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."

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