The FDA sent a warning letter, and Wonderful pledged to study the chlorine levels in the bathing tanks. We changed the culture of safety, and we think we can do the same with health, Anzaldo says. Selling the farm to migrant families has required Lynda to rebrand agriculture. Two strains of salmonella found in their pistachios had caused a multistate outbreak of illnesses. On a fog-drip night in January 1972, two men walked into my fathers empty bar with gloves on and shot him to death. The water is being taken from unsuspecting farmers in an irrigation district in Tulare County more than 40 miles away. The biggest farmer of them all is tearing out 10,000 acres because he doesnt have enough water to cover the nuts to harvest. Its gambling. In one orchard, half the trees are dying., I had traveled the fields of Wonderful from one end of western Kern to the other, looking for dying trees. Its still a mystery, Column: Artificial intelligence chatbots are spreading fast, but hype about them is spreading faster. The city of Los Angeles, by comparison, consumes 587,000 acre-feet. But he got too big. A van pulls up to the curb, and the door slides open. From the vaulted ceilings with gold-leaf moldings hung two blown-glass chandeliers. Resnick dipped into his savings from his job at a mental hospital and went in half on the machine. I cash them the same. The wall of Pacifico and 16-ounce cans of Bud is rebuilt daily. If only Eve had offered Adam a pomegranate instead of an apple, Lynda wrote, every day could have been a holiday.. Undoubtedly aided by Stewart's law degree, the Resnicks have also proven to be adept at fighting legal battles. Theyre our future, she says. The Spanish rice isnt rice but cauliflower made to look like rice. Nothing changes. When I crossed the border and found Lost Hills, there was nothing here, he says. Frankly, Im having too much fun to think about retiring., Even if he were inclined to wind down, he had no successor in mind. The State Water Project, for the first time in six years, delivers surplus flows. Stewart & Lynda Resnick - Forbes Already, Wonderful has bulldozed 8,000 to 10,000 acres of pomegranate trees over the past few years to send more water to its nuts. Ever since I was a kid, I have felt its pulla gravitational presence on the land and in my own story. Four tribes of Yokut lived along its shores. As it happened, just down the road, on the other side of the lake bottom, Resnick had captured his own body of water, the Kern Water Bank, and planted millions of nut trees on desert scrub. Everything but the turkey had come from his orchards. Selfo works 50 hours a week as an irrigator. She had recently divorced and wasnt about to settle for a life in Culver City. A plume of dust joins up with other plumes of dust until the sky over the valley turns sickly. Kevin Assemi demanded by email that Wonderful commit to paying the full bonus for 2019, and gave Wonderful until Sept. 4 to reply. Still, none of it would have happened without luck., What he and Lynda had done with the wretched pomegranate was another matter. All Rights Reserved. The bunches of chartreuse-tipped nuts hanging from antler branches never touch the ground. 4. Private User. Where gravity needs a boost, the pipes run atop wooden crates used to pack boxes of fruit. ("I can't make anyone cry in 15 seconds, but we can make them laugh," says Lynda, adding that 30-second ads in the Super Bowl were too expensive.). I was 16, and his packing house was my first job, a baptism into the money, money, money world of the men who grew fruit and the men who sold it. Its ads claimed Pom has beneficial effects on prostate cancer (Drink to prostate health), cardiovascular health and even erectile dysfunction. Other grantees have included Los Angeles Opera; P.S. But she cannot remember the last time she or Manuel or their children drank it. Another third-generation grandson, Scott, has his own real estate company; his SR Capital is currently developing a 19-floor luxury apartment building at West 21st Street. At age 81, hes gotten so big, he doesnt know how big. Wonderful said Monday that it has spent $5 million to remediate the property, including stabilizing the site to prevent erosion and planting 400 trees and 3,500 acorns on site.. 2007 Wonderful Pistachios Launches I dont know how Hershey did Hershey, Pennsylvania, but Lynda is present in every painted sunburst, every planted flower, every blade of grass. One of his frat brothers was a wealthy kid whose father ran a janitorial business. The water bank, which is a public-private partnership in which the Resnicks own a 57% stake, is a 32-square-mile recharge basinwhich looks like floodlands from the street that essentially stores up to 1.5 million acre-feet of water (or 500 billion gallons) underground. He guides me to the caf, and we grab our lunches from the buffet. Even so, Resnick says, he learned a lesson from the 2004 recall of 13 million pounds of the companys