I want to thank you for coming today. It's kind of sad, but I always think that there's something good after something bad, so hopefully with your support, when you turn it around and it's good.
My name Diana Padilla and this is my husband, Sual. We're the founders of HOPE for Small Farm Sustainability. We are also the owners of Yahweh’s All Natural Farm and Garden, which has 75 acres in the City of Harlingen, Texas. We invited you here today because we invited you in 2024 to tell you about this really great news that we got $7.4 million to work on the food system, to work on expanding what we were doing down here.
My heart was broken on March 23 at 10pm when we received an email from IT, not even from somebody from IT and they said your funding has been terminated. We're here because we are going to appeal, but we're going to need everybody's support. We're going to debunk that. That letter says that the grant was given to DEI, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Small farmers are considered DEI? We’re not. We work for small farmers.We work to support, increase and help them become sustainable and provide food for our community.
Texas is losing farmers. Land prices are out of the roof. When I wrote the grant in 2022, we wrote it with 800 acres in mind at $4,000 an acres. When we finally got the grant functioning, I couldn't find any land at $4,000 an acre. It was $7,000 an acre. And right now, if you look, it's $15,000, $20,000, $25,000 an acre. How can the new generation of farmers even make it? It's impossible. So communal farming is going to be the way for the new generation farmers. Our grant was for Land Access Victory Fas that arm. It was set up because, years ago, during the war, they brought people together to help with Victory Garden. It's so coincidental that right now we're in chaos, and our grant is called Victory Farm. Our grant can help provide that food security for our Texas community.
The biggest barrier is land, equipment and technical support. Farmers are plagued. They don't have the next generation trained. They need people like us that are willing to train them. Between 2017 and 2022, according to the internet, we lost over 17,000 farmers. That's a lot of farmers. Food doesn't change. Food is not political. We need everybody. We need to protect that. Over 70% of our food is imported. Well, if a catastrophe happens, we're not even prepared. We need to protect our food system. This grant was the only grant that was issued in Texas. That made it special.
We've already started the movement. We have our our partners in North Texas. We have our partners in South Texas and the land that was going to be purchased was going to be in Central Texas. I put in your booklet the percentages of where this money was going to go. It's not being misused. Fifty-nine percent of that grant was for land purchase, land purchase that was going to be owned by USDA, managed by hope and used by the community.
We are small. We're a small organization. Universities and (agriculture) extensions get three 40 percent to run their grants. We were given 2.9 of this grant to run the organization. How could you even say we're making such very good, allocated, funding. We're organic farmers.
My last words. We’re going to debunk that letter. And as Texas residents, we’re not Republican nor Democrats, we're community leaders and representatives. We have an obligation, proactive, to safeguard our food system, for the future of Texas, for the future of Texas farmers.
I ask you and whoever is listening to this, whether it be on social media or whether you read it in the newspaper, call your congressmen, your senators, anybody. Tell them that HOPE for Small Farm Sustainability, Victory Farm Land Access, needs to be reinstated, and our funding needs to be released.
We've identified the lands that we want to purchase. We did that between 2000 to 2025. At the beginning we were ready to close. We have four properties in Central Texas, close to Houston, San Antonio, Austin, the metropolitan areas, where people who are in those areas are interested in farming and don't have land, they will have the option to have access to land. Help us help others.
Editor's Note: The above remarks were delivered by Diana Padilla-Garcia, founder of the nonprofit Holistic Organic Practical Education (H.O.P.E.) for Small Farm Sustainability and owner of Yahweh’s All Natural Farm and Garden in Harlingen, at a press conference she called to protest a decision by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to terminate a $7.4 million grant.
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