And then what happens in drought is there is this desperation to keep it going. Our relatives have been patient. He worries because there isnt enough water now to properly irrigate the almonds, pistachios, and pomegranates. In fact it should be getting smaller, more sustainable and thats what youre seeing play out on the land right now. Twine strung trailer to trailer hangs with the laundry of fathers, mothers, and children. The men and women who planted, irrigated, sprayed, and picked our crops were phantoms. So the state couldnt deliver, in one year couldnt deliver any of it. Hes farming water. (Vidovich said he didnt think Sandridge had hit 100,000 acres, total, yet.). This water basically came from a land owned by someone whos also a near billionaire a guy named John Vidovich. Fifty-three percent of our employees are obese, and 12 percent of them have diabetes., The growers start to fidget. He had an industrial machine, hardly used, that scrubbed and waxed floors. 2023 Minnesota Public Radio. 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. She is here and there, but I have never seen her up close. Her brother-in-law was killed recently in a car crash along Highway 46. They made a new plantation here. Your weekly print newspaper delivered, and more, Weekly Print Edition delivered to your mailbox, When you don't want the printed newspaper. The matter was headed to court when Vidovich paid a visit to Resnick. At the buildings he was cleaning, he noticed that no one was watching the front and back doors. The tumbleweeds on open ground give you a peek into what Lost Hills looked like before the aqueduct made a river here. He studied the situation. His father, Stephen Vidovich, formed De Anza Properties and helped develop the valley. Thats how he came upon the San Joaquin. 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. Six hundred pistachio growers in blue jeans isnt her usual crowd. Conceived by Lynda, it cost one fortune to build and a second fortune to light up. A husband and wife sharing the reins is rare for corporate America, rarer still for industrial agriculture. He could collect the rents while he slept. Kings County Supervisor Joe Neves, whose district would contain the proposed feedlot and slaughterhouse, suggests that the process for approval is just beginning. In the kitchen corner, cases of bottled water are stacked halfway up the wall. I turn back around and find Route 46, the road that killed James Dean. The court settlement allows him to take the water to Dudley Ridge, but it cant go outside Kings County. 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. He had moved out to Long Beach, bought some property, and built one of those new strip malls. The POM tanks, Im told, are backed up with a three-year supply. It hardly ceases for the next five months. He got into UCLA and joined a Jewish fraternity. Resnick wanted no part in my story. Neves also added that there would undoubtedly be an effort to explore more reasonable sites for the facility, away from educational and city populations. What if I failed? It isnt a lot of water., Im not going to give you the numbers. No. 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. Boswell Company, and Sandridge Partners, controlled by John Vidovich, will be back in court on March 23 when Judge Valerie Chrissakis will decide whether the Sandridge pipeline is subject to review under the California Environmental Quality Act If so, it would mean the Hes dressed Italian chin to footLoro Piana jeans and Hogan tennis shoes. 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 curriculum is being created by Noemi Donoso, the chief of education for the Chicago public schools before Lynda recruited her to Wonderful. Under her rethink agriculture program, the kids will be trained in plant science and irrigation technology, marketing and sales. He yanks and pulls, and it finally comes off, throwing him a foot backward. U.S. immigration has little say-so here. ! it says. Hes smiling but speaks only Spanish. His face is blank. When all three phases are finished, 1,800 students will be attending the high school, middle school, elementary, and preschool. As we sat down to chat, one of his assistants leaned over and whispered into his jewel-studded ear. 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.. That company led to another company, and he soon owned half the commercial alarm accounts in Los Angeles. Carls Jr., Subway, McDonalds, Wendys, Loves, or Arbys. Whatever remains is not nearly enough to make up for the shortfall of imported water from the state. If he were on the scene today, hed have to add sashed Queens to the list. They dont do agribusiness. Thats our goal. Lynda sent the first batches of POM, week after week, as gifts to David Bowie, Rupert Murdoch, and Disney head Michael Eisner. But Semitropic is the first district to get this close to making it a reality. Hed been diagnosed with early prostate cancer and had no doubt that the juice was keeping him well. I try to calculate how many hundreds of aluminum sections need to be linked seamlessly, or at least watertight, to cover the distance of a mile. Compare and book now! We hope you enjoy Finding Lost Hills., The 11-minute film opens with a shot of swirling dust. The image of water moves on and on through miles of western Kern. California showed me why.. His father worked as a truck driver, transporting crops to the city. When asked if he applies the skills he learned in his military intelligence training to his life today, he answers that we all use the things we learn through life. What happens to Wonderful? 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. 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. My old well cant compete with his new wells. Youre the one who needs to see., We pull out of the parking lot, past the palm trees and roses, and head up the thin ribbon of Highway 33 into the dust-swirling tunnel of nuts and fruits. FAMILY OFFICE MARKETPLACE. They slap back with the cold vibration of water. Wonderful has enough water to irrigate its orchards in Lost Hills and park tens of thousands of acre-feet in the water bank. I steer past Wasco to the dust-blowing orchards that flank Lost Hills, the densest planting of almonds, pistachios, and pomegranates on earth. By the time he graduated from UCLA in 1960 and entered its law school, he was bringing home $40,000 a yearthe equivalent of $320,000 today. Boswell, who owned more land and controlled more water than any other person in the West for most of the 20th century. He was the bad guy in agriculture for no bigger offense than that he was big. 