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This is my wife. 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. Rainfall near a quarter of an inch. Now shes getting lots of credit.. In Kern County, one in two adults and almost one in five children are obese. Now, Pace said, Vidovich will do the same thing on a larger scale by moving Kings and Tulare groundwater to Kern County. Why not we start with an extended interview or two? I offered. 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. We hope that you continue to enjoy our free content. Even the community water tank is painted baby blue with a big sunflower. The bunches of chartreuse-tipped nuts hanging from antler branches never touch the ground. Hes using it to irrigate his almonds and pistachios in Lost Hills. The Mojave Water Agency in the high desert needed a backup supply to serve its growing communities of Barstow and Apple Valley, Hesperia and Victorville. He doesnt know what pipeline means. Yeah, hes got a lot of money and hes been buying up land, makes some people nervous, Page said. This project may not be fully thought out," said Neves. "This is the first step of a long journey. When it goes into full effect, in a decade or two, more than a million acres of cropland across the valley will have to be retired. The State Water Project that allowed western Kern County to grow into a farming behemoth has given no water or very little water over the past three years amid the worst drought in California history. 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. Number three, water from Angiola cant physically get to Semitropics proposed storage cells. The City of Lemoore is one such agency obligated to respond. That breaks your agreement with those farmers. Vidovich owns the property in question, and he is well known in Valley circles. The partner kept the Cutie name but only after paying the Resnicks tens of millions of dollars. Weve had our battles in the past, and I dont agree with everything hes doing. We rely on your financial support to keep making that possible. Well still make money.. We tell the children about the fields when they are young so they dont know the fields when they are old, she says. More than a dozen family members have followed Lupe and Manuel to Lost Hills. Days Inn or Motel 6. He tells me to meet him in Lost Hills. What do you need to know, sir?, Whats it been like here during the drought?, Drought, no drought, makes no difference. The Yokut had a saying that when the farmer drained the last drops of snowmelt from Tulare Lake, the water would return. Except when you plug John Vidovichs name into the equation. On Oscar night, she handed out free samples to the stars at the Vanity Fair party. In the maroon of sundown,I follow the workers back to Lost Hills. He wouldnt know one of his Valencia orange groves from one of his Washington navel orange groves. On the way out of the market, Pablo buys a case of Pacifico. 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. So so sleepy, says another. However, first-term councilmember Frank Gornick, West Hills College's longtime chancellor and one of the guiding forces behind the expansion of the college in Lemoore, says he isn't opposed to a feedlot and processing plant. The price for pistachios has climbed from $4.50 a pound to an unbelievable $5.25 a pound. Still, he was starting to think about his legacy, and thats why he finally agreed to meet with me. On this same stretch of 99, I once wrote a story about farmworkers who moonlighted as meth cookers to make ends meet. First of all, the myriad laws and rules that govern water wouldnt allow that to happen, they say. Heat olive oil in a Dutch oven over medium-high heat until smoking. No bee can penetrate the shield, and his mandarins remain seedless. The POM tanks, Im told, are backed up with a three-year supply. Brown oxtail in batches and set aside. Lynda assisted her with the design and color scheme but otherwise has remained hands-off. I didnt see our creation, much less the figures bent under the canopies of vine that our creation counted on. This 79-minute documentary focuses upon the overall culture of bullying at Mentor High School; outlining the abuse both teenagers endured and the efforts made by both sets of parents to address their concerns prior to their children's suicide. 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. At issue? Vidovich is the owner of Sandridge Partners, LP - a farmland investment firm that has undertaken more than 100,000 acres of Valley farmland. A bunch of trees are going dry, he says. My life is about California. Theyll take home $11 an hour for their labors. 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 hillocks that existed back in Yokut Indian days were flattened by a hunk of metal called the Fresno Scraper. 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. Among the graduating class are kids headed to Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Dartmouth, and the state and community college systems. After school and on weekends, wed clean and wax floors. About five years ago, Lynda started our community development organization in Lost Hills, and the journey has been an amazing one. Looking back, he said he wouldnt make that sale today. It was a hit. At the time, I was heavy with state water but the state water had low allocations and I had no other water source over there (Dudley Ridge land in western Kings County).. LOIS HENRY: Is John Vidovich planning to sell off the valley's lifeblood? The bowls on her kitchen table are filled with grapes, berries, bananas, and red and green bell peppers. The big man with the goatee behind the wheel is Bernard Puget, a Basque sheepmans son who oversees these orchards. 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. Hes fishing right now. In exchange, the state would get banking rights in Semitropic, said General Manager Jason Gianquinto. One of the first things he did with his monopoly was kill the California Pistachio Commission, the industrys marketing group, by yanking his funding. If he knows what hes doing, the shears can make a thousand more pounds an acre.. Already mechanization is changing, you know, the labor situation. The Resnicks are growing again. Now Lynda herself stands before us, a single light over her head. This is the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley. Down a rutted road, 100 trailers with foundations dressed in plywood back up against an orchard. