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     I was just catching my breath last week from the news that Boswell had withdrawn their proposal for Yokohl Ranch when I heard that Mark Arax would be interviewed on KVPR.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

 

 

Eulogy Values

Published June 1, 2016 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     David Brooks, a columnist for the New York Times and a conservative commentator on PBS’s News Hour on Friday nights, gave a wonderful presentation in Fresno on May 10^th.  He was promoting his new book called “The Road to Character” which identifies two different value systems.  One he calls “resume” values (i.e., values that define professional success in this society,) and the other, “eulogy” values:  the things people say about you after you are dead and define you as a good person.

           

     “The argument in the book,” he told Fresno Bee reporter Tim Sheehan, “is that we spend a lot of time, especially in our educational system, on (developing) the resume virtues and not enough time on the eulogy (virtues) – are you a good person? – even though we know those are more important.”  He believes that “We’ve become a country that’s just really pleased with itself,” having become “a more narcissistic culture,” “over-politicized and under-moralized,” over the past half century.

           

     With the current level of political debate at the national level, it’s just a darned good time to be thinking about these distinctions.  The gap between these two values systems is where we find ourselves caught in this country.  When Donald Trump confided at the microphone that he was kinda hoping for the housing mortgage bubble to burst ‘way back in 2008, and then defended  himself when Democrats seized on that little revelation with “Hey, what am I supposed to do? I’m a businessman!” – he was trying to straddle that gap.  The fact that he normally stands with both feet on the businessman side apparently is still lost on his supporters.

           

     Or not. There are those who still believe that whatever is good for business is good for the country, that whatever trickles down is better than nothing, I guess.

           

     I believe in trickle up, which is always harder to defend, especially when resume values hold sway or are touted as the only ones that matter.  If we didn’t have to keep writing eulogies, we might forget the other system entirely.  But thankfully we do.  

           

     David Brooks may have been caught in that values gap recently when he wrote a story for the New York Times (republished May 19^th in the Bee) on the philanthropic contributions to the small Westside community of Lost Hills by land and water tycoons Lynda and Stewart Resnick of Paramount fame.  The Resnicks, both noticeably aging in the 2013 photo of them attending a community forum in that town, may be developing their own set of eulogy values for their bucket list.  (It should be noted that what they’re giving is just a drop in the bucket, so to speak: an infinitesimal percentage of their net worth.)  Brooks’ literary portrait of those contributions was sweet.  I hope it encourages the Resnicks to double or even triple their efforts.  

           

     But there is no way to offset the damage done to Lost Hills and myriad other Central Valley towns by the structure of political power and economic control created when one entity owns too much land.  You cannot offset the jobs lost in packinghouses from the plant closures and mechanization by Paramount (oops, sorry: Wonderful, Inc.)  You cannot offset the farming opportunities lost in citrus or nuts like pistachios and almonds; you can’t bring back the small pomegranate farmers they decimated several years ago when they thawed the frozen juice they’d been hoarding.  You can’t bring back the downtowns they destroyed when they sold off those communities’ water to southern California or pumped down the aquifers.  No amount of financial aid can offset the socio-political and economic damages inflicted by giant landholdings on communities. 

           

     The Resnics do not now, and probably never will wear Haloes, no matter how many dollars they drop on Lost Hills or how many other communities they attempt to rescue.  Like Donald Trump, they have one foot on each side of the resume/eulogy values gap, and when push comes to shove or some opportunity raises its snaky head, we’ll find them with both feet on the resume values side, not even blinking.

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Trudy Wischemann is editing a book of writings on Agriculture and the Common Good with Tulare Lake Basin geographer Bill Preston.  Thanks to Michele Hester and Mark Arax for their comments this week.  You can send your thoughts on rural philanthropy c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.