and watching them cross by bridge into California. Menu. each comment to let us know of abusive posts. Shell check in every so often to see how business is going. The colors turn brilliant in the light made spectacular by the particles of dust. Kingdom. This project may not be fully thought out," said Neves. Like the waters of the lake, the indent of the Resnicks will recede from the land, too. By age 19, Lynda had dropped out of college, married a magazine ad man, and opened her own advertising agency. If he were on the scene today, hed have to add sashed Queens to the list. 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. Theyre now building an $80 million charter-school complex in Delano, just down the road from Cesar Chavez High. It comes out to $2,000 a month. Or he can devise a scheme to steal water from a neighbor up the road. His law license is inactive, according to the California State Bar Association website. "I don't want to make any. 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. His partner in the mandarins once told me that when Stewart is done with you, hes done with you. The district has already paid him $40 million for an easement, or right of way, on that land and signed an agreement with him for how the project would operate. More often than not, it is hauling away some piece of the valleys bounty. Hes a decent guy making $216,000 a year who doesnt pretend that he isnt beholden to Wonderful. All told, nine men operating five machines will pick clean this orchard over the next four weeks. The next day, I drive to a spot a few miles beyond the trailer park where the county road dead-ends in a pomegranate orchard, or what used to be a pomegranate orchard before a Caterpillar came crashing through. 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. They spend $50 a month on bottled water. His father met his mother, the cantors daughter, and they married. High 61F. 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. 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. Documentary film. "We're just in the preliminary parts of planning for this," he said. SGMA refers to the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act passed in 2014 that mandates water basins be in balance by 2040. This drought has brought Stewart to his knees. She owns this place. He goes on to explain what he means by own. 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. It will be interesting to see what the regulatory boards say. City of Sunnyvale NOTICE OF PUBLIC HEARING. Kings County Supervisor Joe Neves, whose district would contain the proposed feedlot and slaughterhouse, suggests that the process for approval is just beginning. Theyre droughts best buddies.. The making of a billionaire over the next half-century was a series of dots that connected in the California sunshine. Its not easy to hear, but Im not going to sugarcoat this, she says. Vidovich and a co-defendant were found guilty in 2014 of conspiracy to breach a land sale contract and ordered to pay nearly $130 million in compensatory and punitive damages. Page had been a longtime board member of the Semitropic Water District and Vidovich wanted that kind of expertise. Resnick has saved the front seat for me. Down a rutted road, 100 trailers with foundations dressed in plywood back up against an orchard. In the kitchen corner, cases of bottled water are stacked halfway up the wall. As we hop down from the van to inspect the pomegranates on the eve of harvest, Resnick motions to Bernards belly. Wonderful is getting smaller, he says. They are still paying off the $27,000 debt to relatives who hired the coyote. Besides, Pace and others say, overreaching is another Vidovich hallmark. The aqueduct was built with tax money, yes? You look like Border Patrol undercover.. Main Street is Highway 46, which slices through the middle of town. The contents of each catcher, 500 pounds of almond meat, are placed on a conveyor 20 feet high and dumped into a big-rig hauler for transport to the Wonderful processing plant. The proposed project has raised local eyebrows. "I am a farmer and a big farmer," Vidovich said. If that happens, theyll go down the highway, and hell lose the $1 he takes for every $100 worth of their checks. The court settlement allows him to take the water to Dudley Ridge, but it cant go outside Kings County. He makes $10.75 an hour. But when your neighbor is going to lose his crop, you do what you can to help him., I tell Vidovich this sounds almost charitable. This is a big crop, the field man tells me. I get it. Buried in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, USA. Now, Pace said, Vidovich will do the same thing on a larger scale by moving Kings and Tulare groundwater to Kern County. Overview Company Description: Key Principal: John Vidovich See more contacts Industry: Peanut farm Printer Friendly View Address: 960 N San Antonio Rd Ste 114 Los Altos, CA, 94022-1346 United States Phone: Website: www.sunnygem.com Employees (this site): Modelled Employees (all sites): Modelled Revenue: Modelled Year Started: ESG ranking: Stewart tries to interrupt, but hes not the boss in this room. The truck driver hits the wide open of Highway 33 and traces the serpentine of the aqueduct. President George Bush has been outspoken in his criticism of the bill, which he vetoed last week before being overruled by majorities in the House and Senate. I stick to the left lane and try to stay ahead of the pack. Posted on August 6, 2018 Bakersfield Californian. Resnick picks up the water in Dudley Ridge, Vidovich says. Welcome to San Antonio del Norte, he says. You can plant only so many acres on ground that has no groundwater. I come upon a Wonderful field man in a four-by-four truck who listens to my bewilderment and takes pity. A day later, I get a call from Mr. Resnick. They knew little about the company except it was selling its keepsakes for five times the amount Teleflora was. The money was too easy. His 15 million trees in the San Joaquin Valley consume more than 400,000 acre-feet of water a year. Just get started became one of his guiding principles. Not the people. One more bin, a post reads. Even as the supplies of federal and state water have dropped to near zero, agriculture in Kern keeps chugging along, growing more intensive. The brick-hard ground cant be