I kept my notes and tapes and waited for another day. This is how Resnick became a pistachio, almond, and pomegranate grower. Four tribes of Yokut lived along its shores. Vidovich is the owner of Sandridge Partners, LP - a farmland investment firm that has undertaken more than 100,000 acres of Valley farmland. He doesnt feign surprise when I tell him about the pipeline, but he dismisses it as a private matter between private parties. 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. 650) 397-5213 with any questions or to learn more. I didnt grow up here, but if it wasnt for California, its openness and opportunities, I wouldnt be sitting where Im sitting., No other farmer, not even Gallo, had cornered a market the way Resnick had cornered the growing, buying, processing, and selling of pistachios. Why not California? Theres a lot happening in the world. 2022-02-14 - BY LOIS HENRY. In fact, his detractors call him the single greatest threat to Central Valley farming ever to come down the pike. For the next two or three seconds, the almonds pour down like hail. Lynda has a son who works as a musician and a son who suffered a birth trauma and lives in a care facility. I enter an equipment yard where a Wonderful farmhand is standing next to a tractor. Already, they are paying $69 a month to the local utility district. The ceiling, all sheetrock and spackling, remains a work in progress. 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. 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. Arax: They lose their livelihood. There is a local water bank, a kind of underground lake, that the Resnicks control. Thank you for signing in! John Ivo Vidovich (1934-2005) - Find a Grave Memorial Days Inn or Motel 6. Right there in the big canal of the Dudley Ridge Water District. My life is about California. 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. Look it, Im from Beverly Hills. Release Calendar Top 250 Movies Most Popular Movies Browse Movies by Genre Top Box Office Showtimes & Tickets Movie News India Movie Spotlight. His many land purchases and involvement on water boards are all about farming, not selling water to L.A. As featured on. The partner kept the Cutie name but only after paying the Resnicks tens of millions of dollars. 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. 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. The Resnick story certainly deserved a book, but did he really want me to be the one to write it? Neighbors dont tell on neighbors.. Fussing with one input or another, he can produce 3,500 pounds of nuts an acre. Dont let his boots, blue jeans, and ball cap fool you, the old-timers say. The city sued. Subscribers keep our independent community news in business. Ive gone too far. The big-rig drivers are cranky two ways, and the farmworkers in their last-leg vans are half-asleep. Thirty-five percent of our pre-diabetic population has gone into the healthy range, she tells the team. He grew up in New Jersey, where his father ran a bar. They were actually harvesting record crops. So beginning in the 1940s, Kern farmers went out and grabbed a share of not one distant river but two: the San Joaquin to the north and the Sacramento to the north of that. We want good groundwater, too., You mean no more pipelines carrying water in the dead of night?, The pipeline. He stammers a bit. Who anticipates that you cant fill a water bank for six or seven years?, Come on, I say. One million acres of the valley floor, greater than the size of Rhode Island, are now covered in almond trees. Somehow, 30 or 40 nuts arent compelled to drop. Groundwater and floodwater are two very different things. Making hundreds of millions of dollars in the process?. Hes got another meeting to attend. All the rest of that stuff its just jealousy and innuendo, jealousy and innuendo, jealousy and innuendo.. The front gates of the 25,000-square-foot Beaux Arts mansion on Sunset Boulevard magically opened without a guard giving a nod. Each mound is fed into an even bigger machine whose teeth pulverize the trees and make sawdust. And Vidovich ended up pumping water an extraordinary amount of water out of. Big fish eat the small fish here. Its known as a census-designated place, which is another way of saying that Kern County has every reason to neglect it. It can be squeezed only so much. But the one thing he cant control is what hes most dependent on water. His daughter, who used to own a restaurant, is busy raising her one son. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (2019) - IMDb By: jdubble07. Its loaded, Bernard says. He is irrigating 121,000 of those acres. She wanted me to put our $5 million in an account, draw interest, and we could live happily on the 50 grand a year.. We send money home each month to our families left behind, Lupe says. According to Lemoore's city manager, local officials will likely respond to the feedlot proposal at Tuesday's (Jan. 18) council meeting. 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. It goes to doctors and nurses, trainers and dietitians, who track the weight of workers, prod them to exercise, and wean them off soda and tortillas. The Sureos gang has tagged the front entrance but otherwise has left the inside unmarked. 