She deftly places her body between him and me. Stephen Vidovich, founded De Anza Properties | Archives Fallowing the farm until the footprint gets smaller and smaller. Arax: They lose their livelihood. Whatever remains is not nearly enough to make up for the shortfall of imported water from the state. 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. VIDEO: Christmas wonderland featuring the Grinch . So in that time, we started cleaning windows, too. They named the business Clean Time Building Maintenance. His accountant suggested he buy apartments. The Yokut had a saying that when the farmer drained the last drops of snowmelt from Tulare Lake, the water would return. In the maroon of sundown,I follow the workers back to Lost Hills. So much snowmelt comes down the mountain that it nearly takes out Oroville Dam. The workers didnt react well. The baseballs will be crushed into juice. She is determined that their lives will play out differently from the lives of their parents, but she means no disrespect by this. Meanwhile, without water, his cattles corn crop is stunted. Join Facebook to connect with John Vidovich and others you may know. The idea was to enroll at Rutgers and study to become a doctor. Also set to pitch in is hedge fund executive Donald Sussman who told . No announcement was made; locals noticed excavation, first reported by Lois Henry of SJV Water, a nonprofit news site that covers water issues in San Joaquin Valley. The company has built lucrative apartment, condominium, mobile home, hotel and office projects all over the South Bay and Peninsula, from Redwood Citys Trailer Villa RV Park to Los Altos Gardens condominiums, with imported European appliances and hand-cut marble. We had gangs and murders, but thats better, too., He has come to El Toro Loco to cash his check and buy some beer. In the late 1970s, he went looking for a hedge against inflation. Back then, the Los Angeles Times had a bureau in the middle of California. The ancestral Tulare Lake was once the master of this valley, a catch basin for four mighty rivers the Kern, Tule, Kaweah and Kings flowing down from the Sierra. Not a single one of them wants any part of Wonderful. And then it hits me when I reach the road to Weedpatch, where my grandfathers story in Americaa poet on his hands and knees picking potatoesbegan. At age 81, hes gotten so big, he doesnt know how big. Then I get lucky. He had no papers, like so many others, just an image of what this side of the border looked like. Its gone, I say. At the core, though, the Resnicks were still moved by the duty of social justice, not just as traditional liberals but as secular Jews. Under his leadership, the company used its business smarts, political clout and legal strategies to acquire water and transform a modest cotton farm into an agricultural empire. 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. You rely on Marketplace to break down the worlds events and tell you how it affects you in a fact-based, approachable way. Asia Pacific +65 6212 1000. His daughter, who used to own a restaurant, is busy raising her one son. Stewart and Lynda created a new brand, the Halo, from the same variety of mandarin. He did this first in the name of wheat and then beef, milk, raisins, cotton, and nuts. Theres going to be a lot of very creative and motivated people looking for ways to get water to their crops, or to get water to somebodys crops moving it around from low-value to high-value acreage, said Jay Lund, head of the Center for Watershed Sciences at UC Davis. Thats on top of managing 100,000 acres of farmland and sitting in on Valley-based water boards. Each square-mile section is divided into blocks, and each block counts a precise number of rows. But others are suspicious of Vidovichs record of buying land and selling its water, both surface and groundwater, out of the area, sometimes to urban users. Look, I have no guilt. Stewart tries to interrupt, but hes not the boss in this room. It takes a lot of work to get ahead. She and Manuel were able to buy their trailer several years ago. Im going to Kern County, just shy of the mountains, to figure out how the biggest farmers in America, led by the biggest of them all, are not only keeping alive their orchards and vineyards during drought but adding more almonds (79,000 acres), more pistachios (73,000 acres), more grapes (35,000 acres), and more mandarins (13,000 acres). The POM tanks, Im told, are backed up with a three-year supply. We want good groundwater, too., You mean no more pipelines carrying water in the dead of night?, The pipeline. He stammers a bit. He is also on the board of ELM Resources Corp. Current positions of John Vidovich. Presently, John Vidovich is Vice President & Sales Director at The Student Loan Corp. They dont do agribusiness. Lynda is making the trip on the company jet more often these days. He was in the mood to gamble. California is free to return to its amnesia. I cant afford to move it., But the Boswells and Vidovichescan invest to move water around, he said. Because it is a community of all Hispanics.. The states massive plumbing system is sending virtually nothing to farmers. Who would have thought the two of them in cahoots? I ask her if she is concerned about wasting water, given the drought and the distance the water has traveled20 miles from a well in Wascoand that the cost goes up the more they use. The Cutie and the Halo are now warring in the fields outside the Visalia Convention Center. Are big banks following through on their climate pledges? It was the same distance that allows them to control more land and water130 billion gallons a yearthan any other man and woman in California and still believe it isnt enough. The farmer corralled the snowmelt and erased the valley, its desert and marsh. I think I paid $9 million. Vidovich has a unique perspective on Stewart Resnick and the acres of crops that have made Wonderful a success, as he tells Arax . He doesnt wave me off or give chase. Because, while he does farm thousands of acres of pistachios, almonds [] John Vidovich, Student Loan Corp: Profile and Biography His real estate empire became big enough to bring aboard each of his four children. On the shallow bottom, the women fished mussels and clams with their toes. He is a San Joaquin Valley farmer from Northern California. Of course, I know everyone in the world, she told one reporter. He was headed to the fields at the same time that another farmworker, drunk on beer, was coming home from the fields. The vibration is a stunning piece of violence to behold. He didnt know where to begin. 