john vidovich billionaire

No bee can penetrate the shield, and his mandarins remain seedless. Too many pomegranates. Late to the states water game, the regions farmers are the first to have their supplies curtailed. He used to work for the Resnicks before Stewart put him in charge of the district. My dust cloud tells him Im getting close. The biggest farmer of them all is tearing out 10,000 acres because he doesnt have enough water to cover the nuts to harvest. Vidovich has more than one reason to be evasive. Month after month, she made ends meet on a $1,600 budget. Each time I called, his secretary hung up the phone. A piece of pipeline south of Stratford rests in the arm of a piece of heavy equipment on Dec. 16, 2021. Stewart gambled and won for many years. "Once you have them, you spend a lifetime defending them." General Partner. In the summer of 2010, hed spent several days documenting the deplorable conditions of the modern company town. This water basically came from a land owned by someone who's also a near billionaire a guy named John Vidovich. 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. Along with paying a quarter-million for recharging the aquifer, with the terms including a restriction on pumping of up to 36,000 acre-feet annually, or 130,000 acre-feet within a five-year consecutive period and a separate restriction that the district, nor its members, move water outside of Tulare and Kings counties. Vidovichs supporters like Wilson say he loves to help people, donating laptops to the struggling Stratford school district and inviting local Native Americans to his property to harvest reeds and teach basket-weaving traditions. Hes headed to the Wonderful plant, 13 miles north of Lost Hills, to drop off his load. In recent years, theres been a consolidation of farms, as investors buy land with reliable water supplies and then fallow the fields because, in an era of climate change, water can be more lucrative than crops. 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. Or at least thats the way Vidovich puts it when I finally reach him. . Each square-mile section is divided into blocks, and each block counts a precise number of rows. Brad Steinwede. The Iranians dont irrigate their trees. So much snowmelt comes down the mountain that it nearly takes out Oroville Dam. But this can lead to conflict and distrust. The Mojave Water Agency, a San Bernardino-based water provider. This last-ditch water in Lost Hills wont make everything right. Boswell Company for 26 years and now advises the regions growers on water and land management issues. She splits her time between Palo Alto and Inverness, and in her spare time likes wildlife photography, swimming, skiing and backpacking. Theyve gone back to the nut line. Each mound is fed into an even bigger machine whose teeth pulverize the trees and make sawdust. In the Wonderful fields, he tells me, at least 80 percent of the workers carry no documents or documents that are not real. On vacation in the south of France, he heard about a farming company called Paramount that needed a buyer for some of its orchards in Kern County. I waited five years before placing another call to his headquarters. 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. Burglar alarms, on the other hand, offered round-the-clock vigilance without coffee breaks. In Kern County, one in two adults and almost one in five children are obese. . 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. I had not seen any. What spikes blood sugar more than a can of Coke? 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. But Paramount isnt Paramount anymore. Being healthy is a choice. But the players are different. Its the beginning of September 2016, and battalions of heavy machinery dispatched from the Wonderful equipment yards pound the ground and rattle the trees. How much was plunder? I didnt see our creation, much less the figures bent under the canopies of vine that our creation counted on. Turn onto Twisselman Road off I-5 and continue west until it intersects with the California Aqueduct. She tells me the water comes out of the tap yellow and foul smelling, and she doesnt trust it. I roll past Tulare, where every February they hold the biggest tractor show in the world, even bigger than the one in Paris. I gaze out the passenger window, looking for the glint of the pipeline. At the plant, we built our gyms, and we have stretching and walking activities. 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 . A worker can still order a hamburger, but its half the size of the old hamburger and costs $6twice what the wild salmon served with creamed leeks and raw asparagus salad costs. EIN: 41-0953924. Lupe excuses herself to prepare dinner. Many are here without documents, after all. On our trips to Disneyland, I must have blinkered my eyes heading down 99. Because its so much fun to say that Lost Hills has been found., The room full of growers applauds. 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. In a valley of dead rivers, each one killed on behalf of agriculture, the aqueduct was the one river still alive. 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. To top it off, the greedy SOB (farmers rarely uttered Vidovichs name) intended to keep his 7,000 acres of nut trees in Dudley Ridge. John Vidovich, the current patriarch of the family business, and his wife Lydia live in an $11.4 million Los Altos Hills home. Due to the drought, this water would be impossible to replace, it said. The project would take five days to completewhen the canal wasnt in use. He was the bad guy in agriculture for no bigger offense than that he was big. John Gibler, a freelance journalist, found Lost Hills a year before Lynda. He started cleaning pizza parlors and drugstores. Boswell Company. His father bought a neighborhood bar and ran it with the same iron fist with which he ran the house. His accountant suggested he buy apartments. 