Meet Diana Padilla, a woman from Harlingen who had the audacity to think that teaching Texans how to grow their own food was a good idea. For years, she and her husband have been running a community garden, giving “pep talks” to people who couldn’t afford organic kale at the farmer’s market. It was all going great until she landed a $7.5 million federal grant to take her “HOPE for Small Farm Sustainability” show on the road. Naturally, the government stepped in to remind everyone why we can’t have nice things.
The USDA, now under the Trump administration’s “efficiency” regime, decided to yank the funding because the program was reportedly “rife with DEI preferences.” Because nothing screams “radical diversity agenda” like teaching a 78-year-old woman in Kaufman County how to mix seed-starting soil. The USDA even threw in some spicy allegations about other grant winners spending money on massages and $20,000 ink pens. Padilla, who has spent less than 10% of her grant—mostly on boring stuff like tillers and seeds—is now the lucky winner of a federal ghosting.
While the feds are busy high-fiving each other for “saving” us from the scourge of inclusive gardening, Texas is losing farmland faster than a Lubbock local loses their mind during a half-inch of snow. We’ve lost nearly 4 million acres of working land in the last 25 years. But hey, who needs locally-grown produce or “sustainable food systems” when we can just pave over the entire state and eat imported cardboard?
Padilla is planning to appeal, hoping the government realizes that “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” isn’t actually a secret code for “how to grow a tomato without being a patriot.” Meanwhile, the educators she hired are out of a job, the community plots are gathering dust, and the dream of a self-sufficient Texas is being buried under a mountain of bureaucratic spite.
If we can’t even teach people how to play in the dirt without it becoming a culture war, what’s next—making sure the tractors are sufficiently “anti-woke” before they’re allowed to turn a furrow?
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