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The pistachio trees in Wonderful number 6 million. The people here have traveled too far. Among the graduating class are kids headed to Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Dartmouth, and the state and community college systems. No farmer ever is. I did sell water out of Kings County to an urban user and people didnt like it, Vidovich said. John Vidovich, ultimately, followed in his fathers footsteps after obtaining a law degree from Santa Clara University School of Law. Boswell pumps reach 2,500 feet into the earth looking for water to grow crops, looking for water to sell. At the core, though, the Resnicks were still moved by the duty of social justice, not just as traditional liberals but as secular Jews. He sold rights to more than 14,000 acre feet a year to the Mojave Water Agency in San Bernardino County for a headline-grabbing $73 million. Mr. Vidovich was a descendant of one of the pioneer farm families that settled here from Croatia . Vidovich went home with $74 million in his pocket. The oldest of five children, he came from Mexico when he was 18. His grandfather Resnick had fled the Ukraine in the wake of another killing of Jews by Cossacks. Once, he came home from school and discovered the family car gone. The aquifer either doesnt exist or is so befouled by salts that the water is poison. Surely, no one does this better than Wonderful? He tells me to meet him in Lost Hills. Thats why he built the pipeline. Kings and Tulare farmers and water managers want to know. So were seeing a shift now and then to have nature imposing its will on the situation. When I tell her my name, she whispers into his ear. Page had been a longtime board member of the Semitropic Water District and Vidovich wanted that kind of expertise. I had in mind a magazine profile on Stewart, the Nut King. Frankly, Im having too much fun to think about retiring., Even if he were inclined to wind down, he had no successor in mind. 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. Lynda believes that if theyre enticed in the right direction, the 1,300 workers might choose to prepare the same healthy fare at home. He spends much of his off hours fixing it up. 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. Vidovich says the animus against him goes back to his 2009 sale of State Water Project (SWP) contract rights tied to land he owned in the Dudley Ridge Water District in Kings County. It goes to doctors and nurses, trainers and dietitians, who track the weight of workers, prod them to exercise, and wean them off soda and tortillas. As he bled the aquifer dry, he called on the government to bring him an even mightier river from afar. He got himself into this jam. Section, block, and row dont compute; he has to direct me by cellphone and guideposts. You look like Border Patrol undercover.. LOIS HENRY: Is John Vidovich planning to sell off the valley's lifeblood? Hes trying to play dumb, but I can see the sliest of grins peeking out from his mustache and goatee. The dispute over the no fly zone was finally resolved by the invention of a netting that Resnick sheathes around his mandarins each spring. Yet he doesn't think the farm bill in its present form is going to achieve its protectionist goals. Lupe says no one in her family, and none of her friends living in the trailer park or on the other side of town, drinks the water that comes out of the pipe. Ive done no big wrong in my life that would cause me to have any. Number three, water from Angiola cant physically get to Semitropics proposed storage cells. If Resnick retains every drop, he might squeeze 25 acre-feet of water a day out of both pipes. None of his three children had the slightest interest in taking over the company. That was eight or nine years ago. The partner kept the Cutie name but only after paying the Resnicks tens of millions of dollars. Preview. 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. 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. Vidovich has long been at odds with. I sort of remember growing up on a farm, he said. Vidovich says his quote was clipped and sewn back together to make it sound bad. There are a lot more rural areas that would be able to support that operation.". 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. Ive never seen her up close, never watched her in action. What to give a grieving widow and her five children in Lost Hills but drinking water? Phone Number: (724) 495-**** John T Vidovich, age 84 View Full Report Address:***** Butternut Ridge Rd, Elyria, OH. The man and his pincers cant be bothered. With water from the delta becoming more unreliable, he said, farmers have to hoard land for the groundwater. Whether those pipes end on Vidovich lands or Resnicks is hard to know. I try to calculate how many hundreds of aluminum sections need to be linked seamlessly, or at least watertight, to cover the distance of a mile. At the buildings he was cleaning, he noticed that no one was watching the front and back doors. Me, Im a carpetbagger from Beverly Hills. Past Delano and the first vineyards that Cesar Chavez marched against. 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. Lucky for her that the young man was kind. 