California’s wealthiest farming family is proposing an expansion of industrial warehousing in Kern County that would fundamentally reshape the economy in the southern San Joaquin Valley.

Outside of Kern, Stewart and Lynda Resnick, the billionaire owners of the Wonderful Co., are better known for pomegranates and pistachios. But for more than a decade, they have also owned a master-planned industrial park in the city of Shafter, northwest of Bakersfield, that is home to distribution centers for Fortune 500 companies like Target, Amazon and Walmart.

Now, looking to capitalize on the seismic shift to online shopping, the Resnicks want to position Kern County as a new frontier for the industrial-scale warehousing that is key to connecting customers with their goods. Wonderful is pushing to more than double the size of its industrial park by converting 1,800 acres of its own almond groves into additional warehousing space.

And it’s pursuing costly infrastructure projects that company leaders say will mitigate the impacts of that expansion.

Wonderful says its vision for a scaled-up Wonderful Industrial Park is wholly different from the thousands of sprawling distribution centers that have swallowed up neighborhoods in California’s Inland Empire. The influx of mega-warehouses in Riverside and San Bernardino counties has generated thousands of jobs — but also relentless truck traffic and poor air quality that have given rise to a backlash.

Wonderful’s industrial park sits along railroad tracks on more than 1,600 acres of former farmland several miles outside the Shafter town center. With the exception of a cluster of homes on the other side of the tracks, the surrounding acreage is primarily agricultural. Wonderful describes the park as a job creator in a region hard hit by economic shifts in agriculture and oil.

The company is working with local officials on plans for a new highway that would route trucks away from central Shafter. It also plans to funnel at least $120 million into an inland rail terminal, expected to be completed next spring. The goal is to move more products from coastal ports by rail to Shafter, reducing traffic on State Route 99, already one of the busiest truck routes in California.

If all goes according to plan, Shafter would be transformed from a small town, population 20,162, into an international trade hub; and Kern County — a region that long has prized what’s extracted from the ground — would become ground zero for the growing global goods movement.

Many Shafter residents say the opportunity for steady, relatively well-paying work in areas other than farming and oil would come as a welcome addition. But some are concerned that doubling-down on an industry that will bring more truck and train travel to one of the nation’s most polluted corridors can’t help but have negative consequences.

“I understand that company says it will bring jobs; this is true to some extent,” said Gustavo Aguirre, assistant director of the Delano-based Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment. “But it is also true that it’s going to bring health and environmental impacts that are going to impact the neighbors who live near the industrial park.”

The way John Guinn tells it, the Wonderful Industrial Park was created out of necessity.

Several decades ago, as big-box retailers moved into San Joaquin Valley towns, Main Street shoe shops and dry goods stores struggled to survive. Town officials were looking to create employment opportunities.

“The world was changing,” said Guinn, who worked as city manager in Shafter for 17 years. “We had to find a way to do something different.”

So Shafter rezoned a portion of land between Highway 99 and Interstate 5, along the BNSF rail line, and that became the industrial park. The first tenant was Target, which built a warehouse of roughly 2 million square feet in 2003.

In 2011, the Resnicks’ real estate arm bought the development. Guinn retired from the city in 2014 and joined Wonderful as executive vice president and chief operating officer for the real estate team. It’s a role, he said, that will allow him to bring his broader vision for Shafter to light.

Today, the Wonderful Industrial Park typically builds and leases million-square-foot warehouses. Just over half of the 1,625 acres already zoned for industrial buildings have been developed.

It’s proved a profitable form of diversification for Wonderful — which also owns Fiji Water and Justin Vineyards — at a time when almond prices are falling and water supplies are tight.

According to Wonderful, the industrial park has generated about 10,000 jobs, including warehouse employees, truck drivers and services handling shipping logistics. With the planned expansion, company leaders said, the complex eventually could support 50,000 jobs.

Warehouses are quickly becoming more mechanized, meaning more robotics and less need for people. “Warehouses are both job creators and job destroyers,” says UC Riverside’s Ellen Reese.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Marco Avendaño, 27, has worked for nearly a year as a forklift operator for CJ Logistics in the industrial park. Avendaño, who didn’t go to college, said he’s learned new skills and now finds himself interested in pursuing a management role with the company.

“Even though it just started as a job for me, it made me get a career mindset,” he said.

His schedule — 9:30 p.m. to 6 a.m. — works well for him and his fiancee, a librarian, who are raising three children. By his working nights, he said, “we still grow that bond with our family.”

Avendaño previously held two other jobs in the industrial park — at a manufacturing plant that has closed and for a contractor at the Walmart warehouse. In his current job, he said he’s received several raises and is making $22.69 an hour — “more than I’ve ever made hourly.”

