Being healthy is a choice. He emptied the sky of tens of millions of geese and drained the 800 square miles of Tulare Lake dry. 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. A native of Sunnyvale, Vidovich was the son of a Bay Area real estate scion. They were married only a short time when Manuel decided to cross the border almost 20 years ago. I think I paid $9 million. Resnick dipped into his savings from his job at a mental hospital and went in half on the machine. The buyer? 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. His second son is a psychiatrist. As you know, our philosophy at Wonderful is doing well by doing good. It's John Vidovich. The Boswell Company wants it blocked, saying it threatens the companys own water supplies, which run through a canal over the pipelines underground route. The shelves spill piatas, gloves, hats, pruning shears, and loaves of Bimbo white bread. The new plantings arent cotton, alfalfa, or carrotsthe crops a farmer can decide not to seed when water becomes scarce. The colors turn brilliant in the light made spectacular by the particles of dust. Angelica, one of four sisters, runs the restaurant. But she cannot remember the last time she or Manuel or their children drank it. Legal bills for this and other Boswell-related disputes are costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, he said. How come?, We dont need it anymore, he whispers., Back at the plant, Lynda is meeting with Wonderful doctors, nurses, and farmworkers. The drought is driving prices and shifting business practices. Upon graduation, he only needed to look across the Raritan River to find his college. Feudal. Already, the high school is filled with hundreds of students bused in from farmworker towns that are among the poorest communities in the West. Thats why hes in trouble., So he makes a deal for private water?, Yep. Antioxidants that delivered 32 grams of sugar in each serving didnt come cheap: $11 a bottle. None of his three children had the slightest interest in taking over the company. The nets of the Chinese during the Gold Rush caught terrapin that was served as turtle soup in the fanciest restaurants of San Francisco. Who would have thought the two of them in cahoots? Whichever dish they choose, workers are asked not to take a bite until they have considered Lyndas latest concoction: an ounce of apple cider vinegar cut with ginger, mandarin juice, and turmeric served in small plastic cups like the wine of Mass. The wall of Pacifico and 16-ounce cans of Bud is rebuilt daily. A public resource had been privatized for the purpose of growing tens of thousands of acres of nuts, he charged. Even so, Resnick says, he learned a lesson from the 2004 recall of 13 million pounds of the companys salmonella-tainted almonds: Dont fight the FDA. One way or the other, we got rid of our last farm a few years before I was born and moved to the Fresno suburbs. The comments don't come from Boswell and Vidovich themselves, of course, but from the groundwater sustainability agencies each farming . Are big banks following through on their climate pledges? I returned for two more sessions, and then he and Lynda took off to their $15 million vacation house in Aspen, where they were warring with the locals over a housing project for community workers that was blocking their view. Theres a lot happening in the world. A day later, I get a call from Mr. Resnick. She was a very frugal lady. It was true that agriculture had been selling state project water to cities for two decades. John Hume, . Yosemite Valley to reopen as Big Melt flood concerns persist across California. Now Lynda herself stands before us, a single light over her head. He lingers in the crowd long enough to shake hands with a friend from Bel-Air whos planting thousands of acres of pistachios in the worst ground of Tulare Lake. Frankly, Im having too much fun to think about retiring., Even if he were inclined to wind down, he had no successor in mind. 16: Emmanuel Forbes, CB, Mississippi State My take: Washington entered the draft wanting to take a corner or an offensive lineman in the first round. Our relatives have been patient. He worries because there isnt enough water now to properly irrigate the almonds, pistachios, and pomegranates. You can reach Alex at alex.tavlian@sjvsun.com. The company is now run by son Jim, or J.W., 69, who lives 2.5 hours away from this dusty valley in a palatial home in the wealthy Southern California town of La Caada Flintridge. We pile back into the van and head up the road. The calculation and hubris inside it. Im here to show the farmer that ags footprint needs to get smaller.. Stewart Resnick is the biggest farmer in the United States, a fact he has tried to keep hidden while he has shaped what we eat, transformed Californias landscape, and ruled entire towns. And like other of the regions water barons present and past Resnick and Boswell Vidovichs last name is a sort of shorthand in coffee shop chatter from Delano to Easton. Their tongues loll to their knees. No journalist had written a word about his rise as an agricultural giant, how he had turned public water into private water by grabbing control of Californias largest water bank, a project jump-started with $74 million in taxpayer money. Month after month, she