Tijerina, a year-old former cotton picker and veteran school board member, apologized for the superintendent—he must have had another important meeting—and for the fact that her own voice was faint; she had cancer. The Resnicks have amassed this empire by following a simple agricultural precept: Crops need water. Last year, the Resnicks rebranded all their holdings as the Wonderful Company to highlight their focus on healthy products and philanthropy.
We are deeply committed to doing our part to build a better world and inspiring others to do the same. She brushes off any notion that Resnick is in the business of charity for the sake of publicity. In a state of land grabs and Hollywood mythmaking, the Resnicks are well cast as the perfect protagonists.
Its cavernous reception hall is bedecked with blown-glass chandeliers, its windows draped with Fortuny curtains, and its drawing room adorned with a life-size statue of Napoleon so heavy that the basement ceiling had to be reinforced to bear its weight. The Resnicks purchased and tore down three adjacent houses to make room for a space parking lot and half an acre of lawn.
The estate employs at least seven full-time attendants. A petite year-old, Lynda has a coiffure of upswept ringlets and a coy smile. In conversation, she reminded me of my own charming and crafty Jewish grandmother, a woman adept at calling bluffs at the poker table while bluffing you back.
Growing up in Philadelphia in the s, Lynda performed on a TV variety show sponsored by an automat. Though wealthy enough to afford two Rolls-Royces and a zip code, he refused to pay for Lynda to attend art school, so she found work in a dress shop, where she tried her hand at creating ads for the store. She was struggling to keep things afloat. Around that time, Lynda started dating Anthony Russo, who worked at a think tank with military analyst Daniel Ellsberg.
The Edward Snowden of his day, Ellsberg was later prosecuted for leaking Pentagon documents about the Vietnam War to the press. A few years later, Lynda met Stewart Resnick.
Born in Highland Park, New Jersey, the son of a Yiddish-speaking Ukrainian bartender, Stewart paid his way through UCLA by working as a janitor and went on to found White Glove Building Maintenance, which quickly grew to 1, employees and made him his first million before he graduated from law school in In , they acquired the Franklin Mint, which at the time mainly sold commemorative coins and medallions. Lynda expanded into jewelry, dolls, and precision model cars.
The Resnicks expanded into agriculture in , mostly as a hedge against inflation. Along the way, Paramount acquired acres of pomegranate orchards. With all this newfound wealth, the Resnicks have ratcheted up their philanthropic profile.
But in the Resnicks had an encounter at a dinner party that Lynda says fundamentally changed her approach to philanthropy. What are you doing about it? When she retold the story onstage at the Aspen Ideas Festival , Resnick stopped short of spelling out exactly what she thought her husband was alluding to. Nor would she elaborate when I asked her about it. That would be the most meaningful. The YouTube clip shows her being taunted repeatedly before turning to douse the camera-wielding scold with her hose.
And now that people have to cut back on their water, all of a sudden it has become important. The aqueduct was built with tax money, yes? The aqueduct brings the water, yes? So everybody should have it, right? But this is water for Mr. Not the people. Resnick are the same checks they bring in for years.
I cash them the same. Nothing changes. Big fish eat the small fish here. Anything else I can help you with? He seems in a hurry. He guides me back into the main store with its displays of fresh fruit and vegetables, meats, cold cuts, and baked goods. The wall of Pacifico and ounce cans of Bud is rebuilt daily. I sit in my car and wait in the parking lot.
They arrive in Chevy trucks and Dodge vans and spill out in groups of four or five under the sweat-stained hats of the 49ers, Penn State, and the Yankees. Each face wears its own weary. The year-olds look like year-olds; the year-olds, like year-olds; the year-olds, like year-olds.
Or at least this is what I can glean through the car window. I grab my notebook and walk up to one of the vans. Inside sits a young man named Pablo. The oldest of five children, he came from Mexico when he was He had no papers, like so many others, just an image of what this side of the border looked like. When he was told there were fields upon fields, he did not believe there could be this many fields.
That was eight or nine years ago. He works year-round for Wonderful. Pablo prunes and irrigates the almond and pistachio trees and applies the chemicals that cannot be applied by helicopter. She is here and there, but I have never seen her up close. She owns this place. Most everything that can be touched in this corner of California belongs to Wonderful.
All but a handful come from Mexico. In the Wonderful fields, he tells me, at least 80 percent of the workers carry no documents or documents that are not real.
