"In talking to the planning department, I found out that the initial step is to notify essential agencies in the area for comments. But if he thinks youre defying him, hell start with, Nobody realizes the good Ive done for agriculture. Then he moves on to, Do you know who I am? 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. Wild salmon and all these sides made from scratch. His account appeared in the Earth Island Journal, a small environmental quarterly out of Berkeley. Lynda is also mapping out a farm-to-food program where students will grow fruits, vegetables, and grains on a plot of village land. 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. 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. Pace gave a nod to Vidovich on that count. But Semitropic is the first district to get this close to making it a reality. He had spent the morning on his exercise bike reading Fortune. His dad had sold the bar and was adrift. The Ninth Annual Wonderful Pistachio Conference at the Visalia Convention Center is an invitation-only affair, but I managed to sneak in and grab a seat. Every river busting out of the Sierra was bent sideways, if not backward, by a bulwark of ditches, levees, canals, and dams. When the clamps let go of the trunk, 8,000 almonds, green outer shells wilted and partly opened, the meat inside a wooden womb, lie scattered on the flat dry earth. The more water he got, the more crops he planted, and the more crops he planted, the more water he needed to plant more crops, and on and on. Past Oildale and the boxcar where Merle Haggard grew up. Its a bad day, he says, shooing me out. He was tough on the outside. 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. A bunch of trees are going dry, he says. The water is cold, clean, and salty, though not too salty for a desperate man. My business approach right now is to acquire as much water as I can to be diversified in water. 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. His bar was a place for guys, Damon Runyontype guys., Resnicks pals were all Jewish kids from upper-class families, so it wasnt easy being the poorest one, the one whose father was a gambler and capable at any moment of losing the few comforts they had. Theres a lot of people who dont like me, he said after his fathers death. Right there in the big canal of the Dudley Ridge Water District. He is also known for his water deals. Amy Scott: Theres a stunning aerial photo in the magazine that shows these green green trees surrounded basically by dust. He guides me back into the main store with its displays of fresh fruit and vegetables, meats, cold cuts, and baked goods. But that still doesnt mean that most people in town can afford to eat here. He used to work for the Resnicks before Stewart put him in charge of the district. Wonderful, by contrast, shoots for the middle. Rain likely. Page had been a longtime board member of the Semitropic Water District and Vidovich wanted that kind of expertise. As the growers punch more holes into the ground looking for a vanishing resource, the earth is sinking. "The plan is to hold a special meeting on Tuesday, then submit," he explained to The Leader via a text. John Vidovich Facebook, Instagram & Twitter on PeekYou For now, theyre selling to farmers like Resnick who can pay the price. And then they pump more groundwater. The State Water Project, for the first time in six years, delivers surplus flows. And, importantly, Angiola promised not to take the groundwater outside of Tulare or Kings counties or allow any of its landowners to do so. He had an industrial machine, hardly used, that scrubbed and waxed floors. On this same stretch of 99, I once wrote a story about farmworkers who moonlighted as meth cookers to make ends meet. He indicated that a proposal was currently being drafted for the council's Tuesday night approval. No picking of crop agitates the earth like the picking of almonds and pistachios. What if he dropped his lawsuit and the two of them worked together to solve their water problems? 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. He leveled its hog wallows, denuded its salt brush, and killed the last of its mustang, antelope, and tule elk. Vidovich has more than one reason to be evasive. Young men and women from Teach for America will do their two-year stints at the complex and live in village housing. Not long before, Vidovich was trying to grab water from Resnick, not give it. Hes smiling but speaks only Spanish. Vidovich used the $73 million in 2010 to buy nearly 75 percent of the land in the Angiola Water District. So in that time, we started cleaning windows, too. They named the business Clean Time Building Maintenance. One of his frat brothers was a wealthy kid whose father ran a janitorial business. She wasnt content to pursue the usual list of wealthy businessmen as clients. But he is also a farmer in the Central Valley through the family's other business, Sandridge Partners, and thus a reluctant participant in the national debate currently swirling around the 2008 Farm Bill. Its bringing water from the Dudley Ridge Water District in Kings County. 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. As he bled the aquifer dry, he called on the government to bring him an even mightier river from afar. They are still paying off the $27,000 debt to relatives who hired the coyote. 