Good morning. I believe this woman (Diana Padilla-Garcia) is very humble and she's eloquent, always eloquent. That's why HOPE has become such a success, because she's been able to express, not just passion, but with clarity, how our local communities can be very good partners with the federal government to accomplish real community-wide benefits.
My role is to advise on projects and grants. For HOPE, I’ve been doing it for years, and this was one of the projects that we were very pleased to go after, because we saw disturbing trends in the (Rio Grande) Valley that were actually statewide trends as far as the loss of agricultural land to non agricultural purposes.
I'm going to give you some numbers. First of all, Texas A&M has estimated that from 1997 to 2022 Texas lost approximately 3.7 million acres of working lands, agricultural land, to non agricultural. Within the last five years, 1.8 of that 3.7 million has been lost. So that trend to turn agricultural land into non-agricultural land has been expedited in the last five years.
This development here, where you remove a partnership trying to reverse the trend in three selected areas of Texas, is really not a very forward thinking decision by USDA.
There's also a statistic about the annual land conversion rate within the top 25 highest growth counties, including two here in the Valley. Over a 25-year period, it has been about 67,000 acres per year. That means that we're losing 67,000 acres a year to non-agricultural purposes. It could be industrial. It could be subdivisions. It could be government construction, like the building behind us. It could be anything other than growing food, other than growing crops, other than producing what we need to produce domestically in the US for our domestic production.
So, every acre that you see converted to non-agricultural is one acre that is never, ever going to produce again food for our local population. And to me, that's a big deal. When you do that, and if we're part of that trend, to exacerbate that trend, then we're doing a disservice to taxpayer dollars. And that's one of the biggest consequences of this decision by USDA.
Let's get down to the Valley. What about the Valley? I'm going to give you four numbers. Four counties in that period of 2017 to 2022… actually, it was updated to 2025 by Texas A&M last year… Cameron County lost 108,726 acres - 108,726 acres went from agricultural lands to non-agriculture. That's just Cameron County. That was a 30% drop. Hidalgo County, 59,419. Willacy County, 6,456 acres, agricultural production became non-agricultural. And the whopper, the one that is really a shocker, is Starr County. They lost 576,290 acres in agricultural working land, which probably means a lot of pasture land was no longer pasture land for different reasons, some of some of which Diana (Padilla-Garcia) mentioned.
That means that in the Rio Grande Valley, we've lost 750,891 acres. We were an agricultural powerhouse in Texas, in the US. We were, for decades, the place to be for agricultural innovation, agricultural production, supporting the US market. And now with this kind of a trend, we're going to be a footnote if we don't take action like HOPE did here, which is to preserve and to keep agricultural land as agricultural land.
Obstacles. Diana mentioned a few, but I'm going to mention a few more. It's really hard to be a producer, whether you're large, small or medium. But for small producers that are really trying hard to contribute to the local economy, there are obstacles left and right. All of them are surmountable. All of them can be addressed. But we need partnerships with the federal government. Finding adequate labor for our small producers, skilled labor to support the operations of the farm.
A level playing field for small producers versus large. Did you know that if you have two or three cattle, and you want to process them, you want to slaughter them, you want to harvest them so you can sell the meat at a local farmers market, or you want to sell them to a local retailer… you can't do it unless it's USDA inspected, government inspected meat. So, go raise cattle, and then when you're ready to harvest them, you’re ready to convert them into meat products, come see HOPE about where you take them. And they will point you north. Not one county over. Not two counties over. Not three counties over… (you have to go) 250 miles with your cattle before dawn to get there in time to drop off your your cattle in Wilson County, outside of San Antonio. That is the only place that Yahweh Farm, or any other local farm that has farm animals can go for USDA inspection services. So that's not a level playing field. That's not a level playing field if you want to compete your product with larger producers of, in this case, farm animals.
Of course, the urban pressure that we feel up and down the highway, up and down the expressway within the Valley… we can't tell the cities to stop. The natural progression of a city is to grow. But we can collaborate. Right now, this farm is in the city of Harlingen, within the city limits. But every city in the Valley has to be sensitive to how their roots are agricultural. They're not urban. They were agricultural hubs from one end of the Valley to the other. And so every city here needs to review the ordinances. They need to review their regulations on how they help local producers, whether they're in the city, in the ETJ or outside the city, how to partner with the county to support the small producer. Help them create markets. Help them partner with the school districts. Help them partner with other providers of local foods. There are many ways to collaborate from a local government perspective.
Land values, we've already talked about that, and yes, the aging of farmers, the aging of our family farm families. They're aging, and their kids may not pick up the baton to keep farming. That's just the reality. And if that's the case, then really what HOPE is trying to do is to recruit more young people who are in different professions, to get them into growing food, to get them into eating organically, to get them to understand exactly how food gets produced. Ant it can be produced. Whether you have a small yard, a front lawn, or you have two acres that your family has done nothing with for years, entities like HOPE and other partners in the community can really help you turn those situations - maybe idle properties - into productive lands to produce food and support the household.
My last point is this. This is a message to USDA. Yes, we are going to go to you and we're going to ask you to reconsider your decision. At the same time, we're going to make it very clear to USDA, as well as the Texas Department of Agriculture, we need you. You are, you have been, and you are a tremendous partner to local producers, particularly small producers. HOPE is a testament to that. Yahweh is a testament to that. There are farms up and down the Valley that have benefited from the USDA programs, everything from technical assistance provided by entities like HOPE to funding studies that have helped us document these concerns that we have. For example, the study that I mentioned about lack of access to meat processing, this is the study that Yahweh funded through a USDA grant. So, USDA itself is part of the solution. They're helping us to document what's needed for the small producer. And we're partners.
We don't just compete for funds and then just let them sit idle. We don't just walk away after we benefit from taxpayer supported assistance. We want to convert all this assistance into real outcomes for our communities, whether it's a study, whether it's helping an individual complete training at a USDA funded nonprofit such as HOPE. We need USDA to continue being a champion for producers, but of all sizes, not just the largest ones. We have seen a very disturbing trend of consolidation of large farms, which are making them bigger. If they get bigger, they will have the monopoly over production of our agricultural products. And, of course, the imports from Mexico, Latin America, those will continue because of the large orders for products from the Midwest and the Northeast and other parts of the US. We can't stop that trend, but what we can do here locally is take care of ourselves by producing locally, convincing our young people to get into food production, get them off the phones once in a while, to learn how to get their fingernails dirty, get mud on their shoes, plant it, monitor it, feed it water, feed it what it needs, which is a lot of love, a lot of attention, and then enjoy the harvest of what they produce. And that's the template. That’s the momentum. We want to keep encouraging partnerships with USDA, the Texas Department of Agriculture and other tax paying entities that we know care about farmers. We just want them to stay focused on the small farmer, particularly. Don’t forget us. Thank you.
Editor’s Note: The above remarks were made by Salomon Torres, president of Harlingen-based Soluciones Consulting, and projects and grants advisor to Holistic Organic Practical Education (H.O.P.E.) for Small Farm Sustainability, at a press conference held by HOPE to protest a decision by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to terminate a $7.4 million grant.
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