salmonella-tainted almonds: Dont fight the FDA. He says he doesnt feel sorry for Resnick. Lost Hills finally has something to be proud about. His second son is a psychiatrist. [2] Resnick and his wife, Lynda Resnick, bought The Franklin Mint in 1986 and sold it in 2006. It isnt going down because he wont let it go down. The land is turning to salt. Vicente Fernndez, the king of Ranchera music, is crooning to no one, but it wont be this way in 30 minutes, Hussein tells me. He can mix this private water with his leftover state water and ship it to at least one stranded neighbor who will pay the price. No luck. Every mogul, every movie star. It was true that agriculture had been selling state project water to cities for two decades. A bunch of trees are going dry, he says. It becomes scorn because they cant allow it to become pity or self-hatred. And then it hits me when I reach the road to Weedpatch, where my grandfathers story in Americaa poet on his hands and knees picking potatoesbegan. It wouldnt even make a couple of sections of his almonds. A member of the commission, on the eve of its demise, told me, Stewart wants to be a benevolent dictator. Days Inn or Motel 6. Not a single penny was put in that piggy bank.. 2023 Forbes Media LLC. If she has her way, they will go to college, too. Wonderful Co.s self-image as an avatar of corporate social responsibility and sustainable agriculture took a hit in 2016, when it was found to have bulldozed part of an oak forest near Paso Robles, in the heart of Californias Central Coast wine country, to make room for new grape plantings for Justin Vineyards, which Wonderful acquired in 2010. My father, born in a vineyard outside Fresno, was a raisin grower before he became a bar owner. You just dont do that to the Earth. Inside, a Wonderful media specialist sees that Resnick needs to be rescued. Carls Jr., Subway, McDonalds, Wendys, Loves, or Arbys. Resnick has saved the front seat for me. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) is set to headline an event hosted by the centrist group No Labels in New Hampshire on Monday, alarming Democrats who fear a Manchin presidential candidacy could cost them control of the White House and Senate. Now theres something here. Already, the high school is filled with hundreds of students bused in from farmworker towns that are among the poorest communities in the West. This is the route my grandfather, one of a legion of fruit tramps, took as he drifted from farm to farm in the 1920s picking crops. This is a forgotten community. The bureau happened to be my house in northwest Fresno. The piece, I was told, had left Lynda embarrassed and fuming. The bells in the churches pealed, and out came the villagers with their scythes and axes, believing they had found the reason for their poverty. I take out my cellphone and swipe across Google Maps. The Wonderful Company, the corporate arm of Beverly Hills billionaires Stewart and Lynda Resnick, promotes itself incessantly as an exemplar of social responsibility and a guardian of sustainable agriculture. The Iranian immigrant family is known there as major home builders, downtown redevelopers, philanthropists and entrepreneurs, as well as growers. The choices for the Kern farmer now come down to two: He can reach deep into his pocket and buy high-priced water from an irrigation district with surplus supplies. Vidovich didnt have to wait long for a buyer to come calling. Still, he was starting to think about his legacy, and thats why he finally agreed to meet with me. Angelica, one of four sisters, runs the restaurant. America's Nuttiest Billionaire Couple: Amid Drought, Stewart And Lynda Resnick Are Richer Than Ever. Theyre now building an $80 million charter-school complex in Delano, just down the road from Cesar Chavez High. I get out of the car and walk down an embankment. Where the pipes butt up against Twisselman Road, a more clever bit of engineering is required. Fresh from a shower, a red Kabbalah string tied around his wrist and a multihued pair of socks covering his feet, he welcomed me. He used to work for the Resnicks before Stewart put him in charge of the district. Nowhere to turn, I turn back around and roll down my window. Altogether the company has about $5 billion in sales, and the Resnicks, who split their time between Beverly Hills and Aspen, are now worth a combined $8 billion. Ah, he says, so youre the one whos been snooping around. She grabs him by the wrist, and they make a beeline for the convention hall door. One out of eight has diabetes. The food is more. As an agricultural company, we are deeply committed to protecting and conserving our natural resources, it says right there on its website. In addition to drip irrigation systems now used on all their farms, they have spent $22 million on solar energy networks and $41 million on fuel-cell research and implementation to power their plants and facilities more cost effectively. That company led