They hide from the fact that it relies on the subjugation of peasants from Mexico they themselves have brought here. In his best Borscht Belt nasal, he takes a jab. If anyone doubted the health benefits of the juice, they spent more than $30 million in research to prove that it fought heart disease and prostate woes. The giving goes to college scholarships and tutors. At the east end, where the highway meets Interstate 5, the traveler gets a choice. As a consequence, the farmland here, nearly 100,000 acres planted in permanent crops, is completely reliant on the governments supply of mountain water. The white flowers have set into buds, and the buds have become baby almonds covered in fuzz. Executive Team Culture Ratings from Discover Employees TOP 15% Discover's Executive Team scores in the Top 15% of similar sized companies on Comparably See Detailed Executive Team Ratings 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. This doesnt count the 21,000 acres of grapefruits and limes hes growing in Texas and Mexico. 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. The Resnicks are growing again. Agriculture in the south valley has extended far beyond the provisions of its one river, the Kern. If this were any other part of Kern, the farmers would be reaching into the earth to make up the difference. These are loaded, Resnick says. A skill his detractors say hes used to maneuver water away from its rightful place to his own benefit. He turns out to be a kindly religious man whose short hair is dyed the black of shoe polish. Their houses made from railroad boxcars have been painted purple, blue, yellow, and gold. Includes Address (3) Phone (3) Email (1) See Results. Its the summer of 2016, eight weeks before the big pick, and Im zigzagging across the almonds and pistachios, square mile after square mile of immaculate orchards lined with micro-irrigation systems and heavy with nuts. They were farmers back in San Antonio, growing lettuce, cilantro, and radishes on a small plot of land. for 30 days. Kings Officials Unhappy About Water Proposal, Local Water Guys Eyeing Kings River Flood Water. Before we go much further, you should probably know a little more about Vidovich. Whos it going to? A meat store, an auto repair, a pool hall, and an arcade pass for a commercial strip. No. She wasnt content to pursue the usual list of wealthy businessmen as clients. These are donations from other farmworker families, but theyre not for her and Manuel and the kids. He points to the young almond trees that envelop his 20 acres like a siege. Somehow, 30 or 40 nuts arent compelled to drop. We are horrified by the lack of regard for both neighbor and nature, and we hope that the community will accept our deepest and most sincere apologies and find it in their hearts to forgive us. They pledge to donate the 380 acres to charity. I hop out of the car. The making of a billionaire over the next half-century was a series of dots that connected in the California sunshine. Before he left her to cross alone, he gave her soda, water, chips, and Cheetos. He was in military intelligence and had a top secret clearance that involved gathering data and evaluating products they made, he said. 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 artificiality had achieved a permanence; its permanence had created my California. It makes interesting reading. Fussing with one input or another, he can produce 3,500 pounds of nuts an acre. Because its so much fun to say that Lost Hills has been found., The room full of growers applauds. Inside sits a young man named Pablo. I meet up with the Wonderful field man who first tipped me off to the pipeline. 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. Among the graduating class are kids headed to Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Dartmouth, and the state and community college systems. She didnt understand his drive. For the next two or three seconds, the almonds pour down like hail. Like many billionaires, he didnt have a decent explanation for his fortune. A judge found this past March that the initiative was flawed because Vidovich used his own project description instead of the neutral description by the Cupertino city attorney. He does enough farming in the area to make it look like hes a farmer. He guides me back into the main store with its displays of fresh fruit and vegetables, meats, cold cuts, and baked goods. In the maroon of sundown,I follow the workers back to Lost Hills. Down the great aqueduct, by freight of politics and gravity, came the excess waters of the Sacramento River. I park the car and walk in the direction of a scattering of buildings slapped together with stucco and corrugated tin. This was the same road that took me to Selma, the raisin capital of the world, to pack peaches and plums for Mel Girazian, my fathers old friend. The biggest misconception about John is that he wants to sell water to LA, he