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. Made of durable plastic, the pipe would be buried four feet below the bottom of the canal, with a foot-deep cement barrier to protect both. But theres none for his precious corn, almond and pistachio trees in the south county and, because of new restrictions, he cant simply drill a new wellthere. Im a billionaire. Hes got an awful temper hes trying to control through Kabbalah. He had his hands on 65 percent of the nations crop. By the time they returned to Beverly Hills, he had lost interest in a book about his life, at least one that I might write. If I want to know more, I need to talk to Lupes brother, Gustavo, who has worked as an irrigator at Wonderful for five years and knows what the company is planning for the future. Rubbish, said Vidovich, in a Los Altos office decorated with maps of his land holdings. But the one thing he cant control is what hes most dependent on water. But his egotheres no controlling that., Resnick had heard it all before. Boswell has met its match. A few weeks later, I found myself riding up the elevator of a high-rise on the Westside of Los Angeles. Dynamic search and list-building capabilities. He had spent the morning on his exercise bike reading Fortune. He commands his realm, and she commands hers, and he takes care to mind the line. This is a park for the people, to give them a break from their hard lives. Days Inn or Motel 6. John Vidovich. 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. All but a handful come from Mexico. Most everything that can be touched in this corner of California belongs to Wonderful. As a class of people, the farmers and real estate developers harbor a deep-down contempt for what they have built. The scale of productionand the ability to process, market, and sell its own cropsallows Wonderful to be mostly mediocre in the fields and remain highly profitable. John Hume, . It was Lynda who came up with the idea of flowers-in-a-gift. Roses are short-lived, she reasoned, but the teapot or watering can that the flowers arrive in is a keepsake. How come?, We dont need it anymore, he whispers., Back at the plant, Lynda is meeting with Wonderful doctors, nurses, and farmworkers. Mr. Vidovich was a descendant of one of the pioneer farm families that settled here from Croatia . 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. Stewart and Lynda planted 15,000 more acres and bought a juice plant. Resnick dipped into his savings from his job at a mental hospital and went in half on the machine. 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. Ex-Fire Marshal Sues City, Alleges Quid Pro Quo Deal - LA Weekly Where is the water going? John Vidovich, the owner of the Santiago Villa and Sahara mobile home parks in Mountain View, is listed as a partner in both businesses. This is how the land of Wonderful is keeping alive its trees. Now its the seven-week nut harvest that brings out the inhalers. Twenty miles outside Fresno, I cross the Kings, the river that irrigates more farmland than any other river here. Scott: How sustainable is this operation given that California only recently came out of a long drought and may actually be headed there again soon? The dispute over the no fly zone was finally resolved by the invention of a netting that Resnick sheathes around his mandarins each spring. But those deals were one water district selling to another water district. And you know why? Upon graduation, he only needed to look across the Raritan River to find his college. China (including Macau and . This isnt any road. You and I look at this meal, he says. In my lifetime alone, California has gone from 13 million people to 40 million people. Support. Contact 3? Resnick himself had sold 5,000 acre-feet to a proposed new town in the farm fields of Madera. 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. Developer, farmer and water trader John Vidovich plans to build a beef feedlot and processing plant near Lemoore according to a preliminary application filed with the county. Either way is a trespass. General Partner. Its a water-saving method, Vidovich said. All told, nine men operating five machines will pick clean this orchard over the next four weeks. He replenished it by shipping water from his property in Tulare County, 25 miles away, infuriating locals there. 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. They planted the first 640 acres, half the pomegranates in the country at the time, knowing there was zero market. It takes a life every six seconds. More than one ballad was about the valley, so he came to Fresno. Look, these farmers go back two, three, and four generations. They made a new plantation here. I sort of remember growing up on a farm, he said. 