“I told John (Vlcek), ‘I’d like to put up a market here in Tyler’… So we had a meeting and we had about 15 to 16 producers in East Texas to show up for the meeting and explain to them what we was trying to do. But then I went on the Horace McQueen Show and advertised it and promoted […]
Mike Nassour
“I want to credit Jim Hightower’s cantankerousness, and just by God bullheadedness with raising awareness in this state that people are hurt by pesticides. They are. Just because you can buy something at Lowe’s or Home Depot doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to spray it on your face. I think people get that now because of the work he […]
Hightower and the Business of Organics in Texas
In this Substack, we continue to tell the forgotten story of Hightower and the Texas Department of Agriculture in the 1980s. One of the forgotten stories that should be remembered is the role Texas played in the Organic Food Industry. Texas was the first state to create a certifiable Organic label. A certifiable label was essential to the expansion of […]
Cather Woods
“Jim Hightower was one of the best things for Texas in my experience, in my lifetime, and I’m 78 years old. So, I started working with farmers during that era. He was really nice. He worked hard to make sure that he made it better for blacks. By making sure that you knew what was there, by reaching out to […]
Ellen Widess
“One of the provisions they (the Trump-era EPA) wanted to get rid of was the farmworkers’ right to have their doctors, or any other advocate, a lawyer, priest, worker center, anybody, union, get access to their pesticide safety sheets to know what they were exposed to, what the risks were and to be able to go after the company and […]
Gus Townes
“A lot of these towns were drying up. They didn’t have anything in them, not even a farmers market. So our strategy was to try to revive rural towns using farmers markets…The first one I had Leroy [Biggers] put together. When we got there, that farmers market only sold roses. That’s a big rose-growing area up around Tyler. So that […]
Brigid Shea
“The (Clean Water Action) canvass had a unique ability to literally be this foot soldier army that could go out door-to-door and reach people who may not show up elsewhere, but who really agreed with the idea of better protections for the environment, and eliminating excessive use of pesticides that were poisoning people, and making opportunities for organic farmers to […]
Freddie Richards
“Initially, the (Texas Agricultural Finance Authority) program funded people who wanted to take ag from production to processing and marketing, from the commodity production side to the processing side. Then we tried to help people who wanted to fund specialty projects that included viticulture, bees and deer and Christmas trees which were also considered to be agricultural diversification. Not 100 […]
Alfred L. Parks
“We had a guy that came in from the Dallas area. He had no farming background, but he had married into a family that’s local here… “My family has land not far from Prairie View, and we want to get into watermelons.” He created a supply chain. What he had done was go out and develop some markets with Luby’s. […]
Jesse Oliver
“(O)ne of my first formal relationships with agriculture was at the Black Farmers Conferences and getting some history of what was going on with them and what had transpired…The few who held on, who actually worked the land and stayed there, were still facing difficult times, mistreatment by USDA, especially with respect to support farm loans, crop loans, crop insurance, […]