Harlingen nonprofit fights to revive small farm project after USDA pulls $7.5M grant

Harlingen resident Diana Garcia-Padilla thought that she’d be able to help the next generation of small-scale farmers in South Texas purchase land to get started with the help of a $7.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture awarded in 2024. 

But the co-owner of Yahweh’s All Natural Farm and Garden and leader of Hope for Small Farm Sustainability found out in late March 2026 that her dream for Texas Victory Farms, which she had described in her application, wasn’t going to happen. 

The Joe Biden administration’s USDA program was meant to increase land, capital, and market access for underserved producers — worth $300 million across 50 projects nationwide — and was funded by the Inflation Reduction Act. 

This grant program, among many others, was canceled by the Donald Trump administration because it was labeled a diversity, equity, and inclusion effort. 

Padilla said the project isn’t political. It’s about growing the Texas agricultural industry, she said Wednesday during a press conference in Harlingen. 

She plans to appeal the decision to the USDA, which described the program as “discriminatory preferences based on diversity, equity, and inclusion and constituted wasteful spending that did little to further agricultural land purchases.” 

“We’re going to debunk that letter. Unless small farmers are considered DEI, we’re not,” Padilla said, saying Texas is rapidly losing farmers and farmland, and that the money would not have been wasted. 

In 2025, the USDA estimated that the nation lost 15,000 farms and ranches. That includes 2,000 in Texas alone. 

The Texas Victory Farms project was described to target Black, Indigenous, and people of color, or BIPOC, farmers, which included refugees and asylum seekers, according to the nonprofit’s application on the USDA’s website. 

The goal was to train farmers through an apprenticeship program that includes a 20-foot-by-20-foot starter plot, which would be scaled up over three years. Participants would have access to the land at no cost, with the goal of preparing farmers to eventually qualify for Farm Service Agency loans. 

In 2022, Padilla said she wrote the grant with a plan to purchase 800 acres at $4,000 per acre. By the time the grant was awarded in 2024, there wasn’t any land available at those prices; it was closer to $10,000 an acre. But the nonprofit still found some acreage in Central Texas to move the project forward, anticipating a closing this year. 

“Farmers are quitting. They don’t have the next generation trained. How can the next generation of farmers even make it?” she queried. “It’s impossible.”