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By Root 1532 0

rescued thousands of farms that were already there, including a good many that were far larger than the law allowed. One of the “farmers” whose land lay within the service area of the Central Valley Project, and who was scheduled ultimately to receive its water, was the DiGiorgio Corporation, whose lands grew more commercial tomatoes than any state except Florida. Another was the Southern Pacific—not a mere railroad, but the largest private landowner in California, and the eventual owner of 109,000 acres in the Westlands Water District, which was scheduled to become the largest single recipient of CVP water. The roster of landlords within the San Joaquin Valley was a Who’s Who in corporate agriculture. Figures for 1946, published in a Senate report on the acreage limitation, reveal that Standard Oil owned 79,844 acres in the probable CVP service area; Will Gill and Sons owned 29,926 acres; the Bellridge Oil Company owned 30,120 acres; the Tidewater Associated Oil Company owned 25,554 acres; the Richfield Oil Company owned 10,718 acres; the Anderson and Clayton Company owned 19,144 acres; and the J. G. Boswell Ranch Company, which, among others listed, was already receiving Kings River water virtually free courtesy of the Army Corps of Engineers, owned 16,760 acres—part of a worldwide land empire later estimated at some 860,000 acres minimum. If such growers availed themselves of the Bureau’s water, which they would doubtless want to do, the law was quite clear about the disposition of their cases: they would have to sell all lands in excess of 160 (or, more likely, 320) acres that received the subsidized water. The Reclamation Act’s chief sponsor in the House, Frank Mondell, had said on introducing the bill that this divestiture provision “was drawn with a view to breaking up any large landholding which might exist in the vicinity of Government works.” It was hard to imagine it stated more emphatically than that.

The threat of divestiture gave the big growers in the CVP service area fits, even if the Bureau was far more interested in building more dams than in trying to enforce such an unpopular law—especially when the Interior Department’s lawyers, few of whom were legal stars, had to go up against some of the craftiest legal talent in the state. One modest example of how the farmers managed to deceive the Bureau was provided by the case of Russell Giffen, one of the big landowners in the Westlands district. A Fresno rancher who stitched together seventy-seven thousand acres of valley property—about seven times the acreage of Manhattan Island—Giffen was the largest cotton grower in the world: nationally, he also ranked just behind Boswell and one other farming company in the combined federal farm subsidies he received. In the 1970s, Giffen decided to clean up his estate for probate, and sold most of the land for $32.5 million. One of the buyers was a New York-based company called Jubil Farms, in which a Bakersfield couple, William and Judith Rogers, owned an 80 percent interest. The Rogerses, five other couples (most of them Rogers employees), the trusts of four Rogers children, and a mail-order denture company took title to 1,812 acres, all of it in parcels of 160 acres or less. All the new landowners then leased their property back to Jubil Farms. Financing for the whole deal, in the amount of $3.5 million, was provided by the Nissho Iwai American Corporation, the subsidiary of a Japanese conglomerate, which happened to own the other 20 percent of Jubil Farms.

On paper, and in the Bureau’s recordable contracts file in Sacramento, the requirements of the Reclamation Act were satisfied. In reality, the whole business was a translucent sham. One company, Jubil Farms, with its headquarters in New York City, was farming eleven times as much California land as the law allowed, with water it bought from the government for a few dollars per acre-foot—probably one-tenth of its worth on the free market, had there been such a thing. But this phony transaction, cynical as it was, was at least a gesture of compliance with the Reclamation