As the park expands, the number of jobs created with each warehouse is likely to slow. Warehouses are quickly becoming more mechanized, meaning more robotics and less need for people. The advancements in technology could stymie Wonderful’s job projections.

“Warehouses are both job creators and job destroyers,” said Ellen Reese, co-director of the Inland Empire Labor & Community Center at UC Riverside. She noted that automation is reducing the number of warehouse employees, but not necessarily making jobs safer.

“A lot of the research actually suggests that more automated warehouses have higher injury rates than less automated warehouses,” she said.

Guinn acknowledged that more efficient warehouses will require less labor. But the remaining jobs, he said, will be more technically skilled and require higher pay.

Inside Walmart’s warehouse, for example, an automated system builds pallets tailored to the needs of individual stores more quickly and accurately than a team of humans could. The facility employs just 400 people across all shifts, many of whom are highly skilled equipment operators trained to troubleshoot technical problems. The average salary is between $28 and $29 an hour.

“I don’t think it’s bad if we’re able to do twice as much with half as much labor,” Guinn said. “What I think is bad is to have a whole lot of folks that don’t have a job, or have jobs that aren’t very good.”

Wonderful says it’s helping ease the transition with an on-site career center that trains workers for the higher-skilled jobs.

Two men take part in an apprenticeship program at the Wonderful Career Center in Shafter, using VR headsets that simulate forklift operations.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

On a March morning, Luis Chapa wore virtual reality goggles inside a classroom at the career center and simulated driving a stand-up forklift. He’s training as a maintenance technician and earning on-the-job experience and college credits through a free year-long program.

Before enrolling in the apprenticeship program, Chapa, 37, worked for two and a half years in Bakersfield’s oil industry. The work on a demolition crew was strenuous and dirty, and Chapa, a father of two, said his pay stalled at $26 an hour.

He decided to make a career change and is confident the training will lead to a better-paid position with Wonderful or another company at the industrial park.

“My cap-off in the oil fields would pretty much be my starting point where I’m heading,” said Chapa.

Along with their farming empire, Stewart and Lynda Resnick are known for their philanthropy, which includes major gifts for climate research, as well as money for scholarships and wellness centers in the valley towns where many of their workers live. So Wonderful is acutely aware of the optics as the company positions the park for a much bigger footprint.

Guinn and others maintain that, with the right planning, the expansion doesn’t have to mirror the trade-offs in the Inland Empire.

The company envisions building the Wonderful Pacific Terminal at the industrial park, so that trains can ferry cargo from California ports directly to the facility. Once built, Guinn estimates that 20% of imported containers could arrive by rail, with each train replacing the equivalent of 240 trucks.

The Wonderful Company, co-owned by billionaires Stewart and Lynda Resnick, says expanding its industrial park in Shafter will generate new jobs in a region shaken by economic shifts in oil and agriculture.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Advertisement

Wonderful is also touting plans for a six-lane highway, the Central Valley Green Pass, that would act as a relief valve for Highway 99.

Both projects are still in the planning phase and in need of multiple approvals.

As another carrot, Wonderful has agreed to create a fund for the local park district if Shafter officials approve the company’s rezoning application. New warehouse tenants would pay 2 cents per square foot per month — or $240,000 annually for a million-square-foot warehouse — into a fund dedicated to enhancing sports programs, arts and crafts and community events.

Aguirre, with the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment, is helping negotiate a broader community benefits agreement intended to ensure the people who live in and near Shafter get more than jobs out of the deal.

“The residents recognize that [this project] could bring jobs, but they come with a price,” Aguirre said. “Because of this, they say, ‘What are you going to do for our community?’”

Thirty years ago, Snoop Dogg was sipping on gin and juice, with his mind on his money and his money on his mind.

These days, the Long Beach-based rapper and business man is running a company that sells gin and juice products, with his mind apparently on college football.

Introducing the newly renamed “Snoop Dogg Arizona Bowl presented by Gin & Juice by Dre and Snoop,” which will take place Dec. 28 in Tucson, Ariz.

“College football fans are exhausted by the constant talk around NIL, conference realignment, coach movement, transfer portal and super conferences,” Snoop Dogg said in a video posted Monday on his social media accounts. “So it’s time we get back to the roots of college football, what it was focused on — the colleges, the players, the competition, the community, the fan experience and the pageantry.”

Held at Arizona Stadium, home of the Arizona Wildcats, the bowl started in 2015 and has been tied to the Mountain West and Mid-American conferences since 2020. Gin & Juice By Dre and Snoop is a ready-to-drink, gin-based canned product from the new premium spirits company launched earlier this year by Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre, a rapper, producer and business mogul.

