Trusted source: Valley farms offer residents an alternative to big-box grocers

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HARLINGEN — Beatrice Guzman looked into the freezer full of chickens.

She planned to buy some chicken and perhaps a pork shoulder and some vegetables. She appreciated and valued the fact that the chickens and the pork and the vegetables had been grown at a local farm where she could speak with the owner.

Welcome to Yahweh’s All-Natural Farm and Garden at 19833 Morris Road where members of the local community can purchase grass-fed beef and pasture-raised chicken, pork and lamb. In the store, customers can purchase goat cheese and moringa powder and fresh onions and garlic and zucchini.

They’ll find fermented cabbage and fresh chicken eggs and perhaps duck eggs, watermelon and radishes and dried cilantro.

And they can speak directly to the grower, Diana Padilla, owner of Yahweh.

“It’s a different relationship when you know who is growing your food,” said Padilla, who is also the director for the nonprofit HOPE for Small Farm Sustainability.

Purchasing meat and produce from the large corporate stores like H-E-B and Walmart means customers have no idea who produced it.

“It may have come from Mexico or Canada and who knows where else,” she said. “When you sell your animal to the feed lots, you lose a lot of money. When you sell it directly to the consumer, the consumer knows exactly what they’re buying, who they are buying it from.”

Farmer’s markets supported by small local farms and ranches seem to be spreading across the Valley. Local farmers and ranchers have been producing goods to sell locally for quite some, and their presence appears to be taking on a greater visibility.

At the Farmer’s Market in Harlingen recently, local producers sold homemade granola, frozen fruit, spicy sauce, jellies and Tamarindo candy. They sold blue oyster mushrooms and zucchini and broccoli, containers of seeds to plant basil and parsley and green beans, carrots and radishes and agave honey.

And people came to buy.

“I just like local produce,” said Gregg Garcia, 46, who browsed through the granola and the jellies and Tamarindo candy being sold by McAllen resident Guadalupe Aguirre.

“I like getting the out of the ordinary that you can’t find on the shelf,” he said. “I believe government needs to stay out of it. People need to be able to access our vendors and local farms and ranches.”

Aguirre had brought her produce first to the farmer’s market in Brownsville which opens 9 a.m. to noon, and then stopped off at the market in Harlingen — as is her practice every Saturday.

“We do vinegar’s and cookies,” she said. “This granola is made of blue agave honey.”

Local meat and poultry producers can promise consumers better quality and selection.

“You can come to our ranch and pick out your animal and know that it never had any antibiotics, never had any hormones, that it was never given any kind of drugs and that it lived in an absolutely stress free environment,” said Katherine Julia, who co-owns PNK Ranch in McAllen.

She and her husband raise and sell Wagyu beef cattle at the ranch.

But there’s a problem — for them as well as other meat and poultry producers.

“With the rules that are in place now that only benefit the large-scale commercial beef producers, we can’t sell individual steaks here,” Julia said. “We’re not allowed to by law. Unless we take our animal at least 250 miles just south of San Antonio to a USDA certified processor and then otherwise we can only sell our animals in quarter size or whole animals. We’re not allowed to sell individual steaks.”

There’s also the hassle and the expense of having to transport live cattle 250 miles away.

“If I drive my animal 250 miles away just the stress from the transport can cause adrenaline spikes which can cause the meat to become less tender,” she said. “It can also cause the animal to lose up to 200 pounds because of the stress which gives me less beef to sell. So, the way it’s set up now with the processing rules, it is completely unfair to the local producer and the small farmer. And it makes it to where you have to buy beef that you have absolutely no idea where it came from.

Under the current rules, producers can only use USDA-approved processing plants, the same facilities used by the largest meat producers, says the Institute for Justice website.

Unfortunately, the website continues, the number of USDA-approved meat processing plants have declined.

“This forces small farmers and ranchers to book appointments months in advance and then travel hours — often across state lines — two slaughter their animals,” says the website.

However, two bills under consideration in the legislature could change that.

At a press conference in April, the Farm and Ranch Freedom Alliance, in partnership with a statewide network of farmers, ranchers, livestock producers, and consumers, formally the Texas State Coalition for the LOCAL Foods Act of 2025 and the PRIME Act.

LOCAL stands for “Livestock Owned by Communities for the Advancement of Local Foods. PRIME stands for Processing Revival and Intrastate Meat Exemption Act.

These two critical, bipartisan pieces of legislation would remove unnecessary federal barriers that currently limit the ability of Texas farmers and ranchers to process and sell locally raised meat. Their passage is essential for strengthening small farm viability, increasing local food access, and rebuilding regional food systems, said a statement from FARFA.

“The PRIME Act increases access to slaughterhouses,” says the Institute for Justice. “It allows small-scale farmers and ranchers to slaughter and process their own animals closer to home at ‘custom’ slaughterhouses, which are small facilities regulated by state law instead of the USDA.”

Julia, Padilla and other growers — and their customers, say that support for local producers is important for many years. Under the current system, beef may have come from Canada or Mexico or someplace farther away. Consumers have no way of know where their meat came from, what kind of hormones and antibiotics were used on the animals, or long ago it was processed.

Or what might have happened to it along the way.

“Who knows when it was processed,” Padilla said. “You get to communicate with people and tell them that. The carcass comes from somewhere else, frozen, to H-E-B or Walmart or wherever, and the date on the package is the day they cut and packaged it. It’s not the date it was processed. The date on our meat is the date it was processed. That’s the difference.”

Small farms and ranches also provide a source of food when disasters strike.

“When COVID happened, and the grocery stores were empty, people knew they could come here and they found eggs here, and they found vegetables here and the found meat here, so if a catastrophe does happen, and we have local producers.”

A bell rang and one of those producers entered the store with a basket of tomatoes and onions.

Her name was Sandy Woods, and she packaged her goods with the name “Nested Exotics.”

Markets like Yahweh are vital, she said.

“It’s invaluable,” Woods said. “It means everything. It’s the reason I still garden the way I do. I mostly grow bananas and dragon fruit. I use organic practices, and everything is fresh.”

Meanwhile, as an employee arranged several types of squash, a farmer outside approached the store with an armful of vegetables, and all seemed well in a chaotic world.

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