Were still trying to figure out who our typical customer is going to be, Angelica says. No longer does it have to be a career that brings Mexicans to their hands and knees. So do the Israelis, who go to the trouble of repackaging the nuts so it doesnt appear that theyre consuming the product of an enemy. Theres a mountain range to my left and a mountain range to my right and in between a plain flatter than Kansas where crop and sky meet. One hundred and twenty thousand acres of nuts and fruits and berries in California and still counting. They were married only a short time when Manuel decided to cross the border almost 20 years ago. In one orchard, half the trees are dying., I had traveled the fields of Wonderful from one end of western Kern to the other, looking for dying trees. His grandfather, who came to California from Croatia in 1908, got his start with 10 acres of cherries and apricots in Mountain View. Its gone. She wasnt content to pursue the usual list of wealthy businessmen as clients. I didnt see our creation, much less the figures bent under the canopies of vine that our creation counted on. Mostly, though, they cant wait for the avalanche of nuts to end. Back then, the Los Angeles Times had a bureau in the middle of California. 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. Theres Cheat Death for their antioxidant-rich pomegranate juice and Get Crackin for their pistachios and Untouched by Man for their Fiji water. Three dogs, part pit bull, the menacing part, have given up on the shade and lie on the open road. Real-time trigger alerts. Hes fishing right now. John, 66, is a former military intelligence officer and Santa Clara Law School graduate who served as Santa Clara County Planning Commissioner from 1990 to 1994 and is as shrewd as his father. He studied the situation. We saved the best for last, he says. Who anticipates that you cant fill a water bank for six or seven years?, Come on, I say. Comprehensive company profiles. John also answers to John Visovich, John Vodovich, John T Vidovich, John Thomas Vidovich and Johnathon T Vidovich, and perhaps a couple of other names. . She seems a little nervous waiting in the wings. More than half our employees are obese or near obese, Anzaldo tells me. She is the brander of the empire, the final word on their Super Bowl ads, the creator of product marketing. A meat store, an auto repair, a pool hall, and an arcade pass for a commercial strip. Mattress maker Tempur Sealy International (TPX) is also in the mix with a P/E ratio of 14.1 relative to five years of annualized 29% earnings growth. It sure looks heavier than last year., Bernard smiles and nods to the others. It was his father and uncles who founded the company in 1925. 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. The agency did not balk at the price tag: $5,321 an acre-foot. He told his neighbors to alter the flight of the bees or hed sue them for trespassing. When the rain returns, some of the ground will be replanted in pistachios, a tree that can better withstand drought. Im 80 years old. The pistachio trees in Wonderful number 6 million. 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. So far, Lynda has shown only patience. He called it fake junk, sued, and won. Vidovich, who has declined to sign paperwork ensuring his pipeline wont cause harm, filed a lawsuit alleging trespass. Unlike many other billionaires, they could poke fun at themselves. I had in mind a magazine profile on Stewart, the Nut King. He was tough on the outside. While Vidovich owns less acreage than Boswell, more of it is devoted to high-value orchards. Everything but the turkey had come from his orchards. 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. Mathews: Should climate projects benefit communities they impact? Eat a corn tortilla instead, she urges. Background details that you might want to know . California had passed a law intended to stop the rising of new towns in the middle of nowhere. You dont believe me?, No, I believe you, Resnick says. She tells me her not-so-silent partner is Lady Lynda, who was so bothered that Lost Hills didnt have a sit-down restaurant of its own that she sought out Angelica. Theyre no longer in danger. No water in the ground to make up for the missing government supply. The believer and the skeptic do their tussle inside my head. As the head of a quasi-public agency, he knows he cant completely blow off my questions. If I follow them south into Resnick almonds, I can see where the water is going. The sentimental ones stay away. This is a magnitude of intervention that no other agricultural company in California has ever attempted. 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. I turn back around and find Route 46, the road that killed James Dean. The space for a familys secrets is only a few feet. Resnick wanted no part in my story. I notice she keeps the water running for a long time. 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. Plastic drip-irrigation lines stick out of the ground at wrong angles. Because its so much fun to say that Lost Hills has been found., The room full of growers applauds. My health, knock on wood, is good. After three years of drought, tensions are running high all over rural California. In the Wonderful fields, he tells me, at least 80 percent of the workers carry no documents or documents that are not real. On our trips to Disneyland, I must have blinkered my eyes heading down 99. Thats all fine and good, Resnick replied, but what about the $1 million-plus hed spent on lawyers fees? I dont know how Hershey did Hershey, Pennsylvania, but Lynda is present in every painted sunburst, every planted flower, every blade of grass. 