said. When it doesnt come, he finds a way to make it come. He spits tobacco juice into the empty can of Rockstar. Four tribes of Yokut lived along its shores. When I got out of law school, I probably had 100 people I was employing.. Being healthy is a choice. Then hed lose his temper and get the strap out.. When Resnick plants, he plants his trees wall to wall. LOIS HENRY: Is John Vidovich planning to sell off the valley's lifeblood? He said he bought his first parcel here in 1994 when he invested in a foreclosed property in Kings County. Its happening. The bosses wont speak of it, he says. It cant be farmed like it was, he says. The sober man died. Our relatives have been patient. He worries because there isnt enough water now to properly irrigate the almonds, pistachios, and pomegranates. They greet me with smiles and handshakes. She tells me the water comes out of the tap yellow and foul smelling, and she doesnt trust it. 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. The problem is this last drought lasted five years. The water sent to Kern County1.4 million acre-feet a yearhas doubled the cropland. I ask him how the drought has affected Wonderful. Everything about our physical selves, Lynda believes, begins in our guts. And you know why? It will be interesting to see what the regulatory boards say. Arax: They lose their livelihood. Sports and playground activities are prohibited at the beach, picnic areas are closed, and masks must be worn by all visitors. Mark Arax: Yeah. Anzaldos grandfather came from Guadalajara in the 1950s as part of the bracero farmworker program. ! it says. Who would have thought the two of them in cahoots? He guides me to the caf, and we grab our lunches from the buffet. 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. "I have sent my opinion to three county supervisors and our city manager. This is the Lynda who now endeavors to see farmhands as something more than workers. Thirty-five percent of our pre-diabetic population has gone into the healthy range, she tells the team. And its even worse for the children in Kings County. First off, Hurley said, hes not Vidovichs henchman. In any event, Vidovich fallowed his Angiola land and took its groundwater about 25 miles west to his Dudley Ridge lands. That was four years ago. He indicated that a proposal was currently being drafted for the council's Tuesday night approval. Look, these farmers go back two, three, and four generations. He made friends everywhere he went, John Vidovich told the Mercury News in 2007. Floodwater is considered a nuisance, a menace even. Each square-mile section is divided into blocks, and each block counts a precise number of rows. I retrace the road I came in on and cross old Tulare Lake, which rose by flood and sank by drought. Vidovich made an offer on the land and Page took it. By the decree of Lynda, who once contemplated a bowl of those juicy little seedless mandarins and on the spot named them Cuties, this is now the land of Wonderful. 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. In December, Vidovich filed an application with the Kings County Planning Department for a slaughterhouse and a feedlot for up to 12,500 animals. As the head of a quasi-public agency, he knows he cant completely blow off my questions. A plume of dust joins up with other plumes of dust until the sky over the valley turns sickly. Vidovich John - De Anza Properties is located at: 960 N San Antonio Rd, Los Altos, California 94022. Lets meet again in two weeks, he said. As it happened, just down the road, on the other side of the lake bottom, Resnick had captured his own body of water, the Kern Water Bank, and planted millions of nut trees on desert scrub. To manage the disease. This is how the land of Wonderful is keeping alive its trees. Theres an unease about the room. The aquifer either doesnt exist or is so befouled by salts that the water is poison. His face is still blank. More often than not, it is hauling away some piece of the valleys bounty. When Lynda learned that half the students receiving thousands of dollars in company scholarships were dropping out of school, she wasnt deterred. Along a fan of the Kings River, a raisin farmer in Selma shows me his well thats coughing up sand. 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. "I am a farmer and a big farmer," Vidovich said. The big-rig drivers are cranky two ways, and the farmworkers in their last-leg vans are half-asleep. Its a $500 million project, of which Semitropic is hoping to get $250 million from Proposition 1 funding. Just get started became one of his guiding principles. The checks the workers bring in here from Mr. Resnick are the same checks they bring in for years. FAMILY OFFICE MARKETPLACE. 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. He and Lynda decided in 1984 to buy the Franklin Mint, the maker of commemorative coins and other kitsch, for $167.5 million. Vidovich didnt have to wait long for a buyer to come calling. As a class of people, the farmers and real estate developers harbor a deep-down contempt for what they have built. 