Rather, it is the authority vested in Wonderful that counts. 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. Lynda built sidewalks and storm drains, the new park and community center, and repaved the roads. He has come to El Toro Loco to cash his check and buy some beer.
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. On the way out of the market, Pablo buys a case of Pacifico.
The Sotos made a name for themselves in Lost Hills by taking their taco trucks into the agricultural fields. Angelica, one of four sisters, runs the restaurant. Lynda assisted her with the design and color scheme but otherwise has remained hands-off. So far, Lynda has shown only patience. A restaurant built by Wonderful for the purpose of making the company town look better from the roadside may enjoy a more forgiving bottom line than, say, the Subway up the road.
The grass is a color green on the verge of blue, and the cutouts for trees are razor etched. The 5. Even the community water tank is painted baby blue with a big sunflower. On the north end sits the Wonderful Soccer Field with its all-weather track, stadium lights, artificial turf, and giant yellow sunburst embossed at midfield.
The believer and the skeptic do their tussle inside my head. This is a park for the people, to give them a break from their hard lives.
Lost Hills finally has something to be proud about. This is an offering of cake handed down from king and queen to serfs. It is one more way to extend the brand. Each square-mile section is divided into blocks, and each block counts a precise number of rows. He turns out to be a kindly religious man whose short hair is dyed the black of shoe polish. Surely, no one does this better than Wonderful? He explains that Wonderful has grown too big to hassle such precision. Let the smaller grower walk among his trees and farm by the row.
Fussing with one input or another, he can produce 3, pounds of nuts an acre. Wonderful, by contrast, shoots for the middle. No picking of crop agitates the earth like the picking of almonds and pistachios. A plume of dust joins up with other plumes of dust until the sky over the valley turns sickly. By the eighth day of harvest, the sun is gone. Not that long ago, we used to time our sinus infections by the immense cloud of defoliants sprayed on the cotton fields at the end of Indian summer.
All this stirring up is a consequence of mechanization. Wages that used to go to workers stay in the pocket of the nut growers. Maybe not since the wheat barons has the income disparity between farmer and farmworker been greater. Growers a tenth the size of Resnick flee the dust in their Ferraris to their second houses in Carmel.
I follow one of the engines of harvest as it rolls into an orchard like a tank. Giant pincers manned by a single worker grab the tree by the throat and start shaking. For the next two or three seconds, the almonds pour down like hail. The vibration is a stunning piece of violence to behold. It moves in a wave from trunk to limb to nut and back down to earth. The jolt and shudder would tear out the roots of a lesser species. When the clamps let go of the trunk, 8, almonds, green outer shells wilted and partly opened, the meat inside a wooden womb, lie scattered on the flat dry earth.
The rain of almonds has moved on to the next tree. Once each tree has been shaken, the nuts are left on the ground for a few days to dry. I walk to another part of the orchard and watch phase two. In a swirl of dust, a worker atop a different machine is blowing the almonds from their spot beneath the trees to the middle of the row.
I then move to the far side of the orchard, where another worker, riding a huge mower, is kicking up an even bigger cloud of dust. He maneuvers down the middle of the row, sweeps up the dried almonds, and throws them into a catcher. The contents of each catcher, pounds of almond meat, are placed on a conveyor 20 feet high and dumped into a big-rig hauler for transport to the Wonderful processing plant.
All told, nine men operating five machines will pick clean this orchard over the next four weeks. And how will the Resnicks fare? Each tree produces 22 pounds of nuts. In the city of trees, I find a paved road with speed bumps that takes me to the harvest of pistachios. The bunches of chartreuse-tipped nuts hanging from antler branches never touch the ground.
Two men sit inside separate cabins of a small tractor with pincers on one side and a catcher on the other. One man drives and shakes the tree while the other man makes sure the clusters fall into the butterfly opening of the receiver. As the nuts pour down onto the roof of the catcher, the operator shifts the trough so that it becomes a conveyor belt. The continuous rattle feeds the nuts into a series of bins on the backside of the tractor.
Unlike the almond, the pistachio is moist and combustible. The nut must be hurried from bin to truck to processing plant to keep it from discoloring. All told, 36 men operating six machines will harvest the orchard in six days. Each tree produces 38 pounds of nuts. The pistachio trees in Wonderful number 6 million.
The truck driver hits the wide open of Highway 33 and traces the serpentine of the aqueduct. The load will translate into 18, pounds of finished nuts in a matter of days. California growers, in the grip of drought, have produced million pounds of the green nut.