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. He certainly looks the part in his well-worn jeans and checkered shirts. Today, most everything in this desolate reach of Kern County, save for the oil wells, belongs to Paramount Farming, which belongs to the Resnicks. The imported flow arrives by way of the Central Valley Project and State Water Project, the one-of-a-kind hydraulic system built by the feds and state to remedy Gods uneven design of California. Theyre either working in the heat or hiding from the heat. "We have one of the premier colleges in the country, and they want to put a slaughterhouse right next to it? Past Bakersfield and the high school football stadium where Frank Gifford and Les Richter, two future NFL Hall of Famers, squared off in the Valley Championship in 1947 in the driving rain. But nobody didnt like my dad.. With that insight, he sold the company for $2.5 million and went into the security guard business. Contact Eliza Ridgeway at elizar@latc.com. It was a permanent water loss for Kings County and put Vidovich under a lingering cloud of suspicion among area farmers and water managers. The problem is this last drought lasted five years. If you have any trouble accessing your account or linking your subscription, our. They do that because they love it., A POM craze followed. What Lynda seems to have in mind is a kind of utopian village set amid orchards, not unlike the utopias that were tried by the early dreamers of Southern California. Youre the one who leads the way on selling agricultural water to the cities. Hes so involved, in fact, he even chairs the monthly meetings for Buena Vista Water Storage District where Sandridge owns thousands of acres. This was Lost Hills, where the people are dependent on the Resnicks from cradle to grave. This is one of the ways the Nut King and the Pomegranate Queen are defying the California drought. To read more copy and paste or select. Often an equal amount of water splits south, wreaking havoc on farmland in the old Tulare Lake bottom, about 60 miles northwest of Bakersfield. Or at least thats the way Vidovich puts it when I finally reach him. Ah, he says, so youre the one whos been snooping around. She grabs him by the wrist, and they make a beeline for the convention hall door. John Vidovich is scion of his family's development firm, De Anza Properties, which owns Rancho Shopping Center and is renovating Los Altos Gardens. Under her rethink agriculture program, the kids will be trained in plant science and irrigation technology, marketing and sales. He did little, if any, catting around. 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. Later, Page would run for and win a seat on the Kern County Water Agency board. Three dogs, part pit bull, the menacing part, have given up on the shade and lie on the open road. It should be noted here that Angiolas general manager is Matthew Hurley. This last-ditch water in Lost Hills wont make everything right. The people here have traveled too far. The curriculum is being created by Noemi Donoso, the chief of education for the Chicago public schools before Lynda recruited her to Wonderful. John Vidovich, Student Loan Corp: Profile and Biography He had moved out to Long Beach, bought some property, and built one of those new strip malls. Bernard, hard to believe, is driving straight toward the aqueduct. Just get started became one of his guiding principles. But that money enabled me to go into Angiola (a water district in Tulare County) and have other water sources.. Stewart was the second of their four children, the only boy. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (2019) cast and crew credits, including actors, actresses, directors, writers and more. They were married only a short time when Manuel decided to cross the border almost 20 years ago. It moves in a wave from trunk to limb to nut and back down to earth. By the eighth day of harvest, the sun is gone. So everybody should have it, right? None of the sales taxes go to City Hall because Lost Hills isnt a city. When Lynda learned that half the students receiving thousands of dollars in company scholarships were dropping out of school, she wasnt deterred. To top it off, the greedy SOB (farmers rarely uttered Vidovichs name) intended to keep his 7,000 acres of nut trees in Dudley Ridge. Why not we start with an extended interview or two? I offered. Then one day, he was trying to find a marketing person and got a call from Lynda Sinay, who worked in advertising. Angiola agreed not to pump more than 36,000 acre feet a year, or more than 130,000 acre feet in any consecutive five-year period. There is nothing here, one of the townsfolk told Gibler. A meat store, an auto repair, a pool hall, and an arcade pass for a commercial strip. He packed his bags and left his wife and kids. I was 16, and his packing house was my first job, a baptism into the money, money, money world of the men who grew fruit and the men who sold it. The space for a familys secrets is only a few feet. But his egotheres no controlling that., Resnick had heard it all before. He was a big drinker, a big liver who loved the fast life. About five years ago, Lynda started our community development organization in Lost Hills, and the journey has been an amazing one. To the growers, it must feel like a jab in the stomach. In the Wonderful fields, he tells me, at least 80 percent of the workers carry no documents or documents that are not real. 