Want to book a hotel in California? Then I get lucky. Why not we start with an extended interview or two? I offered. When the Depression struck, his parents migrated to Middlebush, New Jersey, where they bought a few trucks and peddled coffee and pots and pans. Thousands of California oaks were felled. Hes smiling but speaks only Spanish. California showed me why.. All the new water pours into the delta, and what doesnt go out to sea fills up the aqueduct again. My health, knock on wood, is good. When asked if he applies the skills he learned in his military intelligence training to his life today, he answers that we all use the things we learn through life. Taxpayers support the continued production of such commodities, at least in theory, through direct payments to farmers amounting to $5 billion last year under the direction of the farm bill. The 5.3 acres are so flawless and at odds with the town that the whole thing feels like a movie set. You have permission to edit this article. Typically, each pound sells wholesale for $4.25. They plaintiffs' lawyers argued that Vidovich pursued the McCarthy water to offset the $73 million sell-off, even though he knew that it was already spoken for. Most Los Altos residents don't know it, but one of their neighbors known locally as a developer and political candidate moonlights as a farmer, one currently receiving a dose of notoriety. A year into his studies, an uncle called from California. The giant J.G. It was Lynda who teamed up with the USDA to develop 21 new single-family homes and 60 new townhouses on a couple of acres of almonds that Wonderful tore out. 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. The aqueduct was built with tax money, yes? He bought 20,000 acres in the Tulare Lake basinland that not even Boswell dared farm. 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. Since the middle of the drought, the price of almonds has dropped almost by half. Rethink Your Drink is the latest slogan. It comes out to $2,000 a month. Observers worry that Vidovich plans to pump Kings and Tulare counties dry, park that water in Kern County and then sell it to the highest bidder in dry years, leaving a once-thriving farm district barren. But that money enabled me to go into Angiola (a water district in Tulare County) and have other water sources.. He got himself into this jam. Hes farming water. Mitchell agreed, giving Vidovich credit for seeing where groundwater laws were headed before anyone else. To grow, Big Ag needed a bigger and more dependable supply. "What I was most alarmed about was how I, and most people in the area, knew nothing of this proposal," he told The Leader. Welcome to the club. It was good for the bottom line. The designers at the Mint made a porcelain doll with a tiny replica outfit so precise that it had to be hand-beaded with 2,000 fake pearls. The purpose of the Butcher's Corner Final EIR is to provide written responses to comments received on the Draft EIR.An electronic copy of the Final EIR, appendices and revised project plans are available on the project webpage at ButchersCorner.InSunnyvale.com.Hard copies of the Final EIR also available for review at City Hall, the Sunnyvale Public . A few weeks later, I found myself riding up the elevator of a high-rise on the Westside of Los Angeles. Its his pipe, not mine. But if its the tube that Im looking to follow, I must drive through the almond grove. But when the Kings does flood, as its doing now, millions of acre feet rush north to join up with the San Joaquin River and empty into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Maybe this explains why the United Way could declare the valley one of the nations skinflints, a place where the wealthy farmers donated to the childrens hospital or Fresno State athletics but almost never to the communities filled with Mexicans where their crops grew. The aquifer, a sea of water beneath the clay that dates back centuries, isnt bottomless. 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 fathers death. Stewart refers to the occasional trek between Lost Hills and Beverly Hillsroughly 140 milesas a carpetbaggers distance. It seems even longer, he says, if you add in the psychological distance of being an East Coast Jew in a California farm belt where Jews are few and far between. for 30 days. If the workers doubt the benefit of the enzymes from apple cider vinegar, video banners stream a continuous message of bad food habits to be broken and body mass indexes to be measured and met. You know so I could say, Well, I didnt pass because I was so busy with this project.. They arrive in Chevy trucks and Dodge vans and spill out in groups of four or five under the sweat-stained hats of the 49ers, Penn State, and the Yankees. So, capturing that south fork floodwater would benefit both Kings and Kern county farmers, according to Semitropics Gianquinto. He maneuvers down the middle of the row, sweeps up the dried almonds, and throws them into a catcher. She tells me the water comes out of the tap yellow and foul smelling, and she doesnt trust it. There before me, two aluminum pipes, side by side, 12 inches in diameter each, slither in the sun. 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. The pistachio trees in Wonderful number 6 million. Compare and book now! Rainfall near a quarter of an inch. Past McFarland and the high school runners who won five state championships in a row in the 1990s. Because he hadnt done it with Daddys money or what he considered a superior brain, he attributed his wealth to luck and to a simple lesson he had learned early in life. She is here and there, but I have never seen her up close. Farm bill strikes local note with developer/farmer, losaltosonline.com/users/admin/service/purchase, Los Altos teen wins Food Network top prize, Los Altos teen stars as featured contestant on Food Networks Kids Baking Championship, Snow in the hills: Unusual weather (for Los Altos) brings white winter to area, Running the table: Bullis Charter sixth-grader rules his age group in table tennis, Outside Santa Clara County Annual Subscription, Outside Santa Clara County Monthly Subscription. If their fears come true, the Los Angeles water grab in Owens Valley would pale in comparison. 