This is where the pistachios, truckloads a day, 50 days of harvest, come to be weighed, washed, peeled, dried, gassed, sorted, salted, roasted, packaged, and shipped out to the world. No whistle shouts mealtime in the modern-day company town. Sugar kills, she tells them. It takes a life every six seconds. What spikes blood sugar more than a can of Coke? A flour tortilla. Eat a corn tortilla instead, she urges. His father worked as a truck driver, transporting crops to the city.
Anzaldo grew up in Bakersfield and attended a Catholic high school where he played football and basketball. For college, he picked California Polytechnic in San Luis Obispo over the hill and majored in agriculture business. The Resnicks brought him aboard in , and now he works alongside Lynda and consults daily with the company chef. Five years ago, they decided to get rid of the nacho chips, french fries, and soft drinks. The pizza dough is cauliflower, too. Everything about our physical selves, Lynda believes, begins in our guts.
To change the microbial life in our digestive tracts and reduce inflammation that leads to disease, we have to reintroduce fermented foods into our diet. If the workers doubt the benefit of the enzymes from apple cider vinegar, video banners stream a continuous message of bad food habits to be broken and body mass indexes to be measured and met.
To manage the disease. That still leaves the majority of the workforce beyond his cajole. I had seen what J. Boswell had done for the town of Corcoran. What the Resnicks were doing for Lost Hills, though, was a level of philanthropy I had never witnessed in the valley.
They were hardly the first rich people to use patronage to try to wheedle a citizenry toward their idea of a better life. This was Lost Hills, where the people are dependent on the Resnicks from cradle to grave.
As a second-generation Mexican American, Anzaldo says he knows the powerful clench of fast food and sugar among his own family. Being healthy is a choice. Have we gone too far? During paid breaks, they do their 15 minutes of Zumba, take a walk along a designated path, and munch on the free fruits and veggies put out for them. Inside, a trainer watches over a line of treadmills, elliptical machines, and stationary bikes. On the whiteboard in front of the weights, the big boys list their totals.
In the maroon of sundown, I follow the workers back to Lost Hills. Their houses made from railroad boxcars have been painted purple, blue, yellow, and gold. The colors turn brilliant in the light made spectacular by the particles of dust. Down a rutted road, trailers with foundations dressed in plywood back up against an orchard. The people here have traveled too far. The junk scattered about could be a lot worse. It is the ditch up the road, the one that carries no water, that is filled with old mattresses and spent appliances.
Twine strung trailer to trailer hangs with the laundry of fathers, mothers, and children. Here and there a mulberry tree, its canopy pruned back, breaks up the red-smeared sky. A woman named Lupe is standing above me on the wooden stairway that climbs to the front door of her trailer. She is small with lively brown eyes and a sweet but confident voice.
Her husband, Manuel, will awaken in 30 minutes to prepare for his night shift. Under lights, he prunes, plows, and irrigates the almonds. Lupe and Manuel, like many of the residents, grew up next to each other in a pueblo called San Antonio deep in the state of Guerrero, a mountainous region of dramatic beauty.
They were married only a short time when Manuel decided to cross the border almost 20 years ago. He worked as a gardener in Los Angeles and then heard about the almond trees on the other side of the mountain where the living was so much cheaper. She remembers handing the boy to her sister-in-law, who carried phony papers, and watching them cross by bridge into California. Because Lupe had no papers, she followed the coyote for many more miles until they reached a steep pass.
Lucky for her that the young man was kind. Before he left her to cross alone, he gave her soda, water, chips, and Cheetos. The baby is now a year-old student at Bakersfield College.
Lupe gave birth to two daughters, U. If she has her way, they will go to college, too. More than a dozen family members have followed Lupe and Manuel to Lost Hills. One cousin arrived only last week. A portion of his wages will be set aside each month to pay down the debt. It takes a lot of work to get ahead. He spends much of his off hours fixing it up. 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.
The ceiling, all sheetrock and spackling, remains a work in progress. Lupe excuses herself to prepare dinner. The bowls on her kitchen table are filled with grapes, berries, bananas, and red and green bell peppers. She washes two kinds of lettuce and cuts up fresh papaya to mix into a salad. I notice she keeps the water running for a long time. The family takes showers in it, and she washes their laundry in it, and if she runs the water long enough, she will use it to wash her vegetables and cook her rice and potatoes.
But she cannot remember the last time she or Manuel or their children drank it. The water is filtered for arsenic, boron, and other salts, and the monthly tests show no violation of state or federal standards. Lupe says no one in her family, and none of her friends living in the trailer park or on the other side of town, drinks the water that comes out of the pipe.