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. These trees are pruned by a machine that hedges one side and then the other, he says. My health, knock on wood, is good. She seems a little nervous waiting in the wings. Hes dressed Italian chin to footLoro Piana jeans and Hogan tennis shoes. But he did pass and was admitted to the bar in 1980 at the age of 24. 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. 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. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you. 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. When he was told there were fields upon fields, he did not believe there could be this many fields. "At a time of high food prices and record farm income, this bill lacks program reform and fiscal discipline," Bush said in a statement May 21. "Would I build there if I had the money? In December, Vidovich filed an application with the Kings County Planning Department for a slaughterhouse and a feedlot for up to 12,500 animals. I don't think it would ever be very comfortable if you had an embargo and were denied food.". Hes not only able to irrigate his nut trees with an imported flow of groundwater40,000 acre-feet in some years. The Cutie and the Halo are now warring in the fields outside the Visalia Convention Center. The truth, as always, probably lies somewhere in between. Agriculture in the south valley has extended far beyond the provisions of its one river, the Kern. He blames Iran. Im a billionaire. Hes got an awful temper hes trying to control through Kabbalah. My grandfather, a survivor of the Armenian genocide, traveled 7,000 miles by ship and train in 1920 to find out if his uncles exhortationThe grapes here are the size of jade eggswas true. While he was just starting out, he also enlisted in the Navy and served in the reserves for six or eight years, he cant recall the exact term. Kings County Supervisor Joe Neves, whose district would contain the proposed feedlot and slaughterhouse, suggests that the process for approval is just beginning. "I want to be as open-minded as I can and get all the facts I can," he insisted. use no threatening or hateful language. John Vidovich - Sandridge Partners, L.P., Buttonwillow, California The bowls on her kitchen table are filled with grapes, berries, bananas, and red and green bell peppers. It would return as tule fog to remind the white man of his theft. The math works out to $162 a tree. From the east side of Tulare County to the west side of Fresno County, theyre planting more nuts and Halos. 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. Her brother-in-law was killed recently in a car crash along Highway 46. Each tree produces 38 pounds of nuts. So so sleepy, says another. Wheres it coming from? You have no idea the people on my VIP list who drink it. Except when you plug John Vidovichs name into the equation. Of course, I know everyone in the world, she told one reporter. Were still trying to figure out who our typical customer is going to be, Angelica says. It takes my visiting the irrigation district office during a public meeting for him to cough up more details. Nowhere to turn, I turn back around and roll down my window. Measuring the reach of the Resnicks, its tempting to lean on the hyperventilated language of the 1930s: Empire. He leveled its hog wallows, denuded its salt brush, and killed the last of its mustang, antelope, and tule elk. At age 81, he's gotten so big, he doesn't know how big. Lost Hills sits on an upslope. Anzaldos grandfather came from Guadalajara in the 1950s as part of the bracero farmworker program. Olson did not indicate what the response might say. Through the haze I can see the knoll of the aqueduct come closer. Shes now providing tutors and counselors in every region of California to boost the graduation rate. A member of the commission, on the eve of its demise, told me, Stewart wants to be a benevolent dictator. Resnick himself had sold 5,000 acre-feet to a proposed new town in the farm fields of Madera. Wonderful is getting smaller, he says. "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.". Look, I have no guilt. The rain starts to fall, big, fat, slashing drops that feel like electricity on my open palm. The softballs will go to market as whole fruit or as seed pods in a package. Inside sits a young man named Pablo. Selfo works 50 hours a week as an irrigator. Buttonwillow, California Search Background Check John Vidovich was associated with Sandridge Partners, L.P. between 2018 and 2021. Thats all fine and good, Resnick replied, but what about the $1 million-plus hed