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My life is about California. He guides me back into the main store with its displays of fresh fruit and vegetables, meats, cold cuts, and baked goods. Lupe excuses herself to prepare dinner. The bowls on her kitchen table are filled with grapes, berries, bananas, and red and green bell peppers. She gestures to the young students in the front row, the ones enrolled in the ag-prep classes, and asks them to stand up and take a bow. Do you know what I am? When youre making the kind of money were making, whats the upside? Locals recount how he bought a 360-acre parcel in Los Altos Hills for $5.5 million and, only four years later, turned around and sold part of it to the MidPeninsula Regional Open Space District for $9.3 million. Its happening. The bosses wont speak of it, he says. Resnick wanted no part in my story. Its gambling. Like the waters of the lake, the indent of the Resnicks will recede from the land, too. As he bled the aquifer dry, he called on the government to bring him an even mightier river from afar. Two days after the Tulare Lake Canal Company sued Sandridge Partners, the farming and water giant owned by John Vidovich, to halt trenching work on a water pipeline set to cut . His bar was a place for guys, Damon Runyontype guys., Resnicks pals were all Jewish kids from upper-class families, so it wasnt easy being the poorest one, the one whose father was a gambler and capable at any moment of losing the few comforts they had. We pile back into the van and head up the road. I saw her a few months ago. Sitting in his mansion in 2008, he already counted more than 100,000 acres of orchards across five counties. But western Kern has no groundwater to draw from. Then the autumn of 2016 arrives with the strangeness of clouds. One more bin, a post reads. On the whiteboard in front of the weights, the big boys list their totals. Feudal. Because a human picker is not needed in the almond and pistachio groves, the nut harvest doesnt spread around money the way it spreads around dust. You cant stop a grower from taking his own water to his crops, said consultant Grewal. Neighbors dont tell on neighbors.. Lessons? he says, sounding perplexed. Because Lupe had no papers, she followed the coyote for many more miles until they reached a steep pass. All of it was Lyndas doing, of course. In a region of wall-to-wall plantings, one of the walls is crashing down. When I crossed the border and found Lost Hills, there was nothing here, he says. It was simply a place to park some money and have another opportunity. He drove to Delano, the farm town where Chavez and his union had made so much trouble and history. I had finished the last chapter of The King of California, a book I wrote with a good friend about J.G. She wasnt content to pursue the usual list of wealthy businessmen as clients. I look back at Resnick. The sale got under the skin of valley farmers. The crops we grow can only be grown in a few places in the world. I cant afford to move it., But the Boswells and Vidovichescan invest to move water around, he said. On our trips to Disneyland, I must have blinkered my eyes heading down 99. Resnick himself had sold 5,000 acre-feet to a proposed new town in the farm fields of Madera. Past Oildale and the boxcar where Merle Haggard grew up. A giant pistachio nut flashes on the big screen. I dont know how Hershey did Hershey, Pennsylvania, but Lynda is present in every painted sunburst, every planted flower, every blade of grass. But his egotheres no controlling that., Resnick had heard it all before. He wonders what agriculture will look like in western Kern in ten years. Before being dammed and diverted, the water was home to millions of birds, mountain lions, wolves, bears and more. 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. A public resource had been privatized for the purpose of growing tens of thousands of acres of nuts, he charged. Upon graduation, he only needed to look across the Raritan River to find his college. But this wasnt the Resnick Pavilion at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Theyre no longer in danger. I follow one of the engines of harvest as it rolls into an orchard like a tank. Theres a lot of people who dont like me, he said after his fathers death. The making of a billionaire over the next half-century was a series of dots that connected in the California sunshine. The pipeline, bankrolled by his investment firm Sandridge Partners, is an efficient and conservation-minded way to ship water, he says. Wanted: an animal-loving billionaire who might consider buying 1,993 threatened white rhinos instead of a new superyacht or a Picasso, or a Picasso onboard a superyacht. Thousands of California oaks were felled. I find a former partner of Resnick. Contact 4? The bureau happened to be my house in northwest Fresno. When I started to realize the socioeconomic issues of the Central Valley, I decided to stop writing checks to other charities and bring my business acumen into the project. It was the early 1900s, and his grandfather and grandmother decided to secure passage to America. Hes surrounded by a half-dozen of his top men and women, the same ones whove been artfully dodging me for the past three years. You look like Border Patrol undercover.. It was a curious statement but true. A year into his studies, an uncle called from California. The Boswell company, their attorneys and Tulare Lake Canal Company president Mark Unruh did not respond to repeated requests for comment. The curriculum is being created by Noemi Donoso, the chief of education for the Chicago public schools before Lynda recruited her to Wonderful. He turns out to be a kindly religious man whose