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. One out of eight has diabetes. Pablo prunes and irrigates the almond and pistachio trees and applies the chemicals that cannot be applied by helicopter. Ive never given an interview to a newspaper or magazine before. This is Twisselman. John Vidovich will tell you hes the interloper who came over the other mountain, the Coast Range. Bernard, hard to believe, is driving straight toward the aqueduct. Every river busting out of the Sierra was bent sideways, if not backward, by a bulwark of ditches, levees, canals, and dams. For as far as I can see, the water in the canal runs inky through the orchards. Its gone, I say. The aqueduct brings the water, yes? By age 19, Lynda had dropped out of college, married a magazine ad man, and opened her own advertising agency. Did it teach him any lessons? Were still trying to figure out who our typical customer is going to be, Angelica says. There, he tells me, in the shadow of the states great concrete vein moving snowmelt north to south, I will find a private, off-the-books pipeline that Stewart Resnick has built to keep his trees from dying. The fog is our history. tupperware garlic keeper g2c advantages and disadvantages. He found it. Vidovich, in 2009, according to media reports, sold the rights to 14,000-acre-feet of state water from a Kings County water district to southern California for $73 million. Vidovich and a co-defendant were found guilty in 2014 of conspiracy to breach a land sale contract and ordered to pay nearly $130 million in compensatory and punitive damages. On a Facebook page with postings in Spanish, they offer a glimpse of life inside pistachio world. They give thanks for a job that provides decent wages and access to a free wellness center next door staffed by a full-time doctor, physicians assistant, registered dietitian, and marriage and family therapist. One cousin arrived only last week. He was dressed in the latest slim-fit style. Vidovich continues to run De Anza and in a surprisingly hands-on manner. And, yes, that takes water. Because it is a community of all Hispanics.. John Vidovich just wants to farm, he says. Hes getting ready to introduce Lynda, the main speaker, but first he wants to address the federal governments recent recall of Wonderful pistachios. We saved the best for last, he says. Theres a lot of people who dont like me, he said after his fathers death. Its known as a census-designated place, which is another way of saying that Kern County has every reason to neglect it. Resnick has saved the front seat for me. Like the waters of the lake, the indent of the Resnicks will recede from the land, too. Perched up there, a queen might peek out and utter, Let them eat cake, Lynda once said. As a class of people, the farmers and real estate developers harbor a deep-down contempt for what they have built. I sit in my car and wait in the parking lot. Vidovich is, after all, a powerful landowner in the Central Valley. Hundreds of giant praying mantises standing on platforms of concrete are pulling oil from a Chevron field. Mostly, though, they cant wait for the avalanche of nuts to end. It cracks open and out pops the head shot of Stewart Resnick in a pistachio green tie. Each bush is saddled with more than a hundred pomegranates the size of softballs and baseballs. They settled in Brooklyn among Jews who had fled their own pogroms, and his grandfather went into the needle-and-embroidery trade. John Vidovich Retired Financial Services Executive Greater Roanoke Area 2K followers 500+ connections Join to view profile Tri-County Lakes Adminitrative Commission Alfred University About. Hes so involved, in fact, he even chairs the monthly meetings for Buena Vista Water Storage District where Sandridge owns thousands of acres. 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. Died on 26 Oct 2005. The matter was headed to court when Vidovich paid a visit to Resnick. They dont do agribusiness. Before he left her to cross alone, he gave her soda, water, chips, and Cheetos. We are sensitive to that. He ran unsuccessfully for the Los Altos Hills City Council in 2006, served on the Santa Clara County Planning Commission and is former chairman of the Santa Clara County Republican Committee. Theyre now building an $80 million charter-school complex in Delano, just down the road from Cesar Chavez High. This is the route my grandfather, one of a legion of fruit tramps, took as he drifted from farm to farm in the 1920s picking crops. One day, gunmen mowed down residents with AK-47s and threw grenades at the church filled with parishioners. Chance of rain 100%. The 5th District Court of Appeal in Fresno has overturned a $73.4 million verdict against McCarthy Family Farms and Bay Area developer John Vidovich and Sandridge Partners involving a land and. On the way out, the voice in their head, Lyndas voice, goads them to give one more hour to the Wonderful Fitness Center. The district has already paid him $40 million for an easement, or right of way, on that land and signed an agreement with him for how the project would operate. He needs nearly 1,000 acre-feet a day for 165 daysthe length of nut-growing seasonto hang a good crop across his acres in western Kern. 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. Vidovich is gobbling up all the parcels he can so he can keep on pumping, Mitchell said. He commands his realm, and she commands hers, and he takes care to mind the line. The truth a mercenary has landed on. Hes dressed Italian chin to footLoro Piana jeans and Hogan tennis shoes. Now its the seven-week nut harvest that brings out the inhalers. On a fog-drip night in January 1972, two men walked into my fathers empty bar with gloves on and shot him to death. As he drives off, he throws a clue out the window. His company has donated items to Stratford Elementary School and recently helped Kings County Sheriff Dave Robinson create a pheasant-raising and release program for jail inmates to earn credit. Or at least thats the way Vidovich puts it when I finally reach him. Then he turned and faced me. Web Directions. Stephen Vidovich retired but kept a watchful eye on the company, getting daily reports and giving advice, John Vidovich told the San Jose Mercury News after his father's death. Hes now the president of that powerful panel. Resnick himself had sold 5,000 acre-feet to a proposed new town in the farm fields of Madera. Vidovich wrote out a check for the full amount, then went looking for the water to prop up Resnicks monopoly. It comes out like pee, says her 11-year-old daughter. The William Saroyan Theatre was packed that October 1996 night. He had moved out to Long Beach, bought some property, and built one of those new strip malls. 