spent on lawyers fees? Posted on August 6, 2018 Bakersfield Californian. Lynda is making the trip on the company jet more often these days. I did not name the town, Lynda says. Even so, Resnick says, he learned a lesson from the 2004 recall of 13 million pounds of the companys salmonella-tainted almonds: Dont fight the FDA. But Paramount isnt Paramount anymore. Id have to say that fully half of my success has been luck. Vidovich has long been at odds with. But if its the tube that Im looking to follow, I must drive through the almond grove. Even if they had wheels, they wouldnt be going anywhere. John Vidovich - Green Dunes The GSAs are supposed to set pumping limits to stop overdraft. He wonders what agriculture will look like in western Kern in ten years. Chance of rain 40%. Boswell, who owned more land and controlled more water than any other person in the West for most of the 20th century. She described commodity programs as making up less than 13 percent of the farm bill. In contrast, John Vidovich, who helms Sandridge, comes from a Silicon Valley farming-turned-developer family. 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. Inside, a Wonderful media specialist sees that Resnick needs to be rescued. Since the middle of the drought, the price of almonds has dropped almost by half. It isnt going down because he wont let it go down. The farmers there are raising almost 1 million acres of crops, and fewer than half these acres are irrigated with flows from the Kern. If youve ever had Wonderful Pistachios, POM Wonderful pomegranate juice or Halo mandarin oranges, youve had produce grown on one of the largest farms in the world. So its a really extraordinary kind of development thats never happened in agriculture in California before really to raise the living of your workers. Lynda built sidewalks and storm drains, the new park and community center, and repaved the roads. "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. Wonderful has enough water to irrigate its orchards in Lost Hills and park tens of thousands of acre-feet in the water bank. "The city will be issuing a response to the feedlot proposal," said Lemoore City Manager Nathan Olson. The big man with the goatee behind the wheel is Bernard Puget, a Basque sheepmans son who oversees these orchards. But you ask the growers we process, and theyll tell you that year in and year out, no one offers a better price. Wild salmon and all these sides made from scratch. Because a human picker is not needed in the almond and pistachio groves, the nut harvest doesnt spread around money the way it spreads around dust. 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. Stewart gambled and won for many years. "The plan is to hold a special meeting on Tuesday, then submit," he explained to The Leader via a text. Too many pomegranates. It wasnt a midlife crisis, he told me. We changed the culture of safety, and we think we can do the same with health, Anzaldo says. Resnick dipped into his savings from his job at a mental hospital and went in half on the machine. He holds a little more than 100,000 acres in Kings County, 40,000 acres in Kern, and 10,000 acres in Tulare County. In the distant background, under the gaze of a 10-foot-tall marble goddess, sat Stewart in a gold-skirted chair, head down. 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 commands his realm, and she commands hers, and he takes care to mind the line. I get it. What is the phone number of Vidovich John - De Anza Properties? He maneuvers down the middle of the row, sweeps up the dried almonds, and throws them into a catcher. They were hardly the first rich people to use patronage to try to wheedle a citizenry toward their idea of a better life. Brown oxtail in batches and set aside. Semitropic Water Storage District, in northwestern Kern, has raised a lot of eyebrows with its ambitious, some say audacious, Tulare Lake Storage and Floodwater Protection Project. Now shes getting lots of credit.. 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. Ill have to go deeper if I can.. A balancing of books in an office in the city has decided that this orchard and others around it, covered by too little water, can go. A pump is shooting water out of the canal and into the Rain for Rent pipes. Anything else I can help you with?, He seems in a hurry. By car and foot, I trace the silver pipeline as it creeps north through Wonderful pomegranate orchards. Problem is, I feel like Im 50. Chance of rain 80%.. Cloudy with periods of rain. It was the early spring of 2008, and this time his secretary didnt hang up on me. The Spanish rice isnt rice but cauliflower made to look like rice. More often than not, it is hauling away some piece of the valleys bounty. John Vidovich - Board of Directors - Tri-County Lakes - LinkedIn Ever since I was a kid, I have felt its pulla gravitational presence on the land and in my own story. He did this first in the name of wheat and then beef, milk, raisins, cotton, and nuts. 