By Jennifer Dorsett
Field Editor

U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Office of Partnerships and Public Engagement Director Mike Beatty recently visited the Lone Star State to speak with Texans about opportunities available through the agency.

During the two-day trip, Beatty reached out to youth, veterans, historically underserved communities and other key audiences to explain USDA’s various agencies and programs. The Office of Partnerships and Public Engagement works with partners to find solutions to challenges facing rural and underserved communities in the U.S. and connects those communities to USDA resources, Beatty noted.

“We work directly with Secretary Perdue through the OneUSDA approach. We’ve got roughly 30 institutions that we work with throughout the country that work with historically Black colleges and universities, tribal and Hispanic-serving partners,” he said in an interview with the Texas Farm Bureau Radio Network. “And we have liaisons there, and we really facilitate and partner with all the OneUSDA teams throughout the country.”

Beatty visited several food distribution sites in the Rio Grande Valley that have used the USDA Farmers to Families Food Box program.

“I think we delivered several hundred boxes out into some of the colonias in one day. We’ve got a pandemic going on. People are not able to work. Kids are not in school. So, this is just the right thing to do,” he said from a stop near Edinburg. “I love Secretary Purdue’s emphasis on that last mile and working with food banks and nonprofits all through the nation.”

He also met with leaders at Prairie View A&M University to discuss challenges faced by the local community and talked about ways USDA agencies could help.

“Our office has created a platform called Centers of Community Prosperity, where we really coordinate and work with communities around those locations and really focus on what their challenges are and work with them to match resources. We’ve put together quite a great playbook that has all the different resources of

USDA and other federal departments,” Beatty said. “We want to really help those communities build a bottom-up, locally-driven strategy to deal with their many issues. In a lot of ways, USDA actually does a lot of community development, which folks really don’t know that. But Rural Development can actually rebuild a community from under the ground all the way up.”

Working with socially disadvantaged and historically underserved populations is a key focus of USDA, Beatty said. Connecting those farmers and ranchers with information and assistance available through USDA will help populations like Black farmers across the nation to ensure their heirs are able to continue farming, he added.

The Texas trip wrapped up with a visit to Austin, where Beatty spoke at roundtable discussions for youth and veterans in agriculture.

“The secretary has such a strong emphasis on youth, and we work closely with 4-H and FFA. We have some tremendous internship and scholarship programs to identify these great young people with futures in agriculture,” he said. “We have a lot of military veterans we’re working with coming out of the service, and we’re doing some really innovative programs to help these veteran farmers and ranchers be successful also.”

Click here for more information about the Office of Partnerships and Public Engagement.