Former Farmworker Becomes First Latina