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. One giant dealing water to another has rubbed smaller operators along the Kings River, but what it signals that is perhaps more worrisome that Valley water can easily wind up on the block. She is here and there, but I have never seen her up close. This is a big crop, the field man tells me. Theres an unease about the room. The footprint of agriculture has grown a good deal beyond what the water can cover. For now, shes playing country western music on the sound system and trying to lure a combination of oil-field workers, supervisors at Wonderful, and travelers driving the last miles of James Dean. We were asleep at the wheel. While some counties and water boards prohibit water exports, others dont. I leave Gabbys and follow a winding concrete path through the new Wonderful Park. Bernard, hard to believe, is driving straight toward the aqueduct. Being Wonderful means more than growing, harvesting, and distributing the best of the best. And while Resnick and Vidovich have been at odds in the past over San Joaquin Valley water feuds especially centering on the appearance that Resnick was overly-familiar in his utilization of the Kern Water Bank the feud is long gone. The boss came back in, saw his do-nothing, and said only three words: Just get started. He began to move, and the job went quickly after that. Who anticipates that you cant fill a water bank for six or seven years?, Come on, I say. Dont let his boots, blue jeans, and ball cap fool you, the old-timers say. 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. They were pushing plates, costume jewelry, perfume, and model cars. The borough measured no more than 2 square miles. I did not name the town, Lynda says. The project seemed simple: Using existing canals and new 48-inch pipe, he would ship water 10 miles from his property in Lemoore to property south of Stratford. The agency did not balk at the price tag: $5,321 an acre-foot. What happens to them if Wonderful downsizes? Its California., Sure. Inside, a trainer watches over a line of treadmills, elliptical machines, and stationary bikes. Theres a lot of people who dont like me, he said after his fathers death. Presently, John Vidovich is Vice President & Sales Director at The Student Loan Corp. His second son is a psychiatrist. While water has been moved, bought, sold and traded in California for decades, most deals have typically involved small supplies. To grow, Big Ag needed a bigger and more dependable supply. I call the manager of the Lost Hills Water District. 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. It must have wounded all the more because she and Stewart thought of themselves as progressive Democrats. Look, these farmers go back two, three, and four generations. Cotton still grows on the lake bottom, but less and less each year. As a relative newcomer, Vidovich said he angered Boswell when he outbid the company on Westlake Farms, one of the oldest and largest farms in California, with valuable access to groundwater and Kings River flows. Fallowing the farm until the footprint gets smaller and smaller. But, until now, nobody had the money to fight back.. His daughter, who used to own a restaurant, is busy raising her one son. Vidovich wrote out a check for the full amount, then went looking for the water to prop up Resnicks monopoly. Age : 59. In the maroon of sundown,I follow the workers back to Lost Hills. Typically, each pound sells wholesale for $3.75. Two strains of salmonella found in their pistachios had caused a multistate outbreak of illnesses. Ive done no big wrong in my life that would cause me to have any. All I know is I dont want to split it up or sell it in some leveraged buyout. Once you have them, you spend a lifetime defending them.. He accused Resnick in 2008 of using various shell companies to monopolize control of the Kern Water Bank. We cant insist on wellness the way we can insist on plant safety. It sure looks heavier than last year., Bernard smiles and nods to the others. When you first meet John Vidovich, everything from his ball cap to his dirty boots tells you he's a farmer. And its an area that doesnt have ground water, so its there completely because of the State Water Project. Lupe and I walk to the far side of the trailer park to find Gustavo. This is an offering of cake handed down from king and queen to serfs. He brought great ideas to the table and helped make and then execute tough choices. Nearly $365 million worth of Wonderful almonds will have dropped down from the dry sky. The price for pistachios has climbed from $4.50 a pound to an unbelievable $5.25 a pound. Its artificiality had achieved a permanence; its permanence had created my California. This water basically came from a land owned by someone whos also a near billionaire a guy named John Vidovich. 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. Its his pipe, not mine. In case the growers are fearing the antitrust cops from the Department of Justice, they neednt. But that doesnt make people buy a second bottle. Mathews: Should climate projects benefit communities they impact? Boswells response has a tough Spaghetti Western quality. Lessons? he says, sounding perplexed. They slap back with the cold vibration of water. Water seems to be disappearing, said Verboon. Also set to pitch in is hedge fund executive Donald Sussman who told . The concept changed the industry. Im down.. They have no way to grasp the $50 million to $80 million a year that the Resnicks say they are spending on philanthropy. Selfo works 50 hours a week as an irrigator. If only Eve had offered Adam a pomegranate instead of an apple, Lynda wrote, every day could have been a holiday.. Once he finished grabbing the flow of the five rivers that ran across the plain, he used his turbine pumps to seize the water beneath the ground. He unfolds a $20 bill from a wad he keeps inside a bent paper clip, and we take a seat in the far corner. Just get started became one of his guiding principles. Down the great aqueduct, by freight of politics and gravity, came the excess waters of the Sacramento River. Lets meet again in two weeks, he said. With that insight, he sold the