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. Not long before, Vidovich was trying to grab water from Resnick, not give it. Is John Vidovich Planning to Sell Off the Valley's Lifeblood? I cross the Tulare County line heading south into Bakersfield, and there in front of me, for no eye to miss, stands the Wonderful Citrus complex with its four-story storage building designed in the shape of an almighty box of Halo mandarins. He isnt farming dirt. From Dudley Ridge, pipelines belonging to the farming empire of The Wonderful Company (owned by Beverly Hills billionaires Stewart and Lynda Resnick) the move the once-Angiola . You can plant only so many acres on ground that has no groundwater. I doubt the Resnicks have any idea of the fester that eats at this place, the shame piled on shame. We changed the culture of safety, and we think we can do the same with health, Anzaldo says. Manhattan was 30 minutes in one direction; the Jersey Shore, 30 minutes in the other. It was true that agriculture had been selling state project water to cities for two decades. No luck. 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. Antioxidants that delivered 32 grams of sugar in each serving didnt come cheap: $11 a bottle. Boswells response has a tough Spaghetti Western quality. Lupe knocks on his door, and he invites us in. Groundwater accountability sparks clash of Central Valley ag titans As he bled the aquifer dry, he called on the government to bring him an even mightier river from afar. She was a very frugal lady. It is one more way to extend the brand. 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. His face is still blank. In a profile of Vidovich written by Lois Henry then of The Bakersfield Californian now writing exclusively for her own service, SJVWater the farmer-lawyer-real estate magnate made no bones about where local misgivings began. The comments don't come from Boswell and Vidovich themselves, of course, but from the groundwater sustainability agencies each farming . This is only $3? But for a lot of workers, bringing that big fat burrito from home still makes sense., I had seen what J.G. Its an economy of scale on a scale no ones ever tried here. If Resnick retains every drop, he might squeeze 25 acre-feet of water a day out of both pipes. Well still make money.. The Sureos gang has tagged the front entrance but otherwise has left the inside unmarked. You can reach Alex at alex.tavlian@sjvsun.com. Me, Im a carpetbagger from Beverly Hills. Hes farming water. 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. Sugar kills, she tells them. Neighbors dont tell on neighbors.. He had left for the cornfields a few minutes before the killings.. Title. This is the domain of Stewart Resnick, the richest farmer in the country and maybe the most peculiar one, too. When you first meet John Vidovich, everything from his ball cap to his dirty boots tells you he's a farmer. But if you want to be in agriculture, you need to go to the Central Valley, said Vidovich. LOIS HENRY: Water conspiracy or just poor optics? Theres a lot of people who dont like me, he said after his fathers death. 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. So were seeing a shift now and then to have nature imposing its will on the situation. He saved up a down payment for a raisin ranch west of Fresno, where my father was born in the worst of the Great Depression. This must be the spot the Wonderful field man was describing. Boswell says no 2022-08-07 - By Lisa M. Krieger and Veronica Martinez Staff writers . Water seems to be disappearing, said Verboon. The four grandchildren have visited the orchards once or twice. Has the San Joaquin Valley reached its Chinatown moment? Lynda believes that if theyre enticed in the right direction, the 1,300 workers might choose to prepare the same healthy fare at home. Everything but the turkey had come from his orchards. John Gibler, a freelance journalist, found Lost Hills a year before Lynda. Within the confines of the settlement with Pixley Irrigation District, he continued to move water out of Angiola and into Dudley Ridge. Forbes Billionaires 2023: The Richest People In The World Where gravity needs a boost, the pipes run atop wooden crates used to pack boxes of fruit. The deed had been done in a series of hidden meetings in Monterey. I dont know how Hershey did Hershey, Pennsylvania, but Lynda is present in every painted sunburst, every planted flower, every blade of grass. The bureau happened to be my house in northwest Fresno. The brick-hard ground cant be bought. Already, they are paying $69 a month to the local utility district. And like other of the regions water barons present and past Resnick and Boswell Vidovichs last name is a sort of shorthand in coffee shop chatter from Delano to Easton. Hes never driven a tractor or opened an irrigation valve. Locals recount how he bought a 360-acre parcel in Los Altos Hills for $5.5 million and, only four years later, turned around and sold part of it to the MidPeninsula Regional Open Space District for $9.3 million. And that scares the hell out of everybody who lives here.. You look like Border Patrol undercover.. In the city of trees, I find a paved road with speed bumps that takes me to the harvest of pistachios. Some of them have paid $12,000 to buy their trailers and spent thousands more to fix them up. He doesnt know what pipeline means. Making hundreds of millions of dollars in the process?. What the Resnicks were doing for Lost Hills, though, was a level of philanthropy I had never witnessed in the valley. It was a hit. For years, agriculture has been given a wide berth when it comes to monopolistic practices. To manage the disease. The courtship of Stewart and Lynda went fast. I roll past Tulare, where every February they hold the biggest tractor show in the world, even bigger than the one in Paris. On this same stretch of 99, I once wrote a story about farmworkers who moonlighted as meth cookers to make ends meet. 