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.. Theres a mountain range to my left and a mountain range to my right and in between a plain flatter than Kansas where crop and sky meet. The biggest misconception about John is that he wants to sell water to LA, he said. Not a single one of them wants any part of Wonderful. Thank you for reading! When I got out of law school, I probably had 100 people I was employing.. They are still paying off the $27,000 debt to relatives who hired the coyote. Notifications from this discussion will be disabled. Main Street is Highway 46, which slices through the middle of town. The control Resnick exercises inside his $4.5 billion privately held company does relinquish to one person: his wife, Lynda, vice chairman and co-owner, the Pomegranate Queen, as she calls herself. Lupe and Manuel, like many of the residents, grew up next to each other in a pueblo called San Antonio deep in the state of Guerrero, a mountainous region of dramatic beauty. The bunches of chartreuse-tipped nuts hanging from antler branches never touch the ground. Hes so involved, in fact, he even chairs the monthly meetings for Buena Vista Water Storage District where Sandridge owns thousands of acres. Everything about our physical selves, Lynda believes, begins in our guts. Now they have to keep that up, right? But he is also a farmer in the Central Valley through the family's other business, Sandridge Partners, and thus a reluctant participant in the national debate currently swirling around the 2008 Farm Bill. As the head of a quasi-public agency, he knows he cant completely blow off my questions. The agency did not balk at the price tag: $5,321 an acre-foot. As he walks away, I notice his $400 sneakers. She won a gold Effie, advertisings Oscar. Thats when the Resnicks decided to sell the concept of wellness to their 4,300 employees throughout the valley the same way they sell workplace safety. On this same stretch of 99, I once wrote a story about farmworkers who moonlighted as meth cookers to make ends meet. Yes. "We're just in the preliminary parts of planning for this," he said. Everything but the turkey had come from his orchards. Brad Steinwede. The farmers responded that the path of a bee wasnt something they could supervise, and they threatened to sue him back. It looks like no other campus in the valley: a modern, minimalist two-story design that uses paneled wood and fabricated metal, wild colors, and terraced landscaping to create the feel of a high-tech mountain retreat. Once, he came home from school and discovered the family car gone. They had survived the drought. Theyre coming up with ideas that might lead to an even bigger drop in the number of employees with diabetes. 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. They planted the first 640 acres, half the pomegranates in the country at the time, knowing there was zero market. Shes designing the school. The food is more. 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. Then I get lucky. Burglar alarms, on the other hand, offered round-the-clock vigilance without coffee breaks. The nuts are kept there a few more daysany longer and the ants will attack themto complete their drying. 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. The junk scattered about could be a lot worse. Because Lupe had no papers, she followed the coyote for many more miles until they reached a steep pass. "I want to be as open-minded as I can and get all the facts I can," he insisted. Food and Beverage Manufacturing . His grandfather Resnick had fled the Ukraine in the wake of another killing of Jews by Cossacks. His 15 million trees in the San Joaquin Valley consume more than 400,000 acre-feet of water a year. In the maroon of sundown,I follow the workers back to Lost Hills. It was the early 1900s, and his grandfather and grandmother decided to secure passage to America. Look, I have no guilt. A pump is shooting water out of the canal and into the Rain for Rent pipes. 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. John Vidovich will tell you hes the interloper who came over the other mountain, the Coast Range. Today, most everything in this desolate reach of Kern County, save for the oil wells, belongs to Paramount Farming, which belongs to the Resnicks. No way, according to Vidovich and his longtime associates. Or at least this is what I can glean through the car window. In his best Borscht Belt nasal, he takes a jab. The people here have traveled too far. Bernards eyes are fixed straight ahead. Hes a 61-year-old developer who grew up on a farm in Sunnyvale in the heart of what would become the Silicon Valley. accounts and the history behind a news event. I leave Gabbys and follow a winding concrete path through the new Wonderful Park. Why not California? I stick to the left lane and try to stay ahead of the pack. The Yokut had a saying that when the farmer drained the last drops of snowmelt from Tulare Lake, the water would return. Jun 27, 2007. Water that has shipped you know hundreds of miles from the north of California where there are these abundant rivers. Whether he realizes it, hes part of the biggest pistachio harvest in history. Theres a lot happening in the world. Too many pistachios. If those seem like minute details for the head of a major development company to trouble with, hes even more hands-on with Sandridge Partners LP, the family business he formed for farming acquisitions. 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. This is how the land of Wonderful is keeping alive its trees. Vidovich continues to run De Anza and in a surprisingly hands-on manner. Stewart tries to interrupt, but hes not the boss in this room. I gaze out the passenger window, looking for the glint of the pipeline. For as far as I can see, the water in the canal runs inky through the orchards. 2022-02-14 - BY LOIS HENRY. Talk to me, Hussein says, draining a can of Rockstar. I walk up and reintroduce myself.