short hair is dyed the black of shoe polish. For a silent minute, we dig into our bowls. Longtime Los Altos resident Stephen John Vidovich, founder of De Anza Properties of Sunnyvale, died of an apparent heart attack June 19 as he was driving a tractor on his property in the Cupertino hills, said his son John Vidovich. The hospital, senior citizens center, and football stadium all bore the signature of his giving. My grandfather lost the farm to vine hoppers is the story he told. Tell me, he asked, though it wasnt entirely a question. San Antonio south doesnt exist anymore. He is a small, good-looking man with a patch of black hair under his lip. It also means giving back.. The feedback were hearing is No. In fact, some of the workers think that we havent gone far enough., The workers arent around for a quick survey. Lynda built sidewalks and storm drains, the new park and community center, and repaved the roads. The pipe needed to cross under Boswells dirt canal, but that seemed like no big deal to Vidovich. Ill have to go deeper if I can.. She is small with lively brown eyes and a sweet but confident voice. Resnicks billions rely on his ability to master water, sun, soil, and even bees. I ask him how the drought has affected Wonderful. Then I get lucky. The food is more. EMEA +44 20 7330 7500. You cant reverse diabetes, but you can control it with a blood sugar level between 6.5 and 8. Perched up there, a queen might peek out and utter, Let them eat cake, Lynda once said. Im driving too fast for the ruts in the road. Its his pipe, not mine. Vidovich has a unique perspective on Stewart Resnick and the acres of crops that have made Wonderful a success, as he tells Arax . Being Wonderful means more than growing, harvesting, and distributing the best of the best. The Sureos gang has tagged the front entrance but otherwise has left the inside unmarked. Thats why hes in trouble., So he makes a deal for private water?, Yep. He isnt farming dirt. Theyre dusty with San Joaquin dirt. Here, private water jumps from Tulare County to Kern County, but government jurisdictions dont count. Lets call it what it is, he says. That company led to another company, and he soon owned half the commercial alarm accounts in Los Angeles. Native Americans fished from reed boats. Vidovich went home with $74 million in his pocket. Stewart was the second of their four children, the only boy. She was a very frugal lady. He had an industrial machine, hardly used, that scrubbed and waxed floors. If the city does not settle his claim, Vidovich is prepared to file a . My husband would have been shot dead like the others, but he was lucky. My old well cant compete with his new wells. The ceiling, all sheetrock and spackling, remains a work in progress. They were farmers back in San Antonio, growing lettuce, cilantro, and radishes on a small plot of land. Look, I have no guilt. Thats when the Resnicks decided to sell the concept of wellness to their 4,300 employees throughout the valley the same way they sell workplace safety. The front gates of the 25,000-square-foot Beaux Arts mansion on Sunset Boulevard magically opened without a guard giving a nod. Each mound is fed into an even bigger machine whose teeth pulverize the trees and make sawdust. John Vidovich, the current patriarch of the family business, and his wife Lydia live in an $11.4 million Los Altos Hills home. Main Street is Highway 46, which slices through the middle of town. He uses more water than any other person in the West. Every river busting out of the Sierra was bent sideways, if not backward, by a bulwark of ditches, levees, canals, and dams. I notice she keeps the water running for a long time. Uneasy about a slowly-marching plan to siphon Valley water for Southern California, farmers and some water managers are worrying about the growing shadow of one of the regions largest land owners. Lynda is making the trip on the company jet more often these days. How much water are we talking about?, Id rather not get too specific. How can this be? Marketplace is a division of MPR's 501 (c)(3). Vidovich is the owner of Sandridge Partners, LP a farmland investment firm that has undertaken more than 100,000 acres of Valley farmland. The company was founded in 1925 by the father and unclesof James Griffin J.G. Boswell II, a Stanford grad who served on the boards of General Electric, Safeway and the California Institute of Technology. This is Lynda.. Los Altos, CA. The south valleyits people and poverty, its obesity and diabetesis her newest mission. Nothing changes. But we werent there long. They moved to Highland Park, home to Johnson & Johnson and close enough to Rutgers University to hear the fans screaming at Neilson Field. At the plant, we built our gyms, and we have stretching and walking activities. 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. But he got too big. A woman named Lupe is standing above me on the wooden stairway that climbs to the front door of her trailer. His face is blank. Then one day, he was trying to find a marketing person and got a call from Lynda Sinay, who worked in advertising. The vibration here isnt quite as vehement. Theyre either working in the heat or hiding from the heat. Theyll take home $11 an hour for their labors. Boswell Company for 26 years and now advises the regions growers on water and land management issues. No ones going to get fired for bringing home 2,500 pounds of nuts an acre. At the time, I was heavy with state water but the state water had low allocations and I had no other water source over there (Dudley Ridge land in western Kings County), he told Henry. I park the car and walk in the direction of a scattering of buildings slapped together with stucco and corrugated tin.