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. Today, most everything in this desolate reach of Kern County, save for the oil wells, belongs to Paramount Farming, which belongs to the Resnicks. Vidovich, whose total compensation was about $236,000 in the last fiscal year, was previously the agency's chief of staff. The truck driver hits the wide open of Highway 33 and traces the serpentine of the aqueduct. By the time he died an old man on his tractor in the Cupertino Hills, where he had planted grapes again and was making wine, the transformation of his valley by the silicon chip was complete. Who anticipates that you cant fill a water bank for six or seven years?, Come on, I say. Yes. But he got too big. Groundwater agencies up and down the San Joaquin Valley had to file plans with the Department of Water Resources earlier this year showing . Thats how he came upon the San Joaquin. That company led to another company, and he soon owned half the commercial alarm accounts in Los Angeles. The extraction of water beneath the lake bottom wont last forever. What if I failed? He got into UCLA and joined a Jewish fraternity. A piece of pipeline south of Stratford rests in the arm of a piece of heavy equipment on Dec. 16, 2021. Dont let his boots, blue jeans, and ball cap fool you, the old-timers say. They slap back with the cold vibration of water. He isnt farming dirt, Arax wrote. The family takes showers in it, and she washes their laundry in it, and if she runs the water long enough, she will use it to wash her vegetables and cook her rice and potatoes. Theyre either working in the heat or hiding from the heat. The baby is now a 20-year-old student at Bakersfield College. Legendary Investor Strategies And Stocks For The Current Market - Forbes Surely, no one does this better than Wonderful? The believer and the skeptic do their tussle inside my head. A giant pistachio nut flashes on the big screen. When we learned of the terrible situation, not to mention our poor reputation within the community, we were ashamed and are sorry, their official statement reads. Thats why he built the pipeline. The designers at the Mint made a porcelain doll with a tiny replica outfit so precise that it had to be hand-beaded with 2,000 fake pearls. Already, Wonderful has bulldozed 8,000 to 10,000 acres of pomegranate trees over the past few years to send more water to its nuts. When I crossed the border and found Lost Hills, there was nothing here, he says. So now theyre doing everything they can to frustrate my ability to utilize the property, said Vidovich. From a safe, Ellsberg had lifted the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of how successive presidents lied to the public to cover up the failings of the Vietnam War. The land is turning to salt. When I look around here at what weve built and then look back at my life in New Jersey, I think, How did it happen? For one man and woman to build something like this would be almost impossible today.. Seventy-five years ago, writer Carey McWilliams, in Factories in the Field, lambasted the ribboned Dukes and belted Barons of California agriculture. Talk to me, Hussein says, draining a can of Rockstar. The project would take five days to completewhen the canal wasnt in use. Theres a section stacked with weights and a yoga room with mats on a hardwood floor. While some counties and water boards prohibit water exports, others dont. The fog is our history. This water basically came from a land owned by someone who's also a near billionaire a guy named John Vidovich. But some residents and local leaders are growing wary of the companys dominance and secrecy. It wasnt a midlife crisis, he told me. On more than 150,000 acres 132,000 in Kings County alone, according to ParcelQuest the company grows, processes and sells cotton, tomatoes, wheat, alfalfa and seed crops. What to give a grieving widow and her five children in Lost Hills but drinking water? I feel his gaze going past me, his voice turning oddly sentimental. They had survived the drought. Or he can devise a scheme to steal water from a neighbor up the road. John Vidovich Profiles | Facebook He hired Bert Steir, a Bostonian with a Bronze Star from the Second World War and a degree from Harvard, to come west and work his deals. At the east end, where the highway meets Interstate 5, the traveler gets a choice. To grow, Big Ag needed a bigger and more dependable supply. And in fact these guys were able to squeeze and buy water in the open market, and do a few other things to keep their crops going and they were in the midst of drought. 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. I waited five years before placing another call to his headquarters. For generations, the company has supplied steady work for Kings County families and has been an integral part of the regions identity, helping to build a community park, the YMCA, Corcoran District Hospital and the high school football stadium. On the day the trees fall quietly upon the orchard floor, no one is here but the Mexican on his tractor. One year, it delivers 900,000 acre-feet of snowmelt. Then the drug cartels took over the countryside and planted poppies. Nearly $365 million worth of Wonderful almonds will have dropped down from the dry sky. Where do you begin with a man of great riches if not the distant places you might have in common? 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. If he were on the scene today, hed have to add sashed Queens to the list. Id rather be unknown than known. He had recently read The King of California, and that got him thinking. The aqueduct brings the water, yes? Mobil and Texaco and Prudential Life were willing to practically give the ground and trees away. The Mojave Water Agency, a San Bernardino-based water provider.
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