With a stated goal of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is to provide “Equal Access” to all its programs to qualified applicants and to prohibit discrimination in all programs and activities on the basis of race, color, national origin, age, disability and other factors where applicable, the geographic area of service for this project is the East part of Texas. This request will focus on 60 of the populated SDVFR counties in East Texas. The target audiences of this project are SDVFR under the age of 55years old. The Census shows that this age group includes over 700 African American farmers, 7592 farmers and ranchers of Hispanic origin, 347 farmers and ranchers of Native American origin, and 143 farmers and ranchers that are of Asian origin. Also, in our target audience for this project are SDFRs who have less than ten years’ experience. This group includes 1997 African American farmers and ranchers, 12,810 farmers and ranchers of Hispanic origin, 747 farmers and ranchers of Native American, and 396 farmers and ranchers that are of Asian origin. These various groups of farmers and ranchers will be the target audience for this project, with the intended result of ensuring that they participate in more USDA programs.
Figure 1 shows the East half of Texas Counties. East Texas is commonly divided into three areas:
1) Upper East Texas in the Piney Woods near Arkansas and Oklahoma;
2) Deep East Texas;
3) South East Texas near the Gulf Coast. This area has over six million acres of crop, range, and forest land.
