Theres no garbage piled high and smoldering, no chickens picking at scratch. Ive never seen her up close, never watched her in action. Theres a lot of people who dont like me, he said after his fathers death. Well, maybe just a little guilt, but thats Jewish. He said the prod for all their giving in Lost Hills happened in Aspen, of all places. Presently, John Vidovich is Vice President & Sales Director at The Student Loan Corp. But most of this water has been spent by the Resnicks and other account holders in years two, three, and four of the drought. The gas to and from the orchards costs him $80 a week. The company operates the most wells in the lake basin and the deepest ones. She is twinkling from earlobe and finger. Thats on top of managing 100,000 acres of farmland and sitting in on Valley-based water boards. Former L.A. Fire Marshal John Vidovich has filed a lawsuit against the city, alleging he was "unlawfully and unceremoniously ousted from his job" in August 2016. The men and women who planted, irrigated, sprayed, and picked our crops were phantoms. California had passed a law intended to stop the rising of new towns in the middle of nowhere. For now, theyre selling to farmers like Resnick who can pay the price. When the mansion was built in 1927, it was known as the Sunset House. Inside, a Wonderful media specialist sees that Resnick needs to be rescued. A piece of pipeline south of Stratford rests in the arm of a piece of heavy equipment on Dec. 16, 2021. This is a big crop, the field man tells me. 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. 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. Yes, the pipeline belongs to Resnick. Nothing will stop the houses. A fully equipped teaching kitchen will turn the harvest into school lunches. Meanwhile, without water, his cattles corn crop is stunted. The pipe needed to cross under Boswells dirt canal, but that seemed like no big deal to Vidovich. Thats our goal. His daughter, who used to own a restaurant, is busy raising her one son. Where the pipes butt up against Twisselman Road, a more clever bit of engineering is required. I then move to the far side of the orchard, where another worker, riding a huge mower, is kicking up an even bigger cloud of dust. Arax: They lose their livelihood. They greet me with smiles and handshakes. And while Vidovich grows crops on thousands of the acres he holds and processes his own almonds at a plant in Wasco, his vast holdings in farmland have granted him entree onto a bevy of water district boards, controlling the regions economic lifeline. Wanted: an animal-loving billionaire who might consider buying 1,993 threatened white rhinos instead of a new superyacht or a Picasso, or a Picasso onboard a superyacht. I want to know that what we built will continue into the future.. If she has her way, they will go to college, too. The nuts are kept there a few more daysany longer and the ants will attack themto complete their drying. 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. Even for someone with Vidovichs savvy, the depth of this summers drought could be devastating. The believer and the skeptic do their tussle inside my head. 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. In the kitchen corner, cases of bottled water are stacked halfway up the wall. I know I cant do this forever, he says. Stewart Resnick: Land, Nuts and Water Made America's Biggest Farmer Through the haze I can see the knoll of the aqueduct come closer. Since international sanctions were lifted five years earlier, Iran has been crowding the market with its more buttery-tasting pistachios. 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. A battle between one of Kings County's largest farming outfits and a water district over the trenching of a massive underground water pipeline grew hotter on Friday. The dispute over the no fly zone was finally resolved by the invention of a netting that Resnick sheathes around his mandarins each spring. Hes getting ready to introduce Lynda, the main speaker, but first he wants to address the federal governments recent recall of Wonderful pistachios. I thank him and hurry down the dirt road through the almonds, eyeing the rearview mirror to see if a Resnick truck is following me. He got into UCLA and joined a Jewish fraternity. Every last tree has been torn out of the ground. He was short, bull-like, and didnt take crap from anyone. It took time for the wax to dry. I ask him about his delivery of servicespruning, pesticides, herbicides, fertilizer, waterthat can be calibrated and timed to enable the smallest unit to achieve maximum yield. I take a last bite of cauliflower rice. What if I failed? He wouldnt know one of his Valencia orange groves from one of his Washington navel orange groves. In fact it should be getting smaller, more sustainable and thats what youre seeing play out on the land right now. He works year-round for Wonderful. It should be right here, but I dont see it. A public resource had been privatized for the purpose of growing tens of thousands of acres of nuts, he charged. In the trailer next door, Lupes cousin Margarita lives with her husband, Selfo, and their three young children. As a class of people, the farmers and real estate developers harbor a deep-down contempt for what they have built. Stewart and Lynda planted 15,000 more acres and bought a juice plant. She was a very frugal lady. Ron DeSantis isn't returning his calls . Like other small farmers, my water stays on my ground. A major set of wells for Angiola sits within the Pixley Irrigation District, where the Vidovich-controlled district began improving old wells, installing new ones, and building a pipeline. The wide-open middle of California did its lullaby on me again. He found it. 