made ends meet on a $1,600 budget. No announcement was made; locals noticed excavation, first reported by Lois Henry of SJV Water, a nonprofit news site that covers water issues in San Joaquin Valley. I steer past Wasco to the dust-blowing orchards that flank Lost Hills, the densest planting of almonds, pistachios, and pomegranates on earth. The baseballs will be crushed into juice. Already, they are paying $69 a month to the local utility district. Thats $83 a tree. Even as the supplies of federal and state water have dropped to near zero, agriculture in Kern keeps chugging along, growing more intensive. Thats a billion-dollar crop. To manage the disease. But most of this water has been spent by the Resnicks and other account holders in years two, three, and four of the drought. One million acres of the valley floor, greater than the size of Rhode Island, are now covered in almond trees. The pipeline project is suspended while the two sides battle in court. He has plenty of well water in the northern part of Kings County, outside J.G. At Wonderful Health and Wellness, were educating our employees about this health crisis. Every time I see it, Im inspired and proud of what weve been able to accomplish in such a short amount of time. It becomes something else as soon as they encounter their workers in another guiseas a fellow shopper at Costco or as the parents of the kid who goes to school with their kid. He says he doesnt feel sorry for Resnick. Lynda has a son who works as a musician and a son who suffered a birth trauma and lives in a care facility. 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. The scale of productionand the ability to process, market, and sell its own cropsallows Wonderful to be mostly mediocre in the fields and remain highly profitable. He yanks and pulls, and it finally comes off, throwing him a foot backward. Inside, a Wonderful media specialist sees that Resnick needs to be rescued. There's a reason to lose sleep over mislabeled melatonin gummies, The debt limit is not a tool for "extortion," Biden adviser Lael Brainard says. He could collect the rents while he slept. What to give a grieving widow and her five children in Lost Hills but drinking water? When you first meet John Vidovich, everything from his ball cap to his dirty boots tells you he's a farmer. Theyre all chasing Bobby, whose 325-pound bench press, 335-pound squat, and 455-pound dead lift make him the sole member of the 1,000-Pound Club. If only Eve had offered Adam a pomegranate instead of an apple, Lynda wrote, every day could have been a holiday.. 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. What happens to Wonderful? 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. Once, he came home from school and discovered the family car gone. His grandfather Resnick had fled the Ukraine in the wake of another killing of Jews by Cossacks. We produced a short documentary film. Like the waters of the lake, the indent of the Resnicks will recede from the land, too. They are still paying off the $27,000 debt to relatives who hired the coyote. The control Resnick exercises inside his $4.5 billion privately held company does relinquish to one person: his wife, Lynda, vice chairman and co-owner, the Pomegranate Queen, as she calls herself. The independent growers and processors, no surprise, regarded him as a bully eager to employ teams of lawyers and tens of millions of dollars to force his agenda. Its gone. Developers now had to identify a source of water before a city or county would green light their projects. Photo courtesy of Trent Davis Bailey/The California Sunday Magazine. Already mechanization is changing, you know, the labor situation. John Vidovich lives in Los Altos, CA; previous city include San Jose CA. The nuts are kept there a few more daysany longer and the ants will attack themto complete their drying. The pipeline will pose a constant and continued threat to the easements function, compromising the structural integrity of the easement through saturation and subsidence or by negligent maintenance, wrote attorney Leonard Herr. They were selling 2,500 acres of oranges and lemons and a packing house for a third of their appraised value, Resnick said. Boswell had done for the town of Corcoran. Hes carrying 55,000 pounds of crop in two swaggering trailers open to the sun. So so sleepy, says another. 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. Because, while he does farm thousands of acres of pistachios, almonds [] This hasnt convinced the people of Lost Hills, however. The next year, it delivers 300,000 acre-feet. Why not we start with an extended interview or two? I offered. Hes never driven a tractor or opened an irrigation valve. And its an area that doesnt have ground water, so its there completely because of the State Water Project. Me, Im a carpetbagger from Beverly Hills. There are plans, crazy as it sounds, to take out 10,000 acres of almonds. My old well cant compete with his new wells. Drought turning to floodit is the story of California. She wanted to tell the story of the pomegranate, he told me with a touch of sarcasm. What can I say? On Thursday, the newly formed committee was suddenly flush with cash: Two businesses, VG Investments and VO Limited Partners, poured a combined $94,400 into the campaign.