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (2019) - IMDb Keep it Courteous. There was a majordomo of the house, a butler, a chef, a sous-chef, three housekeepers, a limo driver, and a trio of assistants who worked in the basement, juggling Lyndas calendar and the buying, wrapping, and shipping of gifts she handed out to her Rolodex of highfalutin people. Stewart had made it clear that Lynda would not be joining us. Hes planting ground that no one has ever planted before. John Vidovich is a real estate developer who specializes in land use and development deals involving everything from mobile home parks and large apartment complexes to wine vineyards and pistachio farms. Proposition 1 is a $7 billion bond passed in 2014 that would pay for a host of projects from flood control to water quality. It moves in a wave from trunk to limb to nut and back down to earth. His partner in the mandarins once told me that when Stewart is done with you, hes done with you. 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. In the Wonderful fields, he tells me, at least 80 percent of the workers carry no documents or documents that are not real. The water is being taken from unsuspecting farmers in an irrigation district in Tulare County more than 40 miles away. Unlike many other billionaires, they could poke fun at themselves. He worked as a gardener in Los Angeles and then heard about the almond trees on the other side of the mountain where the living was so much cheaper. And I want to keep farming.. In the kitchen corner, cases of bottled water are stacked halfway up the wall. She seems a little nervous waiting in the wings. 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. He says he doesnt feel sorry for Resnick. 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. Ive gone too far. The GPS tells me to take Interstate 5, the fastest route through the belly of the state, but Im partial to Highway 99, the old road that brought the Okies and Mexicans to the fields and deposited a twang on my Armenian tongue. But a pipeline, which Vidovich is allowed to build under the Semitropic agreement, could span that distance. 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. I understand the fear, but its not based on reason.. Its his pipe, not mine. Michelle Perez, an analyst for the activist watchdog Environmental Working Group, perceives the bill differently, arguing that because the subsidies are calculated on a per-acre basis, the cash infusions "provide liquidity to the largest, most prosperous farms, allowing them to outbid and outcompete their smaller, less prosperous neighbors. Building an agricultural empire in a land of drought - Marketplace He isnt farming dirt. The city of Los Angeles, by comparison, consumes 587,000 acre-feet. Over the years, they had donated large sums of money to political campaigns, and some of it went to Republicans who had pledged to prop up California agriculture. Not a single penny was put in that piggy bank.. What kind of place is this? Because the road ends here, there is no physical way to follow the canals flow. Thats a billion-dollar crop. Where does the water end up? Thats our goal. But if its the tube that Im looking to follow, I must drive through the almond grove. Already, the high school is filled with hundreds of students bused in from farmworker towns that are among the poorest communities in the West. She remembers handing the boy to her sister-in-law, who carried phony papers, and watching them cross by bridge into California. His trees were drinking from the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project, from rivers and irrigation canals and the water bank. His story is the one Ive been carting around in my notebook for the past few decades, sure I was ready to write it after five years or ten years, only to learn of another twist that would lead me down another road. 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. Theres a lot of people who dont like me, but nobody didnt like my dad.. 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. The fight between the Tulare Lake Canal Company, controlled by the J.G. Along a fan of the Kings River, a raisin farmer in Selma shows me his well thats coughing up sand. The water sent to Kern County1.4 million acre-feet a yearhas doubled the cropland. 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. This water basically came from a land owned by someone whos also a near billionaire a guy named John Vidovich. He started cleaning pizza parlors and drugstores. I do all the calculations from the numbers I am able to gather, and I cannot figure out how these nuts are getting enough water. He said he bought his first parcel here in 1994 when he invested in a foreclosed property in Kings County. The Kings is as erratic a river as the Kern so floodwaters are unpredictable. What happens to them if Wonderful downsizes? By then, Wonderful, if it still exists, will be a portfolio run by men even farther away than Beverly Hills. I hop out of the car. Here and there a mulberry tree, its canopy pruned back, breaks up the red-smeared sky.. What to give a grieving widow and her five children in Lost Hills but drinking water? I ask him about his delivery of servicespruning, pesticides, herbicides, fertilizer, waterthat can be calibrated and timed to enable the smallest unit to achieve maximum yield. Resnick, he says. These are trees and vines raised in nurseries and put into the ground at a cost of $10,000 an acre to satisfy the worlds growing appetite for nuts and fruits. One more hour and Im outta this fucking place.. It was the early 1900s, and his grandfather and grandmother decided to secure passage to America. 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. Lucky for her that the young man was kind. He doesnt wave me off or give chase. At the plant, we built our gyms, and we have stretching and walking activities. 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. For a long time, she got no credit. Last time he checked, he told me he owned 180,000 acres of California. Im actually not supposed to talk about it.. They settled in Brooklyn among Jews who had fled their own pogroms, and his grandfather went into the needle-and-embroidery trade. I had not seen any. Pace gave a nod to Vidovich on that count. 