Lynda built sidewalks and storm drains, the new park and community center, and repaved the roads. As a consequence, the farmland here, nearly 100,000 acres planted in permanent crops, is completely reliant on the governments supply of mountain water. Under lights, he prunes, plows, and irrigates the almonds. They donated $15 million to found UCLAs Stewart and Lynda Resnick Neuropsychiatric Hospital and more than $25 million to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to build a pavilion in their name. 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. It moves in a wave from trunk to limb to nut and back down to earth. But you take some risks in business. The idea was to enroll at Rutgers and study to become a doctor. You and I look at this meal, he says. By the time he graduated from UCLA in 1960 and entered its law school, he was bringing home $40,000 a yearthe equivalent of $320,000 today. His grandfather, who came to California from Croatia in 1908, got his start with 10 acres of cherries and apricots in Mountain View. So why hasnt this place gone to tumbleweeds? Lynda believes that if theyre enticed in the right direction, the 1,300 workers might choose to prepare the same healthy fare at home. Dont let his boots, blue jeans, and ball cap fool you, the old-timers say. The new plantings arent cotton, alfalfa, or carrotsthe crops a farmer can decide not to seed when water becomes scarce. 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. Then he turned and faced me. Support. 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? Hundreds of giant praying mantises standing on platforms of concrete are pulling oil from a Chevron field. Boswell, Vidovich is heir to a real estate empire. 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. We were asleep at the wheel. Theyve gone back to the nut line. The farmers there are raising almost 1 million acres of crops, and fewer than half these acres are irrigated with flows from the Kern. As he bled the aquifer dry, he called on the government to bring him an even mightier river from afar. The drought?. One of the most dramatic alterations of the earths surface in human history took place here. 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. Tracts of houses, Californias last affordable dream, civilize three or four exits, and then its back to the open road splattered with the guts and feathers of chickens that jumped ship on the slaughterhouse drive. Two men sit inside separate cabins of a small tractor with pincers on one side and a catcher on the other. 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. This was the same distancegeographic, psychicthat allowed him and Lynda to clear-cut the oaks and to kill the independent pistachio commission, to grab a water bank that belonged to the state and to pretend for 30 years that Lost Hills wasnt a place of dire need. If that happens, theyll go down the highway, and hell lose the $1 he takes for every $100 worth of their checks. If you study his moves, you can see a method to the acres he is accumulating. So in that time, we started cleaning windows, too. They named the business Clean Time Building Maintenance. In the trailer next door, Lupes cousin Margarita lives with her husband, Selfo, and their three young children. Vidovich, who has declined to sign paperwork ensuring his pipeline wont cause harm, filed a lawsuit alleging trespass. Drought turning to floodit is the story of California. Theyre no longer in danger. If Resnick retains every drop, he might squeeze 25 acre-feet of water a day out of both pipes. More recently, he earned $40 million in an easement deal with a water bank and exchange that seeks to siphon flood water out of a Kings County canal for storage in Kern County. But the smaller farmer still uses a pruning shears to make his most important cuts. He got himself into this jam. (SJV Water/ Lois Henry) A large water pipeline being built near Lemoore in Kings County is raising eyebrows as much for its possible uses as for the name associated with its construction John Vidovich. The baby is now a 20-year-old student at Bakersfield College. For the bright kids who have no interest in a bachelors degree, she has designed the Wonderful Agriculture Prep Program to serve an additional 1,000 students. Lets call it what it is, he says. Where gravity needs a boost, the pipes run atop wooden crates used to pack boxes of fruit. Im in another land, an expanse of hard, ugly, cratered-out earth the color of sand. So everybody should have it, right? I did not name the town, Lynda says. When they get on their high horse, you dont want to argue with them.. If I follow them south into Resnick almonds, I can see where the water is going. Summer or not, theyre dressed in shirt layered upon shirt and the same no-name dusty blue jeans. He ran the city's Fire Prevention Bureau, oversaw more than 150 employees and won awards from Mayor Eric Garcetti . All told, 36 men operating six machines will harvest the orchard in six days. On the south end stands the Wonderful Community Center, where residents are urged to attend thrice-weekly Zumba and core-training sessions, healthy cooking classes, and weekend cultural outings featuring the likes of Americas Premier Latino Dance Company. Too many almonds. How will money and power reshape this desiccated landscape? I cant afford to move it., But the Boswells and Vidovichescan invest to move water around, he said. A lot of it is undocumented and they are in these sort of company towns that you describe that are maybe even more sort of dedicated to the company than most. You cant reverse diabetes, but you can control it with a blood sugar level between 6.5 and 8. As we sat down to chat, one of his assistants leaned over and whispered into his jewel-studded ear. 