California Corporations benefitting from the 1902 Reclamation Act

"The Central Valley Project was fundamentally different from every earlier Reclamation Project. It did not create many new irrigated farms. it 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...was the DiGiorgio Corporation, whose lands grew more commerical 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 ... Figures for 1946, published in a Senate report on the acreage limitation, reveal that Standard Oil owned 79,844 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...owned 16,760 acres ...

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 77,000 acres of valley property - about seven times the acres of Manhatan island - Giffen was the largest cotton grower in the world ... 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 named Jubil Farms, in which a Bakersfield couple, William and Judith Rogers, owned at 80% interest. The Rogerses, five other couples (most of them Rogers employees), the trust 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 ...

On paper ... 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 11 times as much California land as the law allowed."

... Quoted from Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert (pp. 337-338)