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. She walks off the stage with Stewart. He was 13 and standing inside the Rutgers Pharmacy on the first day of his first job. He sold a chunk of land to the builders of Sunnyvale and decided he could develop the rest himself. His face is still blank. If he had his druthers, he said, hed still be living in a little ranch house in Culver City. His father had lost it in a bet. He had no papers, like so many others, just an image of what this side of the border looked like. Down the great aqueduct, by freight of politics and gravity, came the excess waters of the Sacramento River. Its gambling. Its gone. "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. Of course, I know everyone in the world, she told one reporter. Their houses made from railroad boxcars have been painted purple, blue, yellow, and gold. Every river busting out of the Sierra was bent sideways, if not backward, by a bulwark of ditches, levees, canals, and dams. Hes trying to play dumb, but I can see the sliest of grins peeking out from his mustache and goatee. We are sensitive to that. Yet the Resnick pipeline is doing just that. Its bringing water from the Dudley Ridge Water District in Kings County. john vidovich documentary. Movies. Every last tree has been torn out of the ground. Welcome to San Antonio del Norte, he says. Hes not only able to irrigate his nut trees with an imported flow of groundwater40,000 acre-feet in some years. 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. "We have one of the premier colleges in the country, and they want to put a slaughterhouse right next to it? The man and his pincers cant be bothered. This year's farm bill, the most recent incarnation of agricultural policy dating back to the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s, is a controversial $300 billion package that combines poverty-relieving nutrition programs with big payoffs to agribusinesses. Well, maybe just a little guilt, but thats Jewish. He said the prod for all their giving in Lost Hills happened in Aspen, of all places. On your next view you will be asked to log in to your subscriber account or create an account and subscribepurchase a subscription to continue reading. How can this be? This is the closest to hills it comes. One man drives and shakes the tree while the other man makes sure the clusters fall into the butterfly opening of the receiver. Annual sales at the Mint jumped to nearly $1 billion. I remind him of the time we spent together eight years earlier in his Sunset House. Food and Beverage Manufacturing . Deadly in the rush of harvest, deadly in the quiet of fog, deadly in the blur of Saturday nights when the fieldwork is done and the beer drinking becomes a second humiliation. Then some of the money we save goes to pay the coyote. Not the people. When pressed, though, they acknowledged it could be done. I didnt know good land from bad land. Thank you for reading! Everything but the turkey had come from his orchards. He points to the young almond trees that envelop his 20 acres like a siege. Past McFarland and the high school runners who won five state championships in a row in the 1990s. Were still trying to figure out who our typical customer is going to be, Angelica says. The borough measured no more than 2 square miles. There is also an existing subdivision just southeast of the college near Highway 198 (Cimmaron Park). You dont believe me?, No, I believe you, Resnick says. Too many pomegranates. Water is what led me to Stewart Resnick in the winter of 2003. Most everything that can be touched in this corner of California belongs to Wonderful. If this were any other part of Kern, the farmers would be reaching into the earth to make up the difference. He was dressed in the latest slim-fit style. The piece, I was told, had left Lynda embarrassed and fuming. To find its flow, Id have to go looking in a thousand irrigation ditches in the fields beyond. I want to know that what we built will continue into the future.. The men and women who planted, irrigated, sprayed, and picked our crops were phantoms. But the one thing he cant control is what hes most dependent on water. 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. In a valley of dead rivers, each one killed on behalf of agriculture, the aqueduct was the one river still alive. He didnt know where to begin. I grab my notebook and walk up to one of the vans. Angiola was rehabbing old wells, drilling new ones and installed a large pipeline. The river is nothing if not fickle. My grandmother said it was his leftist politics that ate up that vineyard and the ones that followed. His father was 3 years old at the time. He used to work for the Resnicks before Stewart put him in charge of the district. She is the brander of the empire, the final word on their Super Bowl ads, the creator of product marketing. 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. On vacation in the south of France, he heard about a farming company called Paramount that needed a buyer for some of its orchards in Kern County. To provide context for the size of his subsidy, Vidovich estimated that the current California drought, which has led him to irrigate an additional 24,000 acres, will cost his business tens of millions of dollars this year, while the subsidy brought in $1 million. He explains that Wonderful has grown too big to hassle such precision. On the north end sits the Wonderful Soccer Field with its all-weather track, stadium lights, artificial turf, and giant yellow sunburst embossed at midfield. You may have never heard of John Vidovich, but his impact on the day-to-day life of the average southern San Joaquin Valley farmer is difficult to be understated. Groundwater agencies up and down the San Joaquin Valley had to file plans with the Department of Water Resources earlier this year showing . Hes never driven a tractor or opened an irrigation valve. He thinks Ive understated the crop.. He makes $10.75 an hour. The Tulare Lake Canal Company, controlled by JG Boswell Company, moved the equipment onto . Vidovich, he said, is just the new water baron on the block, thats all. The miles clock by not as road but as story. Under his leadership, Buena Vista has installed a pipeline system to reduce reliance on canals, which lose a lot of water to seepage and the district has become extremely active in buying up land for water banking. The 5.3 acres are so flawless and at odds with the town that the whole thing feels like a movie set.