Beyond Boswell

Published Feb. 21, 2018 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     I was just catching my breath last week from the news that Boswell had withdrawn their proposal for Yokohl Ranch when I heard that Mark Arax would be interviewed on KVPR.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. 31^st 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.

 

 

The Right to Labor

Published Sept. 7, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     High clouds dim the heat and light this Labor Day morning as I sit down to write, a good day for reflection.  I am celebrating this holiday by exerting my right to labor, even though it is unpaid.  Writing is what I do.

     Many people are celebrating this day by exerting their right to not labor.  On my brief jaunt between Exeter and Lindsay this morning I saw bicyclists coming down off Rocky Hill, exhilarated by their exertions.  Others will celebrate this right to not work by going shopping, cashing in on the Labor Day sales, which have wiped out the right to not work for hundreds of thousands of retail employees who might rather be up at the lake with their friends or attending backyard barbecues.  Thanks to our cultural tendency to celebrate too much, hundreds of thousands of service employees like nurses, EMT’s, rangers and police must also clock in.  Some will even get paid extra for it.

     On my quick trip this morning I saw many others exerting their right to work:  a farmer sitting in his pickup while running furrows in an old orange grove; a farmworker towing a spray rig through rows of citrus; an irrigator on a Kawasaki checking valves in baby mandarins.  A man I know is out near Ivanhoe installing a Blue-Tooth in a harvesting rig for a large walnut grower whose family has been working all weekend getting ready for the shakers.  Walnut growers all over our region are doing the same, their families and employees working overtime.  In farming the days are determined by the progress of the crops, not the calendar.  It’s part of the beauty of farming, if occasionally also part of the grief.

     But mostly my mind is contemplating the larger issue of the right to labor at all.  I started this weekend being interviewed on KFCF’s radio program “Down on the Farm” with Tom Willey.  Tom is an organic farmer in Madera who’s been laboring to feed folks decent food for 40 years, as well as generating programs that promote the small farmer and sustainable agriculture.  For the interview I was joined by Dan O’Connell, a Ph.D. from Cornell who’s worked up farmland conservation easements for Sequoia Riverlands Trust and American Farmland Trust for years and helped start Fresno’s Food Commons.  Dan has organized a speakers series on sustainable ag this fall at the Reedley Peace Center, and the speakers include some of the most important academics and community organizers who have contributed to questions of social justice and environmental quality in our food system for the last 80 years.  The interview with these two men tied up many threads and was mind-enhancing. 

     Then, reading Mark Arax’s phenomenal essay “Phantoms in the fields” in yesterday’s Fresno Bee, the important link between land and the right to labor became clear.  Mark’s story went beyond journalism, portraying the portion of the food system we inhabit locally in our neighborhoods as well as our fields, our politics as well as our plantings. What I saw in his verbal painting was how the right to labor, to earn a living, is determined by the ownership of land.  It is a terrible irony that right now, as some celebrate last week’s legislation increasing the number of hours of overtime pay farm laborers can now receive, their jobs are being eliminated by farmers’ shifts in crops from raisins to almonds, which is, essentially, a decision to mechanize.  No crop is free of this shift, not even olives. Both in the fields and the packinghouses, the landowners’ race is on to replace men and women with machines.

     Perhaps if we understood the “flood” of immigrants from Mexico and points south as being driven by dispossession from land on which people have labored for centuries, people coming here to exert their right to labor somehow, some way, we might seek different solutions.  Until then, building a wall is just an idea for Humpty Trumpty to sit on and make himself feel king-like.  Keep watch for the inevitable.

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Trudy Wischemann is a rural researcher who writes.  Thanks to Perla Soria for her educated interest in these issues.  Send your labor rights ideas c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Beating the Devil

Published Nov.19, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     This summer I learned a song that has become my flagship:  Kris Kristofferson’s “To Beat the Devil.”


     I didn’t know then where the song would carry me, but one of the ports has been resigning from my job at RN Market.  For five summers and four winters I have served this community, for better and for worse, at Checkstand One.  I am grateful for all I’ve learned about our people and for the friendships I’ve gained with customers and co-workers.  To those I have aggravated or hurt in some way, I humbly apologize for taking out on you the normal hardships of employment.


     But there was another source of aggravation I didn’t see amongst the cans of hominy and cases of beer.  I didn’t know I was wrestling an angel in disguise as the devil.  That devil is one every artist has to stare down:  the despair of ever being heard.  With my work on land, through research and essays, photographs and poems, I’ve trumped that guy over and over again, but he always comes back for more.  When I signed on at RN, I was taking a break from fighting - or so I thought - while waiting for the opportunity ship to dock.