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: 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, pistachio farms and water baron. When he was told there were fields upon fields, he did not believe there could be this many fields. If their fears come true, the Los Angeles water grab in Owens Valley would pale in comparison. He is irrigating 121,000 of those acres. He is also known for his water deals. The image of water moves on and on through miles of western Kern. Exactly what groundwater would be moved? Vidovich used the $73 million in 2010 to buy nearly 75 percent of the land in the Angiola Water District. A year into his studies, an uncle called from California. Number two, Angiola is trying to maintain the local aquifer by retiring land to limit pumping. My business approach right now is to acquire as much water as I can to be diversified in water. 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. 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. I walk up and reintroduce myself. In contrast, John Vidovich, who helms Sandridge, comes from a Silicon Valley farming-turned-developer family. 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. Well still make money.. Lupe excuses herself to prepare dinner. Still, none of it would have happened without luck., What he and Lynda had done with the wretched pomegranate was another matter. He was about my size, but he was very tough. This is an offering of cake handed down from king and queen to serfs. It becomes something else as soon as they encounter their workers in another guiseas a fellow shopper at Costco or as the parents of the kid who goes to school with their kid. Two strains of salmonella found in their pistachios had caused a multistate outbreak of illnesses. His father grew grapes, cherries, and apricots in the Santa Clara Valley back when Stanford University still had a reason to be known as The Farm. The hospital, senior citizens center, and football stadium all bore the signature of his giving. The Yokut had a saying that when the farmer drained the last drops of snowmelt from Tulare Lake, the water would return. Vidovich is, after all, a powerful landowner in the Central Valley. His real estate empire became big enough to bring aboard each of his four children. Already, the high school is filled with hundreds of students bused in from farmworker towns that are among the poorest communities in the West. All this stirring up is a consequence of mechanization. Its just smart business. The curriculum is being created by Noemi Donoso, the chief of education for the Chicago public schools before Lynda recruited her to Wonderful. Marketplace is a division of MPR's 501 (c)(3). 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 . The parents of Vidovi and Mohat were featured in a documentary film titled Mentor, which premiered on December 9, 2014. The price for pistachios has climbed from $4.50 a pound to an unbelievable $5.25 a pound. They do that because they love it., A POM craze followed. 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. Though the project is billed as flood control, the agreement also allows Vidovich to move groundwater. So I ask about the big picture. 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. The Cutie and the Halo are now warring in the fields outside the Visalia Convention Center. Antioxidants that delivered 32 grams of sugar in each serving didnt come cheap: $11 a bottle. Past McFarland and the high school runners who won five state championships in a row in the 1990s. But why is insulin so expensive in the first place? I had no idea what I wanted to do, but I reached a moment in my life where I had to give back in a meaningful way, she tells the camera. The load will translate into 18,000 pounds of finished nuts in a matter of days. 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. His father had lost it in a bet. I pull over into the dirt of a pomegranate orchard, the ancient fruit that the Resnicks have turned into POMWonderful, the sweet purple juice inside a swell-upon-swell bottle. Vidovich went on a shopping spree. I'm not sure that it (location) being one of the busiest places in Kings County is the right place for that. Yeah, hes got a lot of money and hes been buying up land, makes some people nervous, Page said. On a fog-drip night in January 1972, two men walked into my fathers empty bar with gloves on and shot him to death. Im 80 years old. Its an economy of scale on a scale no ones ever tried here. When I tell her my name, she whispers into his ear. What the Resnicks were doing for Lost Hills, though, was a level of philanthropy I had never witnessed in the valley. Lynda believes that if theyre enticed in the right direction, the 1,300 workers might choose to prepare the same healthy fare at home. It was a curious statement but true. I take out my cellphone and swipe across Google Maps. The Tulare Lake Canal Company, controlled by JG Boswell Company, moved the equipment onto . Share with Us. 