“In 1985 is when the entire ag industry, business leaders decided to come after Hightower and attempt to defund the agency in various components. Those guys hated (John) Vlcek and hated the marketing program. They just thought we were nuts and that Hightower was nuts by focusing on small farmers, which of course was exactly what Farmers Union wanted. Vlcek […]
Robert Maggiani
“(T)hat’s another legacy relationship that we have, industry has, with HEB, because Hightower and the staff really put a lot of energy into making it happen. We did a lot of behind the scenes work that nobody saw but it did make it happen. HEB did a lot of promotions, still do a lot of promotion. They have a big […]
Barbara Lange
“If you remember one thing, it’s the educational part (of the Black Farmer Conferences). We talked about taxes. We talked about tax credit. We talked about funding, we talked about developing….That’s where Gus (Townes of the Texas Department of Agriculture) and the rest of the high-tech people came in. They knew where to go find specialists. There’s so many different […]
Ben Delgado
“I was the mechanic, the admin guy who knew how to do contracts, knew who to call, figure out how to hire people how to bring people on board, how to schedule things out, how to organize meetings, all the understated and underappreciated, even to this day, admin stuff that has to happen in order to make an organization work…I […]
David Currie
“In the agricultural world, what we’re doing with these farmers markets, in the GDP of the agriculture of Texas it’s not huge, but to the individuals that come here and sell these products, it may be why they get to keep living in this community. The other young lady that came after me, Bernadette (Pfieffer), the African American woman. That […]
Juanita Cox
“(W)ith Hightower, we were very proud, we were able to get even stronger pesticide regulations than what California had at that time….It was the combination of having people in office that cared about the people that harvest the food for this world. It was the power that the union had built in farm workers that said we want you to […]