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. Too many pistachios. Water seems to be disappearing, said Verboon. She walks off the stage with Stewart. My grandmother said it was his leftist politics that ate up that vineyard and the ones that followed. For now, shes playing country western music on the sound system and trying to lure a combination of oil-field workers, supervisors at Wonderful, and travelers driving the last miles of James Dean. Farmers near Pixley already have sued him once for taking too much water out of their ground and moving it. We send money home each month to our families left behind, Lupe says. He was headed to the fields at the same time that another farmworker, drunk on beer, was coming home from the fields. Since international sanctions were lifted five years earlier, Iran has been crowding the market with its more buttery-tasting pistachios. Youre the one who needs to see., We pull out of the parking lot, past the palm trees and roses, and head up the thin ribbon of Highway 33 into the dust-swirling tunnel of nuts and fruits. 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. In the maroon of sundown,I follow the workers back to Lost Hills. 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. John Vidovich lives in Los Altos, CA; previous city include San Jose CA. Thousands of California oaks were felled. Lisa M. Krieger is a Bay Area News Group science writer for The Mercury News and East Bay Times, covering research, scientific policy and environmental news from Stanford University, the University of California, NASA-Ames, U.S. Geological Survey and other Bay Area-based research facilities. Hes never put a dusty boot on the neck of a shovel and dug down into the soil. Whos it going to? To manage the disease. Her brother-in-law was killed recently in a car crash along Highway 46. Even as the supplies of federal and state water have dropped to near zero, agriculture in Kern keeps chugging along, growing more intensive. To read more copy and paste or select. Now Lynda herself stands before us, a single light over her head. John Vidovich made headlines - and a lot of enemies - in 2009 by permanently selling rights to 14,000-acre feet of state water from a Kings County water district to southern California for $73 million, according to media reports. Through it all, Marketplace is here for you. Bankers and their fair-weather financing exasperated Resnick. How much water are we talking about?, Id rather not get too specific. We produced a short documentary film. Lupe gave birth to two daughters, U.S. citizens, who are now 11 and 6. 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. Vidovich didnt have to wait long for a buyer to come calling. Also set to pitch in is hedge fund executive Donald Sussman who told . The company was founded in 1925 by the father and unclesof James Griffin J.G. Boswell II, a Stanford grad who served on the boards of General Electric, Safeway and the California Institute of Technology. In Kern County, one in two adults and almost one in five children are obese. 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. This water basically came from a land owned by someone whos also a near billionaire a guy named John Vidovich. I did sell water out of Kings County to an urban user and people didnt like it. Making hundreds of millions of dollars in the process?. And then they pump more groundwater. Shes built a grocery section in the back of the caf stocked with grapeseed oil and what she touts are Whole Foodsquality vegetables and fruits that sell at Walmart prices. Why grapeseed oil, I ask Andy Anzaldo, head of grower relations and a fitness buff, whos taken on the added duties of what might be called Wonderfuls Minister of Health. Bernard, hard to believe, is driving straight toward the aqueduct. By the eighth day of harvest, the sun is gone. 16: Emmanuel Forbes, CB, Mississippi State My take: Washington entered the draft wanting to take a corner or an offensive lineman in the first round. But he got too big. It takes a life every six seconds. 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. Dont let his boots, blue jeans, and ball cap fool you, the old-timers say. George Shirakawa Jr. once counted on Santa Clara County taxpayers and campaign contributors to be his benefactors, as he spent public money and campaign funds on luxury rental cars, gambling junkets, vacations and lavish dinners for staff and political allies. As she announces the newest gift, the men and women in the back of the crowd smile and applaud politely and try not to show their faces to the publicity crew she has brought with her to film the event. Hes oblivious, or so it seems. Or he can devise a scheme to steal water from a neighbor up the road. Inside, a trainer watches over a line of treadmills, elliptical machines, and stationary bikes. 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. The water is filtered for arsenic, boron, and other salts, and the monthly tests show no violation of state or federal standards. Past Oildale and the boxcar where Merle Haggard grew up. They dont do agribusiness. I cant afford to move it., But the Boswells and Vidovichescan invest to move water around, he said. Im down, Stewart, he protests. In 2009, Vidovich sold the annual rights to 14,000 acrefeet of water belonging to property sitting in the Dudley Ridge Water District, located in Kings County, for an eye-popping $73 million. Big fish eat the small fish here. 