STRATFORD – Water is the lifeblood in the parched San Joaquin Valley, sustaining endless acres of trees, seeds and pastures that feed a hungry nation.
But a controversial pipeline sits empty, as dry as dust, caught in an angry feud between two of California’s largest land barons, Silicon Valley developer and farmer John Vidovich and Pasadena-based longtime cotton king J.G. Boswell Company.
Vidovich needs the pipe to move water. The Boswell Company wants it blocked, saying it threatens the company’s own water supplies, which run through a canal over the pipeline’s underground route.
What started as a dispute about a tube of plastic under a muddy ditch is escalating into a bitter legal fight between the two multimillion-dollar businesses, pitting old power against new money and ambition.
After three years of drought, tensions are running high all over rural California. The state’s massive plumbing system is sending virtually nothing to farmers. And state groundwater regulations restrict the drilling of new agricultural wells.
But it’s here in the bottom of long-gone Tulare Lake, which once held more fresh water than Lake Tahoe, where a conflict has turned heated. The region plays an important role in California agriculture — but it’s also ground zero for many of the state’s most difficult water management problems.
The clash of the agricultural titans, who hold influential positions on local water boards and control thousands of acres with precious water rights, is being waged against a backdrop of deep distrust in the community about both companies’ hidden agendas.
In this fragile and failing oasis, small farmers worry that both will sell precious water to the highest bidders, then ship it far away.
“Boswell has been the aggressor for years. And now Vidovich is the aggressor,” said Doug Verboon, a Kings County supervisor and walnut farmer who works the same 187 acres that his grandfather bought in 1906.
“Each one blames the other,” he said. But with shared ambitions of buying land and moving water, “they’re all doing the same thing, in our eyes.”
The dispute
Sandridge Partners, controlled by Vidovich, is building a 10-mile-long route on its properties to ship water from its wells in the north to its thirsty fields in the south.
To get there, the pipeline has to cross under a Boswell-controlled canal. While Vidovich owns the surrounding land, Boswell’s Tulare Lake Canal Company traverses it with a longstanding legal easement established back in 1906, in spidery cursive print, by the long-dead owner of a long-gone ranch.
Boswell’s team predicts huge harm. The pipeline “will pose a constant and continued threat to the easement’s function, compromising the structural integrity of the easement through saturation and subsidence or by negligent maintenance,” wrote attorney Leonard Herr.
Rubbish, said Vidovich, in a Los Altos office decorated with maps of his land holdings. “It won’t hurt the canal,” he said. “It’s my property, and I have a right to cross.”
Boswell’s response has a tough Spaghetti Western quality. The company periodically flies a helicopter over Vidovich’s rangelands, its ominous WHOMP-WHOMP-WHOMP frightening cattle already stressed by drought, said dairy and beef farmer Jim Wilson, who leases nearby land from Vidovich. To block construction of the pipeline, Boswell parked a parade of giant construction vehicles atop the canal’s embankments.
Vidovich, who has declined to sign paperwork ensuring his pipeline won’t cause harm, filed a lawsuit alleging trespass. Legal bills for this and other Boswell-related disputes are costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, he said.
His strategy, and his Silicon Valley wealth, arouse both admiration and suspicion in this rural community. The pipeline, bankrolled by his investment firm Sandridge Partners, is an efficient and conservation-minded way to ship water, he says. It will carry his private water on his private land, never leaving the region’s geological basin. But Vidovich has a history of selling and shipping water outside the valley, so some locals don’t trust him.
A desperate valley
The ancestral Tulare Lake was once the master of this valley, a catch basin for four mighty rivers – the Kern, Tule, Kaweah and Kings – flowing down from the Sierra. Before being dammed and diverted, the water was home to millions of birds, mountain lions, wolves, bears and more. Native Americans fished from reed boats.
Now the land is dry and saline, drained to support a vast and rigid geometry of nut, fruit and dairy farms. The depletion is causing land to collapse nearly a foot a year, in what U.S. Geological Survey hydrologists Devin Galloway and Francis Riley called “one of the single largest alterations of the land surface attributed to humankind.”
Late to the state’s water game, the region’s farmers are the first to have their supplies curtailed. Falling groundwater levels are stressing their wells.
Faced with scarcity, farmers are very protective of their pipes and canals, said Barton “Buzz” Thompson, a Stanford Law School professor and director of the university’s Water in the West program. There have been several instances where damaged equipment has reduced flows, he said.
While water has been moved, bought, sold and traded in California for decades, most deals have typically involved small supplies. That’s changing.
The drought is driving prices and shifting business practices. In recent years, there’s been a consolidation of farms, as investors buy land with reliable water supplies and then fallow the fields – because, in an era of climate change, water can be more lucrative than crops.
