I was just catching my breath last week from the news that Boswell had withdrawn their proposal for Yokohl Ranch when I heard that Mark Arax would be interviewed on KVPR. The subject was his article “A Kingdom from Dust” on Stewart and Lynda Resnick’s operations just published Jan. 31st in the California Sunday Magazine (https://story.californiasunday.com/resnick-a-kingdom-from-dust).
Once known as Paramount Farms,
renamed to Wonderful, Inc., these operations now exceed those once farmed by
Boswell. Although there’s a difference
in levels and kinds of philanthropy, like the clinics and schools being built
in Lost Hills and Delano, there’s great similarity to the Boswell empire in
control over water and land, which we learned in Arax and Wartzman’s The
King of California: J.G. Boswell and
the Making of a Secret American Empire (2003.) The Resnick article just published is also
part of a forthcoming book by Arax, hopefully to be released next year.
Getting this Resnick story now
rather than later, however, may help us face the need to take back the
decisions over land and water that belong in the public’s sphere. “Stewart Resnick is the biggest farmer in the
United States,” Arax wrote early in the piece, “a fact he has tried to keep
hidden while he has shaped what we eat, transformed California’s landscape, and
ruled entire towns.” Arax also writes of Stewart’s partnership with his wife, Lynda, as unique and portentious. With their influence over the entire citrus
industry, we who live in the Sun-Gazette’s readership sphere are already
feeling the effects in lost navel markets and acres of replants to mandarins no
longer packed in our towns.
Wonderful’s crop production through
the drought was remarkably high, a fact that led Arax to track down their water
supply. One thing he discovered was a
“private, off-the-books pipeline” that was taking water “from unsuspecting
farmers in an irrigation district in Tulare County 40 miles away.” Learning that a land developer from Santa
Clara Valley named John Vidovich was the wheeler for that water provides clues
about what we’ll need to prevent in the future.
Writing about the Wonderful Citrus
complex sited along Hwy 99 just south of the Tulare/Kern county line, “with its
four-story storage building designed in the shape of an almighty box of Halo
mandarins, (the complex was) conceived by Lynda, cost one fortune to build and
a second fortune to light up. I doubt
the Resnicks have any idea,” Arax continued, “of the fester that eats at this
place, the shame piled on shame.” I
think one layer of that shame is that we seem unable to bootstrap our public
power high enough to make these guys realize who they’re taking from and how
they’re damaging the future they’re trying to make with their charitable
contributions in the communities of Lost Hills and Delano.
This is just a taste of what’s
available in Mark’s article. If you’re
interested in the future of this part of the Valley, it’s worth starting here –
and now.
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Trudy
Wischemann is a rural community researcher who writes. You can send her your thoughts on the Big
Boys c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a
comment below.
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