In the kitchen corner, cases of bottled water are stacked halfway up the wall. Her brother-in-law was killed recently in a car crash along Highway He was headed to the fields at the same time that another farmworker, drunk on beer, was coming home from the fields.
The sober man died. What to give a grieving widow and her five children in Lost Hills but drinking water? They were farmers back in San Antonio, growing lettuce, cilantro, and radishes on a small plot of land. Then the drug cartels took over the countryside and planted poppies. One day, gunmen mowed down residents with AKs and threw grenades at the church filled with parishioners. He had left for the cornfields a few minutes before the killings. That was four years ago.
The relatives try not to press them, but the arrangement still feels like a form of indentured servitude. Selfo works 50 hours a week as an irrigator. The food is more. He wonders what agriculture will look like in western Kern in ten years. In one orchard, half the trees are dying. I had not seen any. Lupe and I walk to the far side of the trailer park to find Gustavo. Lupe knocks on his door, and he invites us in.
The room smells of Vicks VapoRub. A cross of Jesus hangs from the bedpost. I ask him how the drought has affected Wonderful. He says his bosses have been instructing him to cut the water each irrigation. There are plans, crazy as it sounds, to take out 10, acres of almonds. When the rain returns, some of the ground will be replanted in pistachios, a tree that can better withstand drought.
The next day, I drive to a spot a few miles beyond the trailer park where the county road dead-ends in a pomegranate orchard, or what used to be a pomegranate orchard before a Caterpillar came crashing through. Every last tree has been torn out of the ground. Thousands of Wonderful acres lay bare.
The Federal Trade Commission found Wonderful guilty of false advertising and ordered the Resnicks to stop claiming that POM cured heart disease and erectile dysfunction.
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. Already, Wonderful has bulldozed 8, to 10, acres of pomegranate trees over the past few years to send more water to its nuts.
Each mound is fed into an even bigger machine whose teeth pulverize the trees and make sawdust. I park the car and walk across the barren rows.
Here and there my boots crunch down on the dried remains of pomegranates that look like small pieces of scat dropped by a coyote. Plastic drip-irrigation lines stick out of the ground at wrong angles. Tender sprouts poke out of the dry soil, and I bend down to feel their prickle.
A giant pistachio nut flashes on the big screen. It cracks open and out pops the head shot of Stewart Resnick in a pistachio green tie. When he materializes onstage, he is wearing narrow black jeans, a black mock turtleneck, and a dark jacket. Two strains of salmonella found in their pistachios had caused a multistate outbreak of illnesses. The FDA sent a warning letter, and Wonderful pledged to study the chlorine levels in the bathing tanks.
As far as the company can tell, no active salmonella has ever traced back to the plant. Domestic sales are up 42 percent over the past eight years, but foreign sales have stalled. He blames Iran. Since international sanctions were lifted five years earlier, Iran has been crowding the market with its more buttery-tasting pistachios.
They rely only on rain, which concentrates the flavorful oils. China, for one, prefers the Iranian pistachio. Iranian pistachios show up in Tel Aviv as nuts from Turkey. What market share has been lost in Asia and the Middle East, the company is looking to get back in Mexico with its spicy Latin line of nuts. For years, agriculture has been given a wide berth when it comes to monopolistic practices. She seems a little nervous waiting in the wings.
About five years ago, Lynda started our community development organization in Lost Hills, and the journey has been an amazing one. We produced a short documentary film. We hope you enjoy Finding Lost Hills. The minute film opens with a shot of swirling dust. This was Lost Hills before Lynda got involved. It took time to gain the respect of the people, and I was afraid. What if I failed? It was good for the bottom line. Because the more you invested in your employees and their communities, the more productive they became.
The film ends with the laughter of kids playing inside the giant sunburst at the center of the soccer field. The room full of growers applauds. I applaud, too. John Gibler, a freelance journalist, found Lost Hills a year before Lynda. His account appeared in the Earth Island Journal , a small environmental quarterly out of Berkeley.
Somehow, it made its way to Lynda. And you know why? Because it is a community of all Hispanics. The piece, I was told, had left Lynda embarrassed and fuming. It must have wounded all the more because she and Stewart thought of themselves as progressive Democrats. Over the years, they had donated large sums of money to political campaigns, and some of it went to Republicans who had pledged to prop up California agriculture. This was how a billionaire who needed more water did politics.