“There’s going to be a lot of very creative and motivated people looking for ways to get water to their crops, or to get water to somebody’s crops – moving it around” from low-value to high-value acreage, said Jay Lund, head of the Center for Watershed Sciences at UC Davis.
But this can lead to conflict and distrust. Longtime small farmers say water is hard to track – and could drain toward rich and politically powerful users, leaving them dry. While some counties and water boards prohibit water exports, others don’t.
In an era of climate change, “everybody is scrambling. I think we’re going to see more of these fights break out over water among competing users,” said Richard Frank, professor of environmental practice at the UC Davis School of Law.
“As water users fight over a decreasing amount of water,” he said, “it’s just inevitable.”
Boswell: ‘King Kong’
The historic king of the region is the J.G. Boswell Company, which pioneered industrial-scale agriculture to become the largest farming operation in California.
The company was founded in 1925 by the father and uncles of James Griffin “J.G.” Boswell II, a Stanford grad who served on the boards of General Electric, Safeway and the California Institute of Technology. Under his leadership, the company used its business smarts, political clout and legal strategies to acquire water and transform a modest cotton farm into an agricultural empire.
“Water rights are like democracy,” he told Forbes in 1989. “Once you have them, you spend a lifetime defending them.”
On more than 150,000 acres – 132,000 in Kings County alone, according to ParcelQuest — the company grows, processes and sells cotton, tomatoes, wheat, alfalfa and seed crops. It’s also in the real estate business, developing and marketing master planned communities and business parks.
For generations, the company has supplied steady work for Kings County families and has been an integral part of the region’s identity, helping to build a community park, the YMCA, Corcoran District Hospital and the high school football stadium. It supports two full-ride college scholarships to the top graduates of Corcoran High School and a faculty position at Fresno State.
The company is now run by son Jim, or “J.W.”, 69, who lives 2.5 hours away from this dusty valley in a palatial home in the wealthy Southern California town of La Cañada Flintridge. Like his father, he’s an intensely private businessman. The Boswell company, their attorneys and Tulare Lake Canal Company president Mark Unruh did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
But some residents and local leaders are growing wary of the company’s dominance and secrecy.
“It’s King Kong,” said Wilson.
The company operates the most wells in the lake basin – and the deepest ones. It is leaning more heavily on groundwater, say locals, because it’s selling or transferring portions of its surface supplies from the State Water Project and Kings River. More pumping, locals say, worsens the region’s destructive land subsidence.
“They’re the 300-pound gorilla,” said Mark Grewal of Grewal Consulting, who worked for J.G. Boswell Company for 26 years and now advises the region’s growers on water and land management issues.
“They’ve always been able to bully anyone,” he said. “But, until now, nobody had the money to fight back.”
Vidovich: Deep pockets
In Vidovich, J.G. Boswell has met its match.
In blue jeans and running shoes, he cuts a slim figure, with closely cropped gray hair and steely blue eyes. Like J.W. Boswell, Vidovich is heir to a real estate empire.
His grandfather, who came to California from Croatia in 1908, got his start with 10 acres of cherries and apricots in Mountain View. Father Stephen excelled in land deals, trading the toil of farming for successful real estate offices and expense accounts.
The company has built lucrative apartment, condominium, mobile home, hotel and office projects all over the South Bay and Peninsula, from Redwood City’s Trailer Villa RV Park to Los Altos Gardens condominiums, with imported European appliances and hand-cut marble.
John, 66, is a former military intelligence officer and Santa Clara Law School graduate who served as Santa Clara County Planning Commissioner from 1990 to 1994 and is as shrewd as his father. Locals recount how he bought a 360-acre parcel in Los Altos Hills for $5.5 million and, only four years later, turned around and sold part of it to the MidPeninsula Regional Open Space District for $9.3 million.
Among other projects, he developed the posh Quarry Hills subdivision in Los Altos Hills with 22 multimillion-dollar luxury homes, where he now lives in a 15,000-square-foot house on 10 acres and a vineyard.
“But if you want to be in agriculture, you need to go to the Central Valley,” said Vidovich.
He bought his first San Joaquin Valley parcel in 1994 when he invested in a foreclosed property in Kings County. Since then, his Sandridge Partners has accumulated ownership or control of thousands of acres of farmland across the Central Valley – 123,424 in Kings County alone, per ParcelQuest, focusing on land with secure surface water rights or where groundwater is abundant.
As a relative newcomer, Vidovich said he angered Boswell when he outbid the company on Westlake Farms, one of the oldest and largest farms in California, with valuable access to groundwater and Kings River flows.
“So now they’re doing everything they can to frustrate my ability to utilize the property,” said Vidovich.