to another company, and he soon owned half the commercial alarm accounts in Los Angeles. Lets meet again in two weeks, he said. Rethink Your Drink is the latest slogan. It took time for the wax to dry. He packed his bags and left his wife and kids. The image of water moves on and on through miles of western Kern. Rather, they say, theyre harvesting health and happiness around the world through our iconic consumer brands. Their crops arent crops but heart-healthy snacks and life-extending elixirs. Im driving too fast for the ruts in the road. He couldn't miss it when, for several. Currently, Stewart Resnick works as a Co-Founder, Chairman & President at The Wonderful Company. The combination has proved unstoppable. The brick-hard ground cant be bought. Thats native vegetation and a habitat for wildlife. spouse. Its known as a census-designated place, which is another way of saying that Kern County has every reason to neglect it. Here there are rows upon rows of green--some 70,000 lush acres of water-hungry pistachio and almond trees. Assets like this that were once in public control and now are in private control need to be returned to the public, Nagy says. It was Lynda who teamed up with the USDA to develop 21 new single-family homes and 60 new townhouses on a couple of acres of almonds that Wonderful tore out. Right there in the big canal of the Dudley Ridge Water District. Water levels dropped further as the drought raged on. The Assemis told Wonderful on Sept. 4 that they were prepared to deliver their 2019 pistachios in the coming days, but also suggested that if they didnt receive written assurance that Wonderful would pay the full price, including the bonus, theyd sell the nuts elsewhere. RESNICK, STEWART - Hudson Reporter A balancing of books in an office in the city has decided that this orchard and others around it, covered by too little water, can go. I follow him inside to a long line of workers that ends at a plastic window where Hussein sits on the other side, working the cash register like a teller at a race track. The couple gave a $25 million to The Milken Institute, establishing the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Center for Public Health. I park the car and walk in the direction of a scattering of buildings slapped together with stucco and corrugated tin. The softballs will go to market as whole fruit or as seed pods in a package. He has painted the interior and put down two new patterns of linoleum, one to mark the living room and the other to mark the kitchen. She wanted to tell the story of the pomegranate, he told me with a touch of sarcasm. I had not seen any. The big concern is if theres a storm event, how will that change the environment, he says. The Kings is bone-dry as usual. At Highland Park High, he excelled in math and struggled in English. The leathery skin on the fruit has turned a nice orange-red. But his egotheres no controlling that., Resnick had heard it all before. The stacks of bottles gave him no answer. It is the ditch up the road, the one that carries no water, that is filled with old mattresses and spent appliances. Well, maybe just a little guilt, but thats Jewish. He said the prod for all their giving in Lost Hills happened in Aspen, of all places. He lives down the road in Wasco, the Rose Capital of America, though the roses, too, have turned to nuts. This is the Lynda who now endeavors to see farmhands as something more than workers. Now Lynda herself stands before us, a single light over her head. When the Depression struck, his parents migrated to Middlebush, New Jersey, where they bought a few trucks and peddled coffee and pots and pans. Most everything that can be touched in this corner of California belongs to Wonderful. To make ends meet, he started a janitorial business while in college. Unlike many other billionaires, they could poke fun at themselves. Thats an injustice of unparalleled proportion.. Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information, a lawsuit the Assemis filed earlier this month, Sen. Dianne Feinsteins drought relief bill needs closer scrutiny, the water is shipped 5,500 miles from a Pacific island country, health claims so extravagant, they drew a complaint from the Federal Trade Commission, routinely distorted the scientific record., Assemis are no slouches when it comes to political heft, Column: Billionaire Resnicks Justin Vineyards bulldozes forest of old oaks, sparking uproar, Disneyland workers could get a pay hike to nearly $20 an hour after living-wage win, California lawmakers want answers after exit of Black Hollywood female executives, Fast-food workers rally as California lawmakers hold controversial franchise liability bill, A heat wave will cook your EVs battery, if you let it, Created in California: How Dr. Bronners became the soap for every subculture, Christopher Nolan goes deep on Oppenheimer, his most extreme film to date, Is Mexico City getting too cool for its own good?