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. Lessons? he says, sounding perplexed. Vidovich claims that he was . She was the daughter of Jack Harris, a film distributor, who moved the family to Los Angeles when Lynda was 15 to produce movies. Main Street is Highway 46, which slices through the middle of town. Billionaires Line Up Behind Biden for 2024: 'Stakes Are - Breitbart Real-time trigger alerts. Plastic drip-irrigation lines stick out of the ground at wrong angles. His father grew grapes, cherries, and apricots in the Santa Clara Valley . 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 would return as tule fog to remind the white man of his theft. 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. Before being dammed and diverted, the water was home to millions of birds, mountain lions, wolves, bears and more. The knoll begins to rise. Rain for Rent, the pipes say. The front gates of the 25,000-square-foot Beaux Arts mansion on Sunset Boulevard magically opened without a guard giving a nod. It cant be farmed like it was, he says. The plastic unfurls across the grove like a giant roll of Saran Wrap. It wouldnt even make a couple of sections of his almonds. He had moved out to Long Beach, bought some property, and built one of those new strip malls. Marketplace host Amy Scott spoke with Mark Arax, who wrote an articlein The California Sunday Magazine about the Wonderful Companys farming business and issues of sustainability in the Central Valley. As the nuts pour down onto the roof of the catcher, the operator shifts the trough so that it becomes a conveyor belt. Correction: August 8, 2022 An earlier version of this article incorrectly reported that Stanford grad James Griffin "J.G." He worked as a gardener in Los Angeles and then heard about the almond trees on the other side of the mountain where the living was so much cheaper. Today, most everything in this desolate reach of Kern County, save for the oil wells, belongs to Paramount Farming, which belongs to the Resnicks. Im in a dire situation.. Vidovich has more than one reason to be evasive. Theyre dusty with San Joaquin dirt. He lives down the road in Wasco, the Rose Capital of America, though the roses, too, have turned to nuts. Even now, months later, the flyovers continue, said Wilson. But thats not an issue I deal with., I dont even know what it was, to be honest with you.. John Vidovich Profiles | Facebook During the drought, the Boswell Company has drilled 52 holes into the old lake bottomseven of these wells reaching a depth of 2,500 feet. She can be reached at lois.henry . She owns this place. He goes on to explain what he means by own. All I know is I dont want to split it up or sell it in some leveraged buyout. He wants his fair share, but he wants everybody else to prosper, too.. At the east end, where the highway meets Interstate 5, the traveler gets a choice. At the plant, we built our gyms, and we have stretching and walking activities. He only needed to find groundwater from another basin to replace the state aqueduct water he had just sold. 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. But she cannot remember the last time she or Manuel or their children drank it. Special Report: Small Farmers Struggle as Ag Titans Boswell, Vidovich The footprint of agriculture has grown a good deal beyond what the water can cover. He had left for the cornfields a few minutes before the killings.. Resnick picks up the water in Dudley Ridge, Vidovich says. The construction of the pipeline forced the irrigation districts hand, launching a lawsuit to halt Angiolas water exports at one point to the tune of 30,000 acre-feet annually. Because when we dont manage it, they end up with severe chronic health issues and amputated limbs., Anzaldo is a man wired for solemn, but he does manage to smile once during lunch, when talking about the 1,150 workers whove earned bonuses of up to $500 for losing a collective 14,000 pounds in two years. Being Wonderful means more than growing, harvesting, and distributing the best of the best. Thats why he built the pipeline. Every river busting out of the Sierra was bent sideways, if not backward, by a bulwark of ditches, levees, canals, and dams. The checks the workers bring in here from Mr. Resnick are the same checks they bring in for years. Six hundred and forty acres dont look like 640 acresa square mileuntil they start ripping out the trees. Each bush is saddled with more than a hundred pomegranates the size of softballs and baseballs. The aquifer, a sea of water beneath the clay that dates back centuries, isnt bottomless. If the pipeline failed and the canal collapsed, precious well water would be lost, the company asserted. The next year, it delivers 300,000 acre-feet. Rather, it is the authority vested in Wonderful that counts. Its a water-saving method, Vidovich said. But the players are different. Two strains of salmonella found in their pistachios had caused a multistate outbreak of illnesses. Vidovich, whose total compensation was about $236,000 in the last fiscal year, was previously the agency's chief of staff. Scott: So you set out with this question: how was he defying nature? Longtime small farmers say water is hard to track and could drain towardrich and politically powerful users, leaving them dry. Anzaldo grew up in Bakersfield and attended a Catholic high school where he played football and basketball. He commands his realm, and she commands hers, and he takes care to mind the line.
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