     With the emergence of the West of West Center, celebrated last week in Fresno, I think that time has arrived.  There was something new in the mix of people who attended the opening/book signing.  One friend said it felt like being in an estuary, that place where rivers meet and mix with saltier water from the ocean, a new environment for organisms from both sides of the salt/fresh water divide.  Estuaries are very productive ecological zones, and I think Mark Arax’s intuitions about pooling people from both sides of another kind of divide - the old wealth of the Valley and the longstanding critics of inequality - are going to be fertile, if also delicate.


     Last week, while suffering round two of the crud, I sat and read an article in the July/August Smithsonian a dear friend had sent me.  The article described the current economic devastation in the rural South, as overwhelming to residents as it is baffling to onlookers from outside: the loss of agricultural jobs to mechanization, the loss of industry to Mexico and China, the highways bypassing small towns linking burgeoning urban centers.


     It also mentioned the havens some of these small rural places have become for people who decide not to accept the inhuman conditions in urban areas, and ended with a brief description of a program in Arkansas helping people get back on the land where they can make a living from it as well as a life on it.  That ending was a brief reprieve from the description of economic despair that preceded it, conditions not unrelated to our own.


     “The devil haunts a hungry man,” sings Kristofferson near the conclusion of “To Beat the Devil.”  “If you don’t want to join him, you got to beat him.”  He pauses just long enough for the meaning to sink in, about wrestling that angel in disguise.  Then he breaks loose with his re-write of the devil’s despair song:


     “And you still can hear me singing to those people who don’t listen to the things that I am sayin’, prayin’ someone’s gonna hear.  And I’ll prob’ly die explainin’ how those things that they complain about are things they could be changin’, hoping someone’s gonna care...”


     See you around town!

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer who has returned to self-unemployment status.  You can send your devil-beating recipes to her c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

 

 

Hello West of West

Published Nov. 12, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Sunday’s Bee carried a long story about Mark Arax’s new venture, West of West Center, which will “launch” formally this Thursday at the Fresno Art Museum.  Though it’s been a long time coming, the timing seems perfect in my mind.


     Arax is one of this valley’s treasures, passionate about our future as well as our history.  Those of us who know and admire him like to think of him as fearless in this regard, and that spirit is contagious.  His first book, about trying to find his father’s murderer, was just a taste of his courage.  When he and co-author Rick Wartzman lifted the lid on the making of the J.G. Boswell empire with The King of California, they liberated the entire valley from the self-imposed gag order we suffered, never saying anything negative about Boswell’s power. 


     Arax’s third book, West of the West: Dreamers, Believers, Builders, and Killers in the Golden State (2009), gives us a taste of what’s coming with this new Center.  The book’s flap explains the title: “Teddy Roosevelt once exclaimed ‘When I am in California, I am not in the West.  I am west of the West.’”  Arax lovingly, but unblinkingly, tells us why that is still true.


     The idea for West of West Center developed organically, starting with a pile of irreplaceable tape recordings of interviews of both the rich and famous and down and out from his long years as a journalist.  The need to digitize these tapes in order to preserve them led to the idea of a website where the  public would have access to them.  Last year, the opportunity to develop an affiliation with UC Merced to become a centrally-located  repository, capped the idea of making it a Center.  It’s a Center in the right sense of the word:  half museum, half training ground for telling this valley’s stories truthfully.


     The venture includes a non-profit publishing house, West of West Books. Not believing that all rich people are greedy, suspicious and hoarding, Arax designed the publishing effort to be supportive of telling the stories of wealthy families in ways that the proceeds and contributions could underwrite the stories of the non-wealthy as well.  The first book, which will be featured Thursday at the Fresno Art Museum event, is Beyond Luck:  The Improbable Rise of the Berry Fortune Across a Western Century, written by Betsy Lumbye, former executive editor of the Fresno Bee.  “You could say he found his luck digging,” wrote Bee writer Donald Munro in Sunday’s story, “- first irrigation ditches in the arid Valley, then a fortune in gold in the remote Yukon, and then a second fortune in oil in the Taft area.”  The grand-nephew of Clarence Berry, who inherited some of this family’s wealth, helped bring this story to light.  It promises to be very interesting.


     One mark of Arax’s courage, however, is that he wants to publish a book of writings on land and water that I have been editing for over 20 years, looking for a publisher.  It won’t make money, which a regular publisher requires, and it could make trouble, which is why I’ve been sitting on this project so long.  But with the drought and the passage of the water bond - another watershed in this state’s life - the need for its contents is greater than ever before.


     As they say, timing is everything.

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Trudy Wischemann is a hopeful writer and editor who lives in the Lewis Creek watershed of Tulare County.  You can send her your watershed life stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.