I stick to the left lane and try to stay ahead of the pack. Then I get lucky. 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. When the mansion was built in 1927, it was known as the Sunset House. The POM tanks, Im told, are backed up with a three-year supply. Twine strung trailer to trailer hangs with the laundry of fathers, mothers, and children. So now theyre doing everything they can to frustrate my ability to utilize the property, said Vidovich. 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. Tracts of houses, Californias last affordable dream, civilize three or four exits, and then its back to the open road splattered with the guts and feathers of chickens that jumped ship on the slaughterhouse drive. He gambled on the price of nuts going up, and he gambled on the water never going dry. A minute later, I reconnect with the pipeline and pursue its length for a football field. We want good groundwater, too., You mean no more pipelines carrying water in the dead of night?, The pipeline. He stammers a bit. And so the question of sustainability is front and center here now in California. When you first meet John Vidovich, everything from his ball cap to his dirty boots tells you he's a farmer. The four grandchildren have visited the orchards once or twice. All but a handful come from Mexico. It should be right here, but I dont see it. She had recently divorced and wasnt about to settle for a life in Culver City. In the late 1970s, he went looking for a hedge against inflation. He needs nearly 1,000 acre-feet a day for 165 daysthe length of nut-growing seasonto hang a good crop across his acres in western Kern. He came to California in the 1950s to remake himself. Contact 3? Its California., Sure. Henry A. Barrios / The . The courtship of Stewart and Lynda went fast. Now theres something here. John Vidovich. You sure this isnt 18 tons an acre? he says, goading. 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. The farmer isnt here to smell the cracking open of wood, the ripping open of warm secret earth. Unlike many other billionaires, they could poke fun at themselves. He was short, bull-like, and didnt take crap from anyone. The pipeline, bankrolled by his investment firm Sandridge Partners, is an efficient and conservation-minded way to ship water, he says. Support. There she stood in the foreground of the photo that accompanied a New Yorker profile titled Pomegranate Princess. She was wearing a black pantsuit with open-toed silver pumps and a single piece of jewelry around her neck. "Once you have them, you spend a lifetime defending them." For a long time, she got no credit. He blames Iran. 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. The image of water moves on and on through miles of western Kern. The hillocks that existed back in Yokut Indian days were flattened by a hunk of metal called the Fresno Scraper. Fallowing the farm until the footprint gets smaller and smaller. If you study his moves, you can see a method to the acres he is accumulating. Theres a lot of people who dont like me, he said after his fathers death. He maneuvers down the middle of the row, sweeps up the dried almonds, and throws them into a catcher. Among other projects, he developed the posh Quarry Hills subdivision in Los Altos Hills with 22 multimillion-dollar luxury homes, where he now lives in a 15,000-square-foot house on 10 acres and a vineyard. By age 19, Lynda had dropped out of college, married a magazine ad man, and opened her own advertising agency. 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. 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. We saved the best for last, he says. And one of the things he was doing was sort of an off-the-books irrigation deal? It wont hurt the canal, he said. Other billionaires getting behind Biden are investor Haim Saban, worth $2.9 billion, DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg, worth $1 billion, and Signum Global Advisors founder Charles Myers whose net worth is unknown. Vidovich, meanwhile, is accusing Boswell-backed groundwater agencies of dragging their feet on pumping reductions to the point their actions could sink the small, rural town of Corcoran up to another 11 feet. I park the car and walk across the barren rows. The borough measured no more than 2 square miles. And he was able to use canals and pumping stations to then get that water in this pipeline that very secretively was connected to irrigation ditches in Lost Hills. Inside, a Wonderful media specialist sees that Resnick needs to be rescued. Theres no garbage piled high and smoldering, no chickens picking at scratch. Upon graduation, he only needed to look across the Raritan River to find his college. The juice isnt selling like it used to. 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. He lingers in the crowd long enough to shake hands with a friend from Bel-Air whos planting thousands of acres of pistachios in the worst ground of Tulare Lake. 2023 Minnesota Public Radio. I feel his gaze going past me, his voice turning oddly sentimental. California had passed a law intended to stop the rising of new towns in the middle of nowhere. Lupe knocks on his door, and he invites us in. So much snowmelt comes down the mountain that it nearly takes out Oroville Dam. Springsteen shook his head and smiled a thin, ironic smile. No ones going to get fired for bringing home 2,500 pounds of nuts an acre. 