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     I was just catching my breath last week from the news that Boswell had withdrawn their proposal for Yokohl Ranch when I heard that Mark Arax would be interviewed on KVPR.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

 

 

Coming Back

Published Oct. 4, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     I was coming back from the Fresno airport last week when I ran into a pocket of despair.  Sometimes it takes a while to come back from hitting one of those.

     I took the long way home, the back roads angling through vineyards and orchards, alternating south, then east along the diagonal front of the Sierra foothills.  Section by section, mile after mile, there were signs of dissolution of the very web of our valley’s life.  Normally I am revived by this drive, encouraged by the sight of one fruit-farming family’s place after another.  But the families are disappearing, leaving trails of abandoned equipment and empty barns, houses removed leaving squares of bare ground behind.  The agricultural landscape of Fresno County’s Kings River fan is beginning to look like ours.

     I hadn’t realized how much the reshaping of our agricultural landscape has been depressing me until I saw the disease spreading north.  Some lines from a Tom Paxton song showed up: “Are you going away with no word of farewell?  Will there be not a trace left behind?”  Then the songwriter brings us home:  “Well, I could have loved you better, didn’t  mean to be unkind; that was the last thing on my mind.”

     My despair at the loss is amplified by knowing that my small attempts to prevent it have failed.  I don’t know what can be done to turn around the trends leading us to rural depopulation and cultural oblivion.  Here in the citrus belt the packinghouses are mechanizing right under our noses, eliminating 75% of the jobs that feed our towns, but nobody sees it coming.  The small farmers are being vanquished by Cuties and Halos.  The flow of incomes from the land have moved from trickling up to trickling down.  The costs of the so-called economies of scale will be borne more and more by our communities and countryside.  Lord.

     The only hope I find comes from the experience of some friends who worked in the Tulare Lake Basin restoring wetlands for migrating waterfowl.  Based in Alpaugh, where hope is a little hard to come by, they worked through BLM (where hope is also a little hard to come by) and built ponds on retired farmland with water purchased from Alpaugh I.D.  They had no way to know whether the provision of this habitat would help the declining numbers of birds, but they did it anyway.  In the first year there was a small increase, but each year thereafter, the increase was astounding.  “We had no idea the birds would come back so fast,” my friends said.

     You could call it an experience in loving better, in stopping being so unkind, even though the unkindness of eliminating bird habitat to plow soybean fields is totally accepted in this culture.  The acreage in new ponds was a tiny fraction of the habitat that once was there, but still, it helped beyond their wildest imaginings.  So it seems to me that we could love our lives here a little better, stop being so uncaring about the outcomes of these trends on our neighbors and our communities.  Perhaps they’ll come back faster than we can imagine - if we just try.

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Trudy Wischemann is a rural advocate who writes.  You can send her your small farmer sightings c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

Away from Home

Published in slightly edited form Sept. 6, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     I’ve been away from home for a week, visiting my brother in Dunsmuir, pop. 1,600.  My memories of this place are few, mostly as a stopover between Washington and California.  I’ve driven by it many times, and seen it once from an Amtrak window at night, draped in snow.  But Dunsmuir looks different this time, a place my brother calls home.

     The upper Sacramento River cuts through the town, having shaped the canyon whose steep sides are laced with curvy streets and antique buildings.   The main north-south railroad tracks also cut through town, bearing mostly freight trains.  Amtrak’s Coast Starlight slips through quietly twice a day, southbound then northbound, stopping briefly in the wee hours of the morning.

     My brother’s home is an old cabin on the far side of the river, nestled against the steep hillside on a small strip of flood plain.  It is also on the “wrong side of the tracks,” an expression from our mother’s era and place of birth.  Fires have taken some of the older homes; some have been replaced with expensive, upscale new construction.  But most of the houses are modest, built a few steps off the ground with steep-pitched metal roofs to shed snow, and sweet garden-wire or picket fences around tidy gardens.  It is an unadorned picture of simpler times.

     Life is simpler here in many ways, more difficult in others.  Things we take for granted in more populous parts of the state are indulgences here, like stores open after 5 pm or all-night gas stations.  Most medical services are located elsewhere and police cars are rare.  Neighbors have to look out for each other because there’s no one else.  

     From my brother’s porch, the sound of the river overrides most else.  It can be punctuated by a dog barking or the train horns blasting, followed by the ding-ding-ding of the crossing signal, the metallic whine of steel wheels on steel rails and gigantic diesel engines roaring.  But the rushing river always takes back the silence, more unrelenting than desert winds.

     Dunsmuir instantly felt like home to my brother when he arrived 12 years ago, and it did to me, too, when I got here last week.  Surrounded by green vegetation and abundant water, our memories of home in western Washington were tapped and revived.  The constant sense of urgency about desiccation, which I’ve had since I moved into the Central Valley, evaporated.  And the people here, who my brother instantly perceived as “real,” are also like those we lived among, making livings and homes from what’s locally available more than from corporate offerings and long-distance commutes.

      What Dunsmuir shares, unfortunately, with many of our valley towns, is its disconnection from its founding purpose:  to serve the people in primary production from the surrounding lands.  I’ve seen no logs on passing trains or trucks on I-5 as in the past, only milled lumber coming south from Canada.  The trains rarely stop.  Traffic from the highway pulls off to shop for antiques and artists’ wares, but leaves with groceries from the little IGA.   The money earned from logging the forests is long gone, and what comes from the land now is thinly spread.  What is left is a degree of priceless beauty that only the rich – and the poor – can afford.

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Trudy Wischemann is a homesick Valley writer on assignment in Heaven.  You can send her your ideas about home c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.