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. A woman named Lupe is standing above me on the wooden stairway that climbs to the front door of her trailer. After Vidovich sold his Dudley Ridge state water, Pace said he drilled several wells in Green Valley, built a pipeline across I-5 and took the valleys groundwater to keep his Dudley Ridge trees alive. Winds SSW at 10 to 15 mph. A flour tortilla. The relatives try not to press them, but the arrangement still feels like a form of indentured servitude. 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. My dust cloud tells him Im getting close. A van pulls up to the curb, and the door slides open. His grandfather Resnick had fled the Ukraine in the wake of another killing of Jews by Cossacks. As you know, our philosophy at Wonderful is doing well by doing good. tupperware garlic keeper how many kids does jim harbaugh have A worker can still order a hamburger, but its half the size of the old hamburger and costs $6twice what the wild salmon served with creamed leeks and raw asparagus salad costs. We cant insist on wellness the way we can insist on plant safety. As farmworker colonies go, this one isnt as grim as others Ive visited. One more hour and Im outta this fucking place.. Groundwater and floodwater are two very different things. I tried not to stare at the gold that was everywhere: heavy-legged gold furniture, paintings in thick gold frames, gold-leaf carpet, and gold-fringed drapes. The Resnicks brought him aboard in 1999, and now he works alongside Lynda and consults daily with the company chef. Groundwater agencies up and down the San Joaquin Valley had to file plans with the Department of Water Resources earlier this year showing . His father worked as a truck driver, transporting crops to the city. No way, according to Vidovich and his longtime associates. Wonderful, by contrast, shoots for the middle. And its that groundwater part of Semitropics agreement with Vidovich that is raising hackles along with eyebrows. When a farmers orchards encompass 186 square miles, finding the field man can be a challenge. for rent by owner sacramento craigslist; coleman . "I want to be as open-minded as I can and get all the facts I can," he insisted. Died on 26 Oct 2005. The fog is our history. Its vastness makes you feel safe and in jeopardy at the same time. 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. This is my wife. They plaintiffs' lawyers argued that Vidovich pursued the McCarthy water to offset the $73 million sell-off, even though he knew that it was already spoken for. Notices were sent to the oversight agencies, including the City of Lemoore, Caltrans, and other relevant agencies. The four grandchildren have visited the orchards once or twice. The idea was to enroll at Rutgers and study to become a doctor. If youre messing with peoples lives and it doesnt work, thats serious. It had to work. Tens of millions of dollars spent on philanthropy in Lost Hills wasnt just good for the people, she discovered. Bernards eyes are fixed straight ahead. Now shes getting lots of credit.. At this point, he said, he uses about 30 percent of his land for farming and 70 percent for water. I feel his gaze going past me, his voice turning oddly sentimental. Sandridge Partners, L.P. Business Data Keep it Courteous. A bunch of trees are going dry, he says. The 789 acre project . Tell me, he asked, though it wasnt entirely a question. 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. Rainfall near a quarter of an inch. Boswell pumps reach 2,500 feet into the earth looking for water to grow crops, looking for water to sell. He blames Iran. Vidovich says he uses that Angiola groundwater to farm in Dudley Ridge, so the groundwater isnt leaving its home basin. No ones going to get fired for bringing home 2,500 pounds of nuts an acre. Because when we dont manage it, they end up with severe chronic health issues and amputated limbs., Anzaldo is a man wired for solemn, but he does manage to smile once during lunch, when talking about the 1,150 workers whove earned bonuses of up to $500 for losing a collective 14,000 pounds in two years. Even if they had wheels, they wouldnt be going anywhere. Measuring the reach of the Resnicks, its tempting to lean on the hyperventilated language of the 1930s: Empire. She was in her late 20s, almost a decade younger than Stewart, and the mother of two children. And one of the things he was doing was sort of an off-the-books irrigation deal? We pile back into the van and head up the road. This water basically came from a land owned by someone whos also a near billionaire a guy named John Vidovich.
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