Its vastness makes you feel safe and in jeopardy at the same time. Not a single penny was put in that piggy bank.. Resnick picks up the water in Dudley Ridge, Vidovich says. 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. But I couldnt have picked a more cinematic name than Lost Hills. In Kern County, one in two adults and almost one in five children are obese. The net return on the pistachio proves that Wonderfuls dominance in the market has benefited every grower in the room. John was vital in helping the company's executive group reposition its strategy. The rain starts to fall, big, fat, slashing drops that feel like electricity on my open palm. A portion of his wages will be set aside each month to pay down the debt. I roll past Tulare, where every February they hold the biggest tractor show in the world, even bigger than the one in Paris. 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. The grass is a color green on the verge of blue, and the cutouts for trees are razor etched. 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. Drought turning to floodit is the story of California. She can be reached at lois.henry . There are plans, crazy as it sounds, to take out 10,000 acres of almonds. They knew little about the company except it was selling its keepsakes for five times the amount Teleflora was. I did sell water out of Kings County to an urban user and people didnt like it. Because, while he does farm thousands of acres of pistachios, almonds [] Every mogul, every movie star. Rather, it is the authority vested in Wonderful that counts. 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. At Highland Park High, he excelled in math and struggled in English. The hillocks that existed back in Yokut Indian days were flattened by a hunk of metal called the Fresno Scraper. California showed me why.. They spend $50 a month on bottled water. I did not name the town, Lynda says. The room smells of Vicks VapoRub. Vidovich, whose total compensation was about $236,000 in the last fiscal year, was previously the agency's chief of staff. This means he can avoid the thievery of a labor contractor who acts as a middleman between the farmer and the farmworker and charges for rides and drinks and doesnt always pay minimum wage. Vidovich has more than one reason to be evasive. Hundreds of giant praying mantises standing on platforms of concrete are pulling oil from a Chevron field. Boswell has met its match. Angelica, one of four sisters, runs the restaurant. Now its the Bobcats turn. The stock is up 33% in the last year and more . Thats why he built the pipeline. But she doesnt dictate this or that. Angelica would prefer not to get into the details of their financial arrangement. It wasnt a midlife crisis, he told me. I had not seen any. Lynda built sidewalks and storm drains, the new park and community center, and repaved the roads. He was the bad guy in agriculture for no bigger offense than that he was big. 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. He yanks and pulls, and it finally comes off, throwing him a foot backward. 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. Along with paying a quarter-million for recharging the aquifer, with the terms including a restriction on pumping of up to 36,000 acre-feet annually, or 130,000 acre-feet within a five-year consecutive period and a separate restriction that the district, nor its members, move water outside of Tulare and Kings counties. Because the road ends here, there is no physical way to follow the canals flow. 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. What can I say? Theyre droughts best buddies.. Not a single one of them wants any part of Wonderful. And you know why? Hes trying to play dumb, but I can see the sliest of grins peeking out from his mustache and goatee. His first wife, the mother of his two sons and daughter, told him she was quite happy living in their $30,000 condo in Culver City. As he walks away, I notice his $400 sneakers. They have no way to grasp the $50 million to $80 million a year that the Resnicks say they are spending on philanthropy. Resnick himself had sold 5,000 acre-feet to a proposed new town in the farm fields of Madera. The farmers there are raising almost 1 million acres of crops, and fewer than half these acres are irrigated with flows from the Kern. This is the Lynda who now endeavors to see farmhands as something more than workers. 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. No stranger enters this zone unless its to get rid of a body or dump waste from cooking meth or drown a hot car. It hardly ceases for the next five months. He wouldnt know one of his Valencia orange groves from one of his Washington navel orange groves. In the years of plentiful rains and heavy snowmelt, the bank fills up with more than 1 million acre-feet of stored water. That still leaves the majority of the workforce beyond his cajole. One year, it delivers 900,000 acre-feet of snowmelt. It then dawned on him that guards were good, but they had to be paid an hourly wage. I write an email to the Wonderful PR team. And its even worse for the children in Kings County. I applaud, too. Hes headed to the Wonderful plant, 13 miles north of Lost Hills, to drop off his load. If she has her way, they will go to college, too. John Vidovich Profiles | Facebook One more hour and Im outta this fucking place.. He called it fake junk, sued, and won. The comments don't come from Boswell and Vidovich themselves, of course, but from the groundwater sustainability agencies each farming . How much bigger can agriculture get. He was 13 and standing inside the Rutgers Pharmacy on the first day of his first job. None of his three children had the slightest interest in taking over the company. Yes, theyre still delivering water. Water wars in a drying California: New money, Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window), Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window), Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window), First Republic Bank seized, sold to JPMorgan Chase, Water wars in a drying California: New money vs. old power in San Joaquin Valley, PG&E measures 211 inches of snow in final Northern California park survey, Walters: Lengthy California water rights battle moves into the Legislature, This California town hasnt had clean drinking water in 11 years, California snowpack data debunked: 2023 was no record year. The vibration is a stunning piece of violence to behold. 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. This is a big crop, the field man tells me. Legendary Investor Strategies And Stocks For The Current Market - Forbes Real-time trigger alerts. By harvests end, the Resnicks will have put their clamps on 4.4 million almond trees. A year into his studies, an uncle called from California. This was Lost Hills, where the people are dependent on the Resnicks from cradle to grave. If this were any other part of Kern, the farmers would be reaching into the earth to make up the difference. That was eight or nine years ago. If he had his druthers, he said, hed still be living in a little ranch house in Culver City. This road ends abruptly at the rise of a second fence. No picking of crop agitates the earth like the picking of almonds and pistachios. 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. He found it.