While Vidovich owns less acreage than Boswell, more of it is devoted to high-value orchards. A tree crop, with the investment of years and irrigation equipment, can be worth $40,000 to $50,000 an acre; in contrast, row crops are about $10,000 an acre.
Vidovich’s supporters like Wilson say “he loves to help people,” donating laptops to the struggling Stratford school district and inviting local Native Americans to his property to harvest reeds and teach basket-weaving traditions.
“He wants his fair share, but he wants everybody else to prosper, too.”
But others are suspicious of Vidovich’s record of buying land and selling its water, both surface and groundwater, out of the area, sometimes to urban users.
They resent how he sold $73 million worth of water rights to Mojave Water Agency in Southern California. He replenished it by shipping water from his property in Tulare County, 25 miles away, infuriating locals there.
More recently, he earned $40 million in an easement deal with a water bank and exchange that seeks to siphon flood water out of a Kings County canal for storage in Kern County.
Locals also are nervous about six new pump stations, controlled by Vidovich, that they fear could pump massive amounts of groundwater out of Tulare County, into the California Aqueduct, and down to Southern California.
“He’s serious about taking water out of this valley,” farmer Milt Pace, who once partnered with Vidovich, told The Bakersfield Californian. “He does enough farming in the area to make it look like he’s a farmer. But it’s just a cover for taking water out.”
The pipeline fix
Even for someone with Vidovich’s savvy, the depth of this summer’s drought could be devastating.
He has plenty of well water in the northern part of Kings County, outside J.G. Boswell territory. But there’s none for his precious corn, almond and pistachio trees in the south county – and, because of new restrictions, he can’t simply drill a new well there.
So he started laying pipes last December. The project seemed simple: Using existing canals and new 48-inch pipe, he would ship water 10 miles from his property in Lemoore to property south of Stratford. No announcement was made; locals noticed excavation, first reported by Lois Henry of SJV Water, a nonprofit news site that covers water issues in San Joaquin Valley.
“It’s a water-saving method,” Vidovich said. “You don’t lose one drop at all.”
The pipe needed to cross under Boswell’s dirt canal, but that seemed like no big deal to Vidovich. Made of durable plastic, the pipe would be buried four feet below the bottom of the canal, with a foot-deep cement barrier to protect both. Even if it leaked, it would simply add water to the canal, Vidovich insists. The project would take five days to complete when the canal wasn’t in use.
“You can’t stop a grower from taking his own water to his crops,” said consultant Grewal. “There’s no issue with the pipeline.”
In court, Boswell’s retort: No way.
If the pipeline failed and the canal collapsed, precious well water would be lost, the company asserted. Due to the drought, this water would be impossible to replace, it said.
So the company drafted a list of demands. It wanted assurance that the pipeline won’t interfere with the canal, as well as proof that Vidovich has $5 million in insurance if the canal gets damaged. It alleged that Vidovich broke state law by not doing an environmental review of the project.
In court, Boswell also warned about the pipeline’s potential use, suggesting that water could eventually end up in Southern California. “Where is the water going? When will it be used? Who is going to use it?” said attorney Herr, according to SJV Water‘s Henry.
On a chilly morning in January, the day the pipe was to cross under the canal, Boswell’s crew arrived to block construction with trucks, trailers, excavators, a motor grader and a bulldozer with the diamond “B” logo, according to the lawsuit.
The helicopter buzzing started in February, scattering cattle. According to a lawsuit, one animal bolted through an electric fence onto a highway, where it was killed by a truck.
“They all just started running, and kept running, and blew right through the hot wire fence,” recalled dairyman Wilson, who estimates $80,000 in fence damage. “It was like being in the middle of a hurricane.”
Even now, months later, the flyovers continue, said Wilson. He never knows when, but the pattern is the same, based on flight radar recordings. Meanwhile, without water, his cattle’s corn crop is stunted.
“It’s ridiculous,” he said. “I’m in a dire situation.”
The pipeline project is suspended while the two sides battle in court. But Vidovich isn’t backing down.
“Their goal is to prevent me from successfully farming. … They’re just mad I’m here,” he said. “We’re building infrastructure, and they don’t like it.”
What if the endless days without rain become endless years? How will money and power reshape this desiccated landscape?
“Water seems to be disappearing,” said Verboon. Like other small farmers, “my water stays on my ground. I can’t afford to move it.”
“But the Boswells and Vidoviches can invest to move water around,” he said. “And that scares the hell out of everybody who lives here.”
Correction: August 8, 2022 An earlier version of this article incorrectly reported that Stanford grad James Griffin "J.G." Boswell II started the Boswell company. It was his father and uncles who founded the company in 1925.