At the core, though, the Resnicks were still moved by the duty of social justice, not just as traditional liberals but as secular Jews.
In the summer of , he and Lynda attended a dinner lecture by Harvard political philosophy professor Michael Sandel about the moral obligations of wealth. It looks like no other campus in the valley: a modern, minimalist two-story design that uses paneled wood and fabricated metal, wild colors, and terraced landscaping to create the feel of a high-tech mountain retreat.
When all three phases are finished, 1, students will be attending the high school, middle school, elementary, and preschool. What Lynda seems to have in mind is a kind of utopian village set amid orchards, not unlike the utopias that were tried by the early dreamers of Southern California. Young men and women from Teach for America will do their two-year stints at the complex and live in village housing. The curriculum is being created by Noemi Donoso, the chief of education for the Chicago public schools before Lynda recruited her to Wonderful.
Lynda is also mapping out a farm-to-food program where students will grow fruits, vegetables, and grains on a plot of village land. A fully equipped teaching kitchen will turn the harvest into school lunches. Already, the high school is filled with hundreds of students bused in from farmworker towns that are among the poorest communities in the West. Selling the farm to migrant families has required Lynda to rebrand agriculture.
No longer does it have to be a career that brings Mexicans to their hands and knees. Now Lynda herself stands before us, a single light over her head. She is twinkling from earlobe and finger. She gestures to the young students in the front row, the ones enrolled in the ag-prep classes, and asks them to stand up and take a bow. It's in the Central Valley where they now have their biggest fight.
Stewart first bought land in the area as an investment in the s. Over the next decade he picked up tens of thousands more acres. Still he took note, quickly realizing that the contracts he had with the state, which delivered water from the California Aqueduct — a mile-long channel flowing with runoff from the snow-capped Sierra Nevada mountains — were vulnerable when water was scarce and the state couldn't meet everyone's needs.
In what some critics have called secret meetings, some of his most trusted advisors met with several leaders from southern California water districts and state water officials, helping broker a sweetheart deal in Two decades later it still gives the Resnicks nearly unrivaled access to water. Wonderful denies the meetings were done clandestinely, alleging that those who say so have an "ax to grind.
The new owners, in turn, agreed to forfeit state water contracts. The Resnicks own about 70, pistachio and almond acres in California's Central Valley.
But their ownership has been under siege, challenged in court nearly continuously for the past two decades. In the Center for Biological Diversity, a nationwide environmental nonprofit group based in Arizona, and several other groups sued the bank and its members, including Westside and the Resnicks' parent company.
A Sacramento County Superior Court judge ruled last year that the state gave up the water resources without properly analyzing the potential environmental impacts but dismissed three other allegations — including one challenging the agreement's constitutionality.
They are fiercely defending that golden goose. Neighboring water districts to Kern Water Bank filed two complaints in when farmers' wells began drying up. In one, Rosedale-Rio Bravo and Buena Vista alleged that the water bank was pumping at "dangerous and unacceptable levels.
Because California was the last state in the West to start placing limits on groundwater pumping, with legislation passed just last year and taking effect only by , it was legal, if not ethical. There was also an allegation that the pumping may have caused land to sink in the Central Valley, a phenomenon that is being tracked by NASA. Wonderful says they have not seen any sinking on property over the last 20 years of filling the bank and extracting water from it, and that a device on the property tracks it.
Kern Bank members "cannot and have not removed more water than they have deposited, just like a bank account," a Wonderful spokesman says. The court ordered the state last year to conduct an environmental review by mid that could result in new limits placed on pumping. In the second suit brought on by those two water districts and two others, Kern Water Bank leaders agreed under a settlement to assess damages and, if necessary, compensate the affected landowners.
The Resnicks are already looking to secure additional water sources. At least two Wonderful farming executives are involved in a grassroots push for the project, now called California WaterFix, which would carry water from the Sacramento River Delta through two mile-long tunnels to San Joaquin Valley farms.
It's a long-term bet but one that is very controversial right now. There's another cushion they've been building for decades. A new research project is also about to roll out "supertrees" cultivated to yield more with a regular tree's amount of water, which could even be sold to rival farmers.
Whatever the future brings, it would probably be a mistake to bet against the power couple. Fortunately, with our management team, we have some optimists and some pessimists," Stewart says. And, of course, some opportunists. This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here. More From Forbes. Nov 12, , am EST. Nov 11, , am EST. Nov 9, , pm EST. Nov 8, , pm EST. Nov 8, , am EST. Edit Story. Nov 4, , am EST.
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