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. That breaks your agreement with those farmers. In an era of climate change, everybody is scrambling. Carls Jr., Subway, McDonalds, Wendys, Loves, or Arbys. Not a single penny was put in that piggy bank.. A few weeks later, I found myself riding up the elevator of a high-rise on the Westside of Los Angeles. And while Resnick and Vidovich have been at odds in the past over San Joaquin Valley water feuds especially centering on the appearance that Resnick was overly-familiar in his utilization of the Kern Water Bank the feud is long gone. Financial Data. Boswell, Vidovich is heir to a real estate empire. Days Inn or Motel 6. The sellers include farmers in the Tulare Lake basin who are pumping so much water out of the ground that the levees protecting the town of Corcoran are sinking, not by inches but by feet. I call the manager of the Lost Hills Water District. Conceived by Lynda, it cost one fortune to build and a second fortune to light up. The Wonderful Company is located in Californias Central Valley where droughts hit frequently, but that hasnt stopped the company from harvesting record crops. Here and there a mulberry tree, its canopy pruned back, breaks up the red-smeared sky.. No stranger enters this zone unless its to get rid of a body or dump waste from cooking meth or drown a hot car. He says his bosses have been instructing him to cut the water each irrigation. He packed his bags and left his wife and kids. Im 80 years old. So he started laying pipes last December. They all just started running, and kept running, and blew right through the hot wire fence, recalled dairyman Wilson, who estimates $80,000 in fence damage. 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. Hes carrying 55,000 pounds of crop in two swaggering trailers open to the sun. The rent is $540. Amy Scott: Theres a stunning aerial photo in the magazine that shows these green green trees surrounded basically by dust. The vibration here isnt quite as vehement. A native of Sunnyvale, Vidovich was the son of a Bay Area real estate scion. 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. Because of a lack of water? I ask. All this stirring up is a consequence of mechanization. Lynda spent $150,000 at an auction to buy the beaded gown and matching bolero jacket, the Elvis Dress, that Princess Diana had worn on a visit to Hong Kong. Correction: August 8, 2022 An earlier version of this article incorrectly reported that Stanford grad James Griffin "J.G." Who would have thought that people would be asking their bartender to fix them a Pomtini? he said. No one is out and about. More recently, he earned $40 million in an easement deal with a water bank and exchange that seeks to siphon flood water out of a Kings County canal for storage in Kern County. In court, Boswell also warned about the pipelines potential use, suggesting that water could eventually end up in Southern California. Hes trying to play dumb, but I can see the sliest of grins peeking out from his mustache and goatee. This is a lot of gestures to unpack, and as I exit the grounds, I keep turning around to get one last look thats true. The farmers there are raising almost 1 million acres of crops, and fewer than half these acres are irrigated with flows from the Kern. She wanted me to put our $5 million in an account, draw interest, and we could live happily on the 50 grand a year.. You can reach Alex at alex.tavlian@sjvsun.com. The making of a billionaire over the next half-century was a series of dots that connected in the California sunshine. And now Vidovich is the aggressor, said Doug Verboon, a Kings County supervisor and walnut farmer who works the same 187 acres that his grandfather bought in 1906. This must be the spot the Wonderful field man was describing. 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 son, 5 foot 6 and thin, with closely cropped blond hair and blue eyes that fix on you, isnt concerned about ingratiating himself. He does enough farming in the area to make it look like hes a farmer. 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. Boswell had done for the town of Corcoran. Resnick dipped into his savings from his job at a mental hospital and went in half on the machine. I had in mind a magazine profile on Stewart, the Nut King. Still, none of it would have happened without luck., What he and Lynda had done with the wretched pomegranate was another matter. Its loaded, Bernard says. When Resnick plants, he plants his trees wall to wall. What? The fight between the Tulare Lake Canal Company, controlled by the J.G. San Antonio south doesnt exist anymore. He is a small, good-looking man with a patch of black hair under his lip. The sentimental ones stay away. One man drives and shakes the tree while the other man makes sure the clusters fall into the butterfly opening of the receiver. He isnt farming dirt, Arax wrote. He didnt know where to begin. His 15 million trees in the San Joaquin Valley consume more than 400,000 acre-feet of water a year. The wide-open middle of