In 1994, some of Stewart Resnick’s most trusted advisors met with several leaders from southern California water districts and state water officials to broker negotiations, in what some critics have called secret meetings. They wouldn’t have been able to create such an expansive farming operation without a sweetheart deal that gave them access to the Kern Bank. For comparison, San Francisco uses about 70 billion gallons annually. says the estimate is high, but declined to comment further. Those crops consume an estimated 150 billion gallons of water a year, two thirds of that on nuts, which would be enough to supply San Francisco’s 875,000 residents for a decade. The Resnicks own 175,000 farmland acres, with nearly 130,000 planted in California alone. Half of American households now purchase Wonderful Co. Stewart and Lynda Resnick are agribusiness billionaires. 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. It also sells Fiji Water and citrus pomegranate drink Pom. Wonderful says it’s the world’s largest producer of tree nuts, America’s largest citrus grower and biggest floral delivery service via Teleflora. They eventually transformed those acres into what’s now one of the biggest private farming operations in America, producing seedless lemons, Halo mandarins and wine. The Resnicks, who became wealthy after setting up a string of businesses in Los Angeles, such as a janitorial cleaning service, bought their first farmland in the Central Valley four decades ago as a hedge against inflation. That’s an injustice of unparalleled proportion.” When we put the food on our plate, we rarely think about the hands that make it and the situation they are in. The Resnicks are so dominant, and the disempowered communities are at the other end a scale that is tipped mightily against them. “The power dynamics are essential to this story. “Water has to be brought in on trucks,” adds Miller, who wrote a book on a 1921 flood in San Antonio that spotlighted social inequality. Miller points out that in the same counties where the Resnicks have banked water underground, there are marginalized communities, often made up of migrant farmworkers and immigrants, with little access to public water.
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