bought. By the eighth day of harvest, the sun is gone. It wasnt a midlife crisis, he told me. It might be nice if my kids and grandkids could turn to a book someday and read about what weve built., He and Lynda were changing the way food was grown in California and sold to the world. "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.". accounts and the history behind a news event. Want to book a hotel in California? In the years of plentiful rains and heavy snowmelt, the bank fills up with more than 1 million acre-feet of stored water. Six hundred pistachio growers in blue jeans isnt her usual crowd. Yes, locals have a bad taste in their mouths from Vidovichs water moves, I was told by several people, many of whom said they were too afraid of retaliation to use their names. Feudal. And then what happens in drought is there is this desperation to keep it going. Who anticipates that you cant fill a water bank for six or seven years?, Come on, I say. Vidovich wrote out a check for the full amount, then went looking for the water to prop up Resnicks monopoly. It becomes scorn because they cant allow it to become pity or self-hatred. But this is water for Mr. Resnick. Ive told them all no. They hide from the fact that it relies on the subjugation of peasants from Mexico they themselves have brought here. How can this be? No one pushes their product harder. It was this persistence and, above all, good timing that explained his bigness. He doesnt wave me off or give chase. Whatever remains is not nearly enough to make up for the shortfall of imported water from the state. Growers a tenth the size of Resnick flee the dust in their Ferraris to their second houses in Carmel. What if I failed? And then they pump more groundwater. 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. According to sources, an application for a proposed feedlot and slaughterhouse was submitted last month. In the late 1970s, he went looking for a hedge against inflation. Vidovich later made an offer for Page to come work for him as a consultant or, as Page says in his slow drawl, his firemancause I put out fires.. The Lemoore City Council Tuesday night (Jan. 18) will discuss a proposed feedlot and slaughterhouse proposed for the southwest corner of Highway 198 and Highway 41. The shiny red orbs, three months shy of harvest, pop out from the bright green leaves like bulbs on a Christmas tree. He said he bought his first parcel here in 1994 when he invested in a foreclosed property in Kings County. So far, Lynda has shown only patience. From the vaulted ceilings with gold-leaf moldings hung two blown-glass chandeliers. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to 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. EIN: 41-0953924. Lynda built sidewalks and storm drains, the new park and community center, and repaved the roads. Even if he has access to the California Aqueduct, Vidovich would have to jump through a lot of state hoops to move water independently of Semitropic. This water basically came from a land owned by someone whos also a near billionaire a guy named John Vidovich. I walk to another part of the orchard and watch phase two. My husband would have been shot dead like the others, but he was lucky. He had spent the morning on his exercise bike reading Fortune. The rent is $540. I don't think it would ever be very comfortable if you had an embargo and were denied food.". Russo and Ellsberg needed a place to photocopy the 7,000 pages, and Lynda volunteered the Xerox machine at her ad agency on Melrose Avenue. I gaze out the passenger window, looking for the glint of the pipeline. Understanding water, water rights and the often complex structures of water districts has become a Vidovich hallmark. The aquifer, a sea of water beneath the clay that dates back centuries, isnt bottomless. But western Kern has no groundwater to draw from. PRIVACY POLICY. The gas to and from the orchards costs him $80 a week. This last-ditch water in Lost Hills wont make everything right. The Southwest Kings GSA is chaired by John Vidovich, who runs Sandridge Partners, which owns hundreds of thousands throughout the San Joaquin Valley. 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. I ask her if she is concerned about wasting water, given the drought and the distance the water has traveled20 miles from a well in Wascoand that the cost goes up the more they use. Frankly, Im having too much fun to think about retiring., Even if he were inclined to wind down, he had no successor in mind. I dont know how Hershey did Hershey, Pennsylvania, but Lynda is present in every painted sunburst, every planted flower, every blade of grass. This is how the land of Wonderful is keeping alive its trees. She tells me the water comes out of the tap yellow and foul smelling, and she doesnt trust it. The price for pistachios has climbed from $4.50 a pound to an unbelievable $5.25 a pound. Its John Vidovich. Relatives arranged his passage, paying the coyote the new rate of $12,000. They were married only a short time when Manuel decided to cross the border almost 20 years ago. He and Lynda wanted to run their own ads for their own brand. Chance of rain 80%.. Cloudy with periods of rain. Or at least this is what I can glean through the car window. My life is about California. Stewart would deny that Giblers reporting played a part in their philanthropy. 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. Lupe knocks on his door, and he invites us in. Each time I called, his secretary hung up the phone. But farmers Jack Mitchell and Milt Pace are upfront about their distaste for Vidovich and especially Hurley. A cross of Jesus hangs from the bedpost. I ask him how the drought has affected Wonderful. Theres a mythology out there that Angiola is stealing water, he said. Then I get lucky. It was a hit. Nothing will stop the houses. He bought his first Kings County property in a foreclosure in 1994 and eventually amassed 102,000 acres in Kings - as well as nearly 40,000 acres in Kern County, 10,000 in Tulare County, and 1,700 in Fresno County, according to . 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. All this stirring up is a consequence of mechanization. The growers would stand in front of the cull line and never stop moaning about how much of their fruit got rejected by Girazians graders.