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. During paid breaks, they do their 15 minutes of Zumba, take a walk along a designated path, and munch on the free fruits and veggies put out for them. Each section of pipe is 40 feet long. We produced a short documentary film. I would have worn my Levis, he says, but Lyndas here, and she thinks I dress like a bum. Were standing in the sun outside the plants corporate office, a building whose clean lines and retro furniture wear the imprint of Lynda, too. It then dawned on him that guards were good, but they had to be paid an hourly wage. Each tree produces 22 pounds of nuts. But not even the two projects working in perfect tandem can defy drought. John Vidovich - Biography The pipeline, bankrolled by his investment firm Sandridge Partners, is an efficient and conservation-minded way to ship water, he says. Its John Vidovich. Like J.W. And its an area that doesnt have ground water, so its there completely because of the State Water Project. Whether its Fresno or Kings or Tulare or Kern counties, hes grabbing land where the groundwater is plenty or a river runs through it or the aqueduct spills its north-to-south flow. Wonderful has enough water to irrigate its orchards in Lost Hills and park tens of thousands of acre-feet in the water bank. ! it says. Fiefdom. His face is still blank. John, his oldest son, had served in the military as an intelligence officer and graduated from Santa Clara law school. Thousands of Wonderful acres lay bare. Boswell has met its match. Talk to me, Hussein says, draining a can of Rockstar. Vidovich claims that he was . . The state of California has adopted a new law that finally regulates the pumping. It moves in a wave from trunk to limb to nut and back down to earth. But you take some risks in business. Domestic sales are up 42 percent over the past eight years, but foreign sales have stalled. 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. The oil companies and insurance companies were looking to unload their farms in Kern County, Steir learned, chunks of earth that measured 20,000 and 40,000 acres. This is the closest to hills it comes. 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. Once you have them, you spend a lifetime defending them.. But we werent there long. They moved to Highland Park, home to Johnson & Johnson and close enough to Rutgers University to hear the fans screaming at Neilson Field. And Vidovich has said if he . Nothing changes. Still, none of it would have happened without luck., What he and Lynda had done with the wretched pomegranate was another matter. To the growers, it must feel like a jab in the stomach. Selfo works 50 hours a week as an irrigator. When they get on their high horse, you dont want to argue with them.. 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 retrace the road I came in on and cross old Tulare Lake, which rose by flood and sank by drought. She wasnt content to pursue the usual list of wealthy businessmen as clients. 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. Lynda sent the first batches of POM, week after week, as gifts to David Bowie, Rupert Murdoch, and Disney head Michael Eisner. Billionaire GOP donor says DeSantis won't return his calls Every river busting out of the Sierra was bent sideways, if not backward, by a bulwark of ditches, levees, canals, and dams. 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. Faced with scarcity, farmers are very protective of their pipes and canals, said Barton Buzz Thompson, a Stanford Law School professor and director of the universitys Water in the West program. I walk into the supermarket El Toro Loco, and the clerk directs me to the back office, where a tobacco-chewing Yemeni named Anthony Hussein is sitting beneath a photograph of an uncle in his U.S. Army uniform. Perched up there, a queen might peek out and utter, Let them eat cake, Lynda once said. Every time I see it, Im inspired and proud of what weve been able to accomplish in such a short amount of time. These trees are pruned by a machine that hedges one side and then the other, he says. The land to him isnt real. The Resnick story certainly deserved a book, but did he really want me to be the one to write it? Surely, no one does this better than Wonderful? The Resnicks brought him aboard in 1999, and now he works alongside Lynda and consults daily with the company chef. Then the men of cotton, driven out of the South by the boll weevil, put the five rivers into canals and dried up the lake. The 5.3 acres are so flawless and at odds with the town that the whole thing feels like a movie set. These are trees and vines raised in nurseries and put into the ground at a cost of $10,000 an acre to satisfy the worlds growing appetite for nuts and fruits.