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. But she cannot remember the last time she or Manuel or their children drank it. That shadow drove him to work hard in an effort to be useful to De Anza. We saved the best for last, he says. My business approach right now is to acquire as much water as I can to be diversified in water. It would return as tule fog to remind the white man of his theft. But I had some good people helping me.. john vidovich documentary. Every time I see it, Im inspired and proud of what weve been able to accomplish in such a short amount of time. He was in military intelligence and had a top secret clearance that involved gathering data and evaluating products they made, he said. The William Saroyan Theatre was packed that October 1996 night. The nuts are kept there a few more daysany longer and the ants will attack themto complete their drying. For just $5/month, you can help sustain Marketplace so we can keep reporting on the things that matter to you. John Vidovich is VP/Executive Director:Sales at Student Loan Corp. See John Vidovich's compensation, career history, education, & memberships. I cross the Tulare County line heading south into Bakersfield, and there in front of me, for no eye to miss, stands the Wonderful Citrus complex with its four-story storage building designed in the shape of an almighty box of Halo mandarins. Ive never given an interview to a newspaper or magazine before. The new plantings arent cotton, alfalfa, or carrotsthe crops a farmer can decide not to seed when water becomes scarce. The extraction of water beneath the lake bottom wont last forever. And its an area that doesnt have ground water, so its there completely because of the State Water Project. The calculation and hubris inside it. He paved over the last orchard in the Santa Clara Valley with some apartments and then went looking for another valley where he might build his own empire. The water is filtered for arsenic, boron, and other salts, and the monthly tests show no violation of state or federal standards. It exists as one thing they can almost rationalize out in the fields. This isnt any road. But nobody didnt like my dad.. The deed had been done in a series of hidden meetings in Monterey. Mark Arax: Yeah. None of his three children had the slightest interest in taking over the company. He packed his bags and left his wife and kids. A husband and wife sharing the reins is rare for corporate America, rarer still for industrial agriculture. 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. Contact howardb@latc.com or call him at (650) 397-5213 with any questions or to learn more. In the maroon of sundown,I follow the workers back to Lost Hills. Share with Us. About 25,000 acre feet of groundwater. Hes oblivious, or so it seems. But his egotheres no controlling that., Resnick had heard it all before. With water from the delta becoming more unreliable, he said, farmers have to hoard land for the groundwater. The speech of his parents and grandparents, the Yiddish-inflected New York with its humors and cut-to-the-quick impatiences, had not left his own speech in the half-century since hed come to California. San Antonio south doesnt exist anymore. He is a small, good-looking man with a patch of black hair under his lip. He used to work for the Resnicks before Stewart put him in charge of the district. 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. There are often laws binding it to a basin. The biggest misconception about John is that he wants to sell water to LA, he said. Nearly $365 million worth of Wonderful almonds will have dropped down from the dry sky. None of this is my idea. The hillocks that existed back in Yokut Indian days were flattened by a hunk of metal called the Fresno Scraper. This is how the land of Wonderful is keeping alive its trees. 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 July sun is a scorcher, and I fuss with the dial on the AC long enough to blow past the towns one stoplight and the aqueduct, too. He came to California in the 1950s to remake himself. I sit in my car and wait in the parking lot. "We're just in the preliminary parts of planning for this," he said. But inside he had these weaknesses. No farmer ever is. Even if I were to move water and sell it, it would be to farming operations.. But the appellate court still found Vidovich liable and he could still have to pay out a major amount. In fact, his detractors call him the single greatest threat to Central Valley farming ever to come down the pike. He grew up in New Jersey, where his father ran a bar. Everyone knew where it was going. They planted the first 640 acres, half the pomegranates in the country at the time, knowing there was zero market. The land to him isnt real. Fiefdom. The wind kicks up dirt from the reap of oil and almonds, and the dust cloud carries back into town, raining down on the elementary school first. Number three, water from Angiola cant physically get to Semitropics proposed storage cells. It took time for the wax to dry. Water that he will take, critics fear, and eventually sell to Southern California cities. So so sleepy, says another. This water basically came from a land owned by someone who's also a near billionaire a guy named John Vidovich. I know theres a more forceful way to ask the question, but to what end? 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. Last time he checked, he told me he owned 180,000 acres of California. 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. Six hundred and forty acres dont look like 640 acresa square mileuntil they start ripping out the trees. He was going to Vegas, hanging out with his own Damon Runyon characters, and making plans to get even bigger. Jun 27, 2007. He gambled on the price of nuts going up, and he gambled on the water never going dry. Gianquinto and Vidovich have repeatedly said that it would be nearly impossible for an individual to use state facilities to create a private water market using any water, let alone groundwater. Where do you begin with a man of great riches if not the distant places you might have in common? Im down.. Too many pomegranates. There was a majordomo of the house, a butler, a chef, a sous-chef, three housekeepers, a limo driver, and a trio of assistants who worked in the basement, juggling Lyndas calendar and the buying, wrapping, and shipping of gifts she handed out to her Rolodex of highfalutin people. Stewart had made it clear that Lynda would not be joining us. Notices were sent to the oversight agencies, including the City of Lemoore, Caltrans, and other relevant agencies. The suit alleges that then-Fire Marshal John Vidovich implemented an "Operation Catch-up" program in which he used untrained and inexperienced inspectors to perform duties after media reports that the LAFD had thousands of overdue inspections. I hop out of the car. Im actually not supposed to talk about it.. If I follow them south into Resnick almonds, I can see where the water is going. He found it. We'd love to hear eyewitness 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. The continuous rattle feeds the nuts into a series of bins on the backside of the tractor. The Federal Trade Commission found Wonderful guilty of false advertising and ordered the Resnicks to stop claiming that POM cured heart disease and erectile dysfunction.

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