company for $2.5 million and went into the security guard business. Inside, a Wonderful media specialist sees that Resnick needs to be rescued. He certainly looks the part in his well-worn jeans and checkered shirts. "Water rights are like democracy," he told Forbes in 1989. If that happens, theyll go down the highway, and hell lose the $1 he takes for every $100 worth of their checks. They're drought's best buddies." John Vidovich will tell you he's the interloper who came over the other mountain, the Coast Range. The image of water moves on and on through miles of western Kern. I didnt see the tumbleweeds along the roadside and the strip of parched earth that separated what remained of the desert from the perfect rows of irrigated agriculture. Lynda assisted her with the design and color scheme but otherwise has remained hands-off. Then one day, he was trying to find a marketing person and got a call from Lynda Sinay, who worked in advertising. The imported flow arrives by way of the Central Valley Project and State Water Project, the one-of-a-kind hydraulic system built by the feds and state to remedy Gods uneven design of California. Thanks to Wonderfuls $15 million Get Crackin campaignthe largest media buy in the history of snack nutspistachios now rank among the top ten bestselling salty snack items in the U.S. We are no longer processing nuts, he says. But a controversial pipeline sits empty, as dry as dust, caught in an angry feud between two of Californias largest land barons, Silicon Valley developer and farmer John Vidovich and Pasadena-based longtime cotton king J.G. Instead of trying to sell the fruit as a piece of fruit, they squeezed its seeds into POMWonderful. Theyre just mad Im here, he said. The new plant, the size of seven super Walmarts and built at a cost of $300 million, rises out of a clearing like an apparition. Has the San Joaquin Valley reached its Chinatown moment? Well still make money.. Even if it leaked, it would simply add water to the canal, Vidovich insists. It takes my visiting the irrigation district office during a public meeting for him to cough up more details. 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. If anyone doubted the health benefits of the juice, they spent more than $30 million in research to prove that it fought heart disease and prostate woes. Wonderful is getting smaller, he says. And when youve been as lucky as weve been, you start to think you can ride out drought, too., He did learn one lesson. Johannesburg He spent his vast fortune on a 30-year quest to save the rhinoceros. Once his parents decided to go, he decided to go, too. And how will the Resnicks fare? Plastic drip-irrigation lines stick out of the ground at wrong angles. Made of durable plastic, the pipe would be buried four feet below the bottom of the canal, with a foot-deep cement barrier to protect both. She can be reached at lois.henry . My life is about California. The sale got under the skin of valley farmers. Then hed lose his temper and get the strap out.. Seventy-five years ago, writer Carey McWilliams, in Factories in the Field, lambasted the ribboned Dukes and belted Barons of California agriculture. So I ask about the big picture. My grandmother said it was his leftist politics that ate up that vineyard and the ones that followed. The 20-year-olds look like 20-year-olds; the 30-year-olds, like 40-year-olds; the 40-year-olds, like 60-year-olds. 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. Henry A. Barrios / The . She won a gold Effie, advertisings Oscar. So do the Israelis, who go to the trouble of repackaging the nuts so it doesnt appear that theyre consuming the product of an enemy. He went out and bought an alarm company. Thats 281 square miles. I notice she keeps the water running for a long time. I hop out of the car. He was tough on the outside. This isnt the Owens Valley and William Mulholland doesnt work for the City of Los Angeles. Today, the highest bidder may grow crops in the region. And now Vidovich is the aggressor, said Doug Verboon, a Kings County supervisor and walnut farmer who works the same 187 acres that his grandfather bought in 1906. The calculation and hubris inside it. A giant pistachio nut flashes on the big screen. Its an economy of scale on a scale no ones ever tried here. But you take some risks in business. Research is showing that grapeseed oil is healthier than corn oil and canola oil and may be better for you than olive oil, he tells me. Hes smiling but speaks only Spanish. I saw her a few months ago. And Vidovich ended up pumping water an extraordinary amount of water out of . The miles clock by not as road but as story. For generations, the company has supplied steady work for Kings County families and has been an integral part of the regions identity, helping to build a community park, the YMCA, Corcoran District Hospital and the high school football stadium. It was linear, logical, fluid, and quite nearly destined. 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. As he walks away, I notice his $400 sneakers. Like J.W. The Resnicks brought him aboard in 1999, and now he works alongside Lynda and consults daily with the company chef. When the rain returns, some of the ground will be replanted in pistachios, a tree that can better withstand drought. Recommended for you Videos 4:28. Somehow, it made its way to Lynda. There have been several instances where damaged equipment has reduced flows, he said. He leveled its hog wallows, denuded its salt brush, and killed the last of its mustang, antelope, and tule elk. Hes a decent guy making $216,000 a year who doesnt pretend that he isnt beholden to Wonderful. He kept planting more and more trees. He is a single man who rents a bedroom from other family members for $150 a month. This doesnt count the 21,000 acres of grapefruits and limes hes growing in Texas and Mexico. STRATFORD Water is the lifeblood in the parched San Joaquin Valley, sustaining endless acres of trees, seeds and pastures that feed a hungry nation.

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