With a name inspired by “Gin & Juice,” the 1994 single by Snoop Dogg and produced by Dr. Dre, the company is the first alcohol brand to serve as a title sponsor for an NCAA bowl game.

“Snoop’s passions for supporting youth football, college football and music completely aligned with things we were already doing and joining forces meant that we could elevate the entire Bowl experience together,” Arizona Bowl executive director Kym Adair told The Times in an email Tuesday. “In fact, three players from his SYFL (Snoop Youth Football League) currently play at the University of Arizona, where we play our game.

“We also quickly recognized that we shared the desire to highlight the joy and pageantry that accompanies the celebration of college football through our bowl game and what it means to the players, the participating universities, our community, and the fans.”

The multi-year agreement with Snoop Dogg and his company comes as the previous three-year deal with Barstool Sports as the event’s title sponsor comes to an end.

“We had a fantastic run with Barstool Sports,” Adair said. “They were everything we had hoped they would be and more and will forever be a part of the fabric of our game.”

That partnership was seen as controversial by some. Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy has made numerous comments considered to be misogynistic or racist. Portnoy has also been accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women; he has denied all of those allegations.

The Pima County Board of Supervisors voted to withdraw its $40,000 funding for the Arizona Bowl in 2021. Adair said her company hasn’t spoken with the county about funding at this point.

Snoop Dogg isn’t exactly the most clean-cut guy either.

Much of his music contains offensive language. He has admitted to a past as a pimp and having gang ties. In 1996, he was acquitted of first- and second-degree murder charges in the shooting death of a gang member three years earlier.

But Snoop’s image has taken a softer turn over the years. He’s funny, friendly and extremely easy going. He’s known as Coach Snoop to the hundreds of inner-city kids who have participated in his nonprofit youth football league since 2005.

And he’s seemingly everywhere.

“Snoop is an American music icon, a successful businessman, a pop-culture phenomenon, the face of the Olympics on NBC this Summer, a brand ambassador for huge companies and someone that loves football so much that he started his own youth football league (SYFL) to serve young athletes in California,” Adair said. “He is ubiquitous.”

Adair added, “We have only heard positive reviews of our new partnership.”

A number of events will take place tied to the event, including a Snooper Bowl featuring youth teams from Arizona and California. Snoop Dogg also could make an appearance in the booth for the Arizona Bowl providing color commentary.

“Being a fan, coach, supporter of all levels of the game, I’ve sent many players through my SYFL to colleges and the NFL, so it’s only fitting that I step up and help get this thing right,” Snoop Dogg said in the video. “I’m ready to bring the juice back to college football.”

For the first time since suffering a stroke, Randy Travis has released new music — with the help of artificial intelligence.

The country star’s latest single, “Where That Came From,” arrived Friday after Travis and his wife, Mary Travis, permitted his record label to re-create his soulful vocals using AI, according to the Associated Press.

Until last week, Randy Travis hadn’t put out anything new in roughly a decade. After he was hospitalized and diagnosed with viral cardiomyopathy (a disease that targets the heart) in July 2013, the “Forever and Ever, Amen” and “Deeper Than the Holler” artist suffered a stroke and developed aphasia, a brain disorder that has limited his ability to speak.

When Warner Music Nashville Co-President Cris Lacy proposed the idea of harnessing AI to reproduce the singer’s voice, the Travises leaped at the opportunity.

“Well, we were all over that,” Mary Travis told AP, “we were so excited.”

“All I ever wanted since the day of the stroke was to hear that voice again.”

The AI technology pulled from Randy Travis music spanning 28 years to create his version of “Where That Came From,” a romantic ballad written by Scotty Emerick and John Scott. Travis’ longtime producer, Kyle Lehning, selected the song because he believed it would best suit the crooner’s vocals.

Mary Travis told AP that the final product moved her husband to tears.

“I remember watching him when he first heard the song after it was completed. It was beautiful because at first, he was surprised, and then he was very pensive, and he was listening and studying,” she said.

“And then he put his head down and his eyes were a little watery. I think he went through every emotion there was, in those three minutes of just hearing his voice again.”

In April, more than 200 musicians — including Stevie Wonder, Billie Eilish and Nicki Minaj — signed an open letter urging AI developers, tech companies and music platforms to stop using AI “to infringe upon and devalue the rights of human artists.” The statement acknowledged, however, that “AI has enormous potential to advance human creativity” when used responsibly.

Other creatives — such as Hollywood writers, actors and craftspeople — have also taken steps to mitigate the encroachment of AI.

Randy Travis is not the only musician to embrace the AI revolution.

Last week, indie pop artist Washed Out released an AI-generated music video for his new song “The Hardest Part.”

“This isn’t a stunt, and it’s not a parlor trick,” Lacy told AP after releasing “Where That Came From.” “It was important to have a song worthy of him.”