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. But those deals were one water district selling to another water district. Wonderful is getting smaller, he says. There is nothing here, one of the townsfolk told Gibler. The Yokut had a saying that when the farmer drained the last drops of snowmelt from Tulare Lake, the water would return. But its just a cover for taking water out, Pace said. Already mechanization is changing, you know, the labor situation. The vibration is a stunning piece of violence to behold. 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. The POM tanks, Im told, are backed up with a three-year supply. Im actually not supposed to talk about it.. So much snowmelt comes down the mountain that it nearly takes out Oroville Dam. Buried in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, USA. Why not California? The Mojave Water Agency in the high desert needed a backup supply to serve its growing communities of Barstow and Apple Valley, Hesperia and Victorville. We hope that you continue to enjoy our free content. Scott: So we should talk about the labor that makes this all possible. The aqueduct was built with tax money, yes? Of all the wonders of Wonderful, this is the one I find most mystifying. He wouldnt know one of his Valencia orange groves from one of his Washington navel orange groves. Angiola was ordered to stop pumping and eventually the districts came to a settlement. The farmer isnt here to smell the cracking open of wood, the ripping open of warm secret earth. Across the field, a heavy machine is stacking whats left of the trees into giant mounds. Resnick grabs at a pomegranate that might win a blue ribbon at the fair and tries to twist it free. When John Vidovich was appointed as fire marshal in September 2014, he was given the difficult task of cleaning up the city of L.A.'s stubbornly antiquated Fire Prevention Bureau, making it more . She is twinkling from earlobe and finger. 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. To manage the disease. The truth, as always, probably lies somewhere in between. After Vidovich sold his Dudley Ridge state water, Pace said he drilled several wells in Green Valley, built a pipeline across I-5 and took the valleys groundwater to keep his Dudley Ridge trees alive. All the new water pours into the delta, and what doesnt go out to sea fills up the aqueduct again. I ask him how the drought has affected Wonderful. His father worked as a truck driver, transporting crops to the city. She owns this place. He goes on to explain what he means by own. The baby is now a 20-year-old student at Bakersfield College. The great drought is officially over. But if its the tube that Im looking to follow, I must drive through the almond grove. Rethink Your Drink is the latest slogan. Every last tree has been torn out of the ground. Lived In Aliquippa PA, Monaca PA. Related To Michele Vidovich, Amy Vidovich. The film ends with the laughter of kids playing inside the giant sunburst at the center of the soccer field. Plastic drip-irrigation lines stick out of the ground at wrong angles. That little red string is supposed to remind him to count to ten. These books indicate who obtained the land, and include a physical description of the tract and where the land is located. I learned back then that our farmers thought the whole world was out to screw them. He guides me to the caf, and we grab our lunches from the buffet. I study the terrain. I enter an equipment yard where a Wonderful farmhand is standing next to a tractor. Resnick also has lands just south of the Kings/Kern county line in Lost Hills and many of Vidovichs detractors believe thats where a lot of that Angiola groundwater is going. He packed his bags and left his wife and kids. He says his bosses have been instructing him to cut the water each irrigation. Just ahead I can see the last section of pipe throwing a cascade of white water into a main canal belonging to the Lost Hills Water District. When he was told there were fields upon fields, he did not believe there could be this many fields. Every time I see it, Im inspired and proud of what weve been able to accomplish in such a short amount of time. Understanding water, water rights and the often complex structures of water districts has become a Vidovich hallmark. Brown oxtail in batches and set aside. If you have any trouble accessing your account or linking your subscription, our. What do you need to know, sir?, Whats it been like here during the drought?, Drought, no drought, makes no difference. He has painted the interior and put down two new patterns of linoleum, one to mark the living room and the other to mark the kitchen. None of this is my idea. Im in another land, an expanse of hard, ugly, cratered-out earth the color of sand. But the one thing he cant control is what hes most dependent on water. As we hop down from the van to inspect the pomegranates on the eve of harvest, Resnick motions to Bernards belly. By harvests end, the Resnicks will have put their clamps on 4.4 million almond trees. Water is what led me to Stewart Resnick in the winter of 2003. From now on, theyll grow on land that offers a double protection against drought. President George Bush has been outspoken in his criticism of the bill, which he vetoed last week before being overruled by majorities in the House and Senate. "There are a lot of good places for it (feedlot). We produced a short documentary film. The big man with the goatee behind the wheel is Bernard Puget, a Basque sheepmans son who oversees these orchards.
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