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. On the day the trees fall quietly upon the orchard floor, no one is here but the Mexican on his tractor. We are creating foods. Nothing keeps prices high like a monopoly. See Also: Stew Recipes, Spanish Recipes Show details. Whatever remains is not nearly enough to make up for the shortfall of imported water from the state. Together, the Resnicks have wedded the valleys hidebound farming culture with L.A.s celebrity culture. The front gates of the 25,000-square-foot Beaux Arts mansion on Sunset Boulevard magically opened without a guard giving a nod. Big fish eat the small fish here. This was how a billionaire who needed more water did politics. He had his hands on 65 percent of the nations crop. The deed had been done in a series of hidden meetings in Monterey. It should be right here, but I dont see it. He and his forebears from Georgia had dried up Tulare Lake, the biggest body of freshwater this side of the Mississippi, and planted 100,000 acres of cotton outside the town of Corcoran. Angelica, one of four sisters, runs the restaurant. The Boswell comments are in a letter sent from the El Rico GSA, while Vidovich's concerns are outlined in a letter from the Southwest Kings GSA.. I didnt grow up here, but if it wasnt for California, its openness and opportunities, I wouldnt be sitting where Im sitting., No other farmer, not even Gallo, had cornered a market the way Resnick had cornered the growing, buying, processing, and selling of pistachios. Past Delano and the first vineyards that Cesar Chavez marched against. The wide-open middle of California did its lullaby on me again. High 53F. The FDA sent a warning letter, and Wonderful pledged to study the chlorine levels in the bathing tanks. It was a permanent water loss for Kings County and put Vidovich under a lingering cloud of suspicion among area farmers and water managers. I follow one of the engines of harvest as it rolls into an orchard like a tank. I cut across Twisselman Road to the pipeline gliding along the aqueduct like a silver snake. What to give a grieving widow and her five children in Lost Hills but drinking water? A few weeks later, I found myself riding up the elevator of a high-rise on the Westside of Los Angeles. A year into his studies, an uncle called from California. They point to three new pump stations along Angiolas main canal just north of the county line that have the ability to move 100,000 acre feet a year into pipes that head south and west. Then he turned and faced me. The tumbleweeds on open ground give you a peek into what Lost Hills looked like before the aqueduct made a river here. The people here have traveled too far. This sale made headlines because it was engineered by one farmeran outsider from the cityfor his benefit only. Inside sits a young man named Pablo. In exchange, the state would get banking rights in Semitropic, said General Manager Jason Gianquinto. Activate your all-inclusive access for print subscribers: Link your losaltosonline.com account to your print subscription here. It sure looks heavier than last year., Bernard smiles and nods to the others. You get exempted from the companys wellness program? Bernard has actually lost a few pounds. Resnick picks up the water in Dudley Ridge, Vidovich says. Id have to say that fully half of my success has been luck. Rather, they say, theyre harvesting health and happiness around the world through our iconic consumer brands. Their crops arent crops but heart-healthy snacks and life-extending elixirs. Now Lynda herself stands before us, a single light over her head. Absolutely not. You sure this isnt 18 tons an acre? he says, goading. You have no idea the people on my VIP list who drink it. Hes thankful to the Resnicks, especially Lady Lynda, for that. This is the Lynda who now endeavors to see farmhands as something more than workers. Ive gone too far. But this wasnt the Resnick Pavilion at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Five years ago, they decided to get rid of the nacho chips, french fries, and soft drinks. But he got too big. The curtains were made of a fabric woven in Venice and substantial enough that they might finish off a person who happened to be looking out the window in the throes of an earthquake. By then, Wonderful, if it still exists, will be a portfolio run by men even farther away than Beverly Hills. The big man with the goatee behind the wheel is Bernard Puget, a Basque sheepmans son who oversees these orchards. Of all the wonders of Wonderful, this is the one I find most mystifying. She was the daughter of Jack Harris, a film distributor, who moved the family to Los Angeles when Lynda was 15 to produce movies. I cash them the same. One of the first things he did with his monopoly was kill the California Pistachio Commission, the industrys marketing group, by yanking his funding. So much snowmelt comes down the mountain that it nearly takes out Oroville Dam. They are suing Angiola for what they say was Hurleys illegal takeover of the tiny Atwell Island Water District. In Kern County, one in two adults and almost one in five children are obese. The speech of his parents and grandparents, the Yiddish-inflected New York with its humors and cut-to-the-quick impatiences, had not left his own speech in the half-century since hed come to California. Each time I called, his secretary hung up the phone. As the head of a quasi-public agency, he knows he cant completely blow off my questions. Its not true, he wants to farm.. I sit in my car and wait in the parking lot. Everyone knew where it was going. In a timespan even shorter than Resnicks, the 61-year-old Vidovich has bought up more than 100,000 acres of farmland scattered across the valley. Where the pipes butt up against Twisselman Road, a more clever bit of engineering is required. But when the Kings does flood, as its doing now, millions of acre feet rush north to join up with the San Joaquin River and empty into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Theyre coming up with ideas that might lead to an even bigger drop in the number of employees with diabetes. Thats why hes in trouble., So he makes a deal for private water?, Yep. EIN: 41-0953924. The film ends with the laughter of kids playing inside the giant sunburst at the center of the soccer field. It gives me the luxury to keep on working. Buttonwillow, California Search Background Check John Vidovich was associated with Sandridge Partners, L.P. between 2018 and 2021. Too many pistachios. His face is blank. Indeed, as president of the board, Vidovich has a great deal of influence in directing much of the water districts business. 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. Vidovich John - De Anza Properties, California (+14087384444) - VYMaps.com Who would have thought that people would be asking their bartender to fix them a Pomtini? he said. Stephen Vidovich died in 2007, at the age of 81, driving a tractor near one of his remaining vineyards. He kept planting more and more trees. It took time to gain the respect of the people, and I was afraid. Across the field, a heavy machine is stacking whats left of the trees into giant mounds. No water in the ground to make up for the missing government supply.