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. The concept changed the industry. As for making a major water grab in the Central Valley, Page said Vidovich has nothing on the Wonderful or JG Boswell companies, both of which have far larger land holdings than Vidovich. I meet up with the Wonderful field man who first tipped me off to the pipeline. Ive told them all no. Thats our goal. As a class of people, the farmers and real estate developers harbor a deep-down contempt for what they have built. But she cannot remember the last time she or Manuel or their children drank it. It also means giving back.. This was how a billionaire who needed more water did politics. Last time he checked, he told me he owned 180,000 acres of California. What if I failed? Not long before, Vidovich was trying to grab water from Resnick, not give it. We were asleep at the wheel. Proposition 1 is a $7 billion bond passed in 2014 that would pay for a host of projects from flood control to water quality. Vidovoch's New Kings County Water Pipeline Triggers Alarm Bells - GV Wire He turns out to be a kindly religious man whose short hair is dyed the black of shoe polish. Back then, the Los Angeles Times had a bureau in the middle of California. Other water districts contended it was much more. John Vidovich. Where the pipes butt up against Twisselman Road, a more clever bit of engineering is required. Yet he doesn't think the farm bill in its present form is going to achieve its protectionist goals. Want to book a hotel in California? Scott: So you set out with this question: how was he defying nature? 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. Stephen Vidovich died in 2007, at the age of 81, driving a tractor near one of his remaining vineyards. Hes using it to irrigate his almonds and pistachios in Lost Hills. Court reverses $73.4 million verdict in Kings County land, water sale Before we go much further, you should probably know a little more about Vidovich. The dispute over the no fly zone was finally resolved by the invention of a netting that Resnick sheathes around his mandarins each spring. What kind of empire are you trying to build?, Im here to show the farmer that ags footprint needs to get smaller., I chew on his answer for a second. I head straight into the glare of the sun shooting over the Coast Range. I had in mind a magazine profile on Stewart, the Nut King. Upon graduation, he only needed to look across the Raritan River to find his college. We'd love to hear eyewitness Hes oblivious, or so it seems. 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. Its vastness makes you feel safe and in jeopardy at the same time. Anzaldo grew up in Bakersfield and attended a Catholic high school where he played football and basketball. The compass in my car says Im headed east, but that means almost nothing inside a province of 15 million trees. 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 four grandchildren have visited the orchards once or twice. Your current subscription does not provide access to this content. With water from the delta becoming more unreliable, he said, farmers have to hoard land for the groundwater. When the clamps let go of the trunk, 8,000 almonds, green outer shells wilted and partly opened, the meat inside a wooden womb, lie scattered on the flat dry earth. There are often laws binding it to a basin. "In talking to the planning department, I found out that the initial step is to notify essential agencies in the area for comments. Mobil and Texaco and Prudential Life were willing to practically give the ground and trees away. The workers didnt react well. The 5th District Court of Appeal in Fresno has overturned a $73.4 million verdict against McCarthy Family Farms and Bay Area developer John Vidovich and Sandridge Partners involving a land and. Hes surrounded by a half-dozen of his top men and women, the same ones whove been artfully dodging me for the past three years. High 53F. The continuous rattle feeds the nuts into a series of bins on the backside of the tractor. We pile back into the van and head up the road. When the next shift ends, he tells me, the gym will fill up with workers looking to win the cash bonuses from the companys GetFit program. And one Kern County water district could be the linchpin to it all. Do you know what I am? In fact, the piece is called A kingdom from dust. Its a pretty dry place right? Lynda believes that if theyre enticed in the right direction, the 1,300 workers might choose to prepare the same healthy fare at home. That was the last straw for Pixley, which sued in 2013. His operation is extensive and very smart.. Ive learned that I have to be diversified in my water, Vidovich said. "Even with the subsidy, I think cotton is a losing battle," he said, predicting that the commodity would increasingly come from China. But this wasnt the Resnick Pavilion at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Jun 27, 2007. He does enough farming in the area to make it look like hes a farmer. 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. Share with Us. On the shallow bottom, the women fished mussels and clams with their toes.



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