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 harvest begins in January with one type of mandarin and ends in December with another type of mandarin and in between spills forth everything in your supermarket produce and dairy aisles except for bananas and mangoes, though the farmers here are working on the tropical, too. Yosemite Valley to reopen as Big Melt flood concerns persist across California. 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. They dumped their stolen car into the canals black waters and got away with murder for the next 32 years. His 15 million trees in the San Joaquin Valley consume more than 400,000 acre-feet of water a year. Before he died at age 86, J.G. A pump is shooting water out of the canal and into the Rain for Rent pipes. Support. For farmers who rely on water from the Kings River, the answer winds up as some shade of yes.. Never mind that this is one of the most over-drafted basins in California or that the land is sinking a half-foot a year. Like J.W. He gambled on the price of nuts going up, and he gambled on the water never going dry. 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. But I had some good people helping me.. Frankly, Im having too much fun to think about retiring., Even if he were inclined to wind down, he had no successor in mind. The Boswell company, their attorneys and Tulare Lake Canal Company president Mark Unruh did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Theres a lot to commend here, I tell Anzaldo, but where does persuasion end and coercion begin?, As a second-generation Mexican American, Anzaldo says he knows the powerful clench of fast food and sugar among his own family. In a swirl of dust, a worker atop a different machine is blowing the almonds from their spot beneath the trees to the middle of the row. It moves in a wave from trunk to limb to nut and back down to earth. As water users fight over a decreasing amount of water, he said, its just inevitable.. But that doesnt make people buy a second bottle. Theyre droughts best buddies.. He brought great ideas to the table and helped make and then execute tough choices. The front gates of the 25,000-square-foot Beaux Arts mansion on Sunset Boulevard magically opened without a guard giving a nod. But Vidovich isnt backing down. Hes serious about taking water out of this valley, farmer Milt Pace, who once partnered with Vidovich, told The Bakersfield Californian. Fiefdom. I call the manager of the Lost Hills Water District. Their goal is to prevent me from successfully farming. At the east end, where the highway meets Interstate 5, the traveler gets a choice. Summer or not, theyre dressed in shirt layered upon shirt and the same no-name dusty blue jeans. Nearly a third of the harvestthe nuts grown by Wonderful, the nuts grown by hundreds of farmers who belong to the Wonderful brandwill come through these gates. Stewart would deny that Giblers reporting played a part in their philanthropy. And so I began with slaughter and madness and then moved on to bartenders for fathers. Vidovich has more than one reason to be evasive. And that scares the hell out of everybody who lives here.. In a report filed Wednesday with the county . No journalist had written a word about his rise as an agricultural giant, how he had turned public water into private water by grabbing control of Californias largest water bank, a project jump-started with $74 million in taxpayer money. Resnick has saved the front seat for me. Across the street, the Soto family has built a new Mexican restaurant named Gabbys that dwarfs every other business on the street with its Spanish Mission faade. His face is blank. 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. It was true that agriculture had been selling state project water to cities for two decades. The image of water moves on and on through miles of western Kern. So were seeing a shift now and then to have nature imposing its will on the situation. Then he turned and faced me. The deed had been done in a series of hidden meetings in Monterey. Theres no waiting around. What happens to Wonderful? She was in her late 20s, almost a decade younger than Stewart, and the mother of two children. One more bin, a post reads. Uneasy about the slow plan to siphon Valley water for Southern California, farmers and water managers are worrying about a large land owner in the region. The stacks of bottles gave him no answer. The farmers responded that the path of a bee wasnt something they could supervise, and they threatened to sue him back. And its an area that doesnt have ground water, so its there completely because of the State Water Project. Vidovich did not immediately respond . This road ends abruptly at the rise of a second fence. I ask him how the drought has affected Wonderful. Contact 4? 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. Thats how he came upon the San Joaquin. When I got out of law school, I probably had 100 people I was employing.. But this outwardly unassuming multimillionaire has become a lightning rod of controversy. I had not seen any. Yes, theyre still delivering water. Already mechanization is changing, you know, the labor situation. Now, it seems, high-profile developer John Vidovich has assumed the role of financier. As a function leader, he . Damn, if he doesnt look even younger and more fit than the last time I saw him eight years earlier. Just get started became one of his guiding principles. 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. 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. I applaud, too. In the summer of 2009, he and Lynda attended a dinner lecture by Harvard political philosophy professor Michael Sandel about the moral obligations of wealth. Now its the Bobcats turn. I saw horrible things, Margarita says. They rely only on rain, which concentrates the flavorful oils.