California did its lullaby on me again. Before he left her to cross alone, he gave her soda, water, chips, and Cheetos. Central Californias family raisin farms are drying up, Commercial bees, the unsung heroes of the nut business, From California to the Midwest, examining the perils of industrial farming and the risk to food, Drought has California farms destroying crops, rather than pay for water, Californias drought is all but over, but some wells are still dry, The color of the year has a political past, A California farm battles drought: Were out here trying to survive, Your donation today powers the independent journalism that you rely on, Seasonal foreign workers fill critical landscaping jobs, enabled by easier access to visas. I returned for two more sessions, and then he and Lynda took off to their $15 million vacation house in Aspen, where they were warring with the locals over a housing project for community workers that was blocking their view. 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. At the plant, we built our gyms, and we have stretching and walking activities. Who knows when a five-year drought is coming? Theyre listening with their heads bent down. 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. What he knows is that Wonderful is buying up to 50,000 acre-feet of water a year in a series of hidden deals. My grandfather lost the farm to vine hoppers is the story he told. Former L.A. Fire Marshal John Vidovich has filed a lawsuit against the city, alleging he was "unlawfully and unceremoniously ousted from his job" in August 2016. This is the route my grandfather, one of a legion of fruit tramps, took as he drifted from farm to farm in the 1920s picking crops. 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. Longtime small farmers say water is hard to track and could drain towardrich and politically powerful users, leaving them dry. No whistle shouts mealtime in the modern-day company town. He doesnt wave me off or give chase. Sandridge Partners, controlled by Vidovich, is building a 10-mile-long route on its properties to ship water from its wells in the north to its thirsty fields in the south. My husband would have been shot dead like the others, but he was lucky. He guides me back into the main store with its displays of fresh fruit and vegetables, meats, cold cuts, and baked goods. Rain for Rent, the pipes say. This is where the pistachios, 400 truckloads a day, 50 days of harvest, come to be weighed, washed, peeled, dried, gassed, sorted, salted, roasted, packaged, and shipped out to the world. A fully equipped teaching kitchen will turn the harvest into school lunches. Just ahead I can see the last section of pipe throwing a cascade of white water into a main canal belonging to the Lost Hills Water District. Theyre the 300-pound gorilla, said Mark Grewal of Grewal Consulting, who worked for J.G. A piece of pipeline south of Stratford rests in the arm of a piece of heavy equipment on Dec. 16, 2021. It's John Vidovich. Where the pipes butt up against Twisselman Road, a more clever bit of engineering is required. He was a big drinker, a big liver who loved the fast life. All told, nine men operating five machines will pick clean this orchard over the next four weeks. He brought great ideas to the table and helped make and then execute tough choices. Have we gone too far? My life is about California. Farmers near Pixley already have sued him once for taking too much water out of their ground and moving it. The pipeline project is suspended while the two sides battle in court. I enter an equipment yard where a Wonderful farmhand is standing next to a tractor. I didnt see our creation, much less the figures bent under the canopies of vine that our creation counted on. VIDEO: Christmas wonderland featuring the Grinch . Its John Vidovich. The shelves spill piatas, gloves, hats, pruning shears, and loaves of Bimbo white bread. Sitting in his mansion in 2008, he already counted more than 100,000 acres of orchards across five counties. But the one thing he cant control is what hes most dependent on water. Lucky for her that the young man was kind. Lynda is making the trip on the company jet more often these days. 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. Shoving aside the coins, they introduced a Scarlett OHara doll that, by itself, raked in $35 million in sales. All Rights Reserved. One more bin, a post reads. In his book, The Dreamt Land, Fresno-based reporter and author Mark Arax noted that Vidovichs business moves were driven out of an almost singular commodity: water. But, until now, nobody had the money to fight back.. As the growers punch more holes into the ground looking for a vanishing resource, the earth is sinking. Contact 4? Still, he was starting to think about his legacy, and thats why he finally agreed to meet with me. It becomes scorn because they cant allow it to become pity or self-hatred. It takes a life every six seconds. In a valley of dead rivers, each one killed on behalf of agriculture, the aqueduct was the one river still alive. She deftly places her body between him and me. They settled in Brooklyn among Jews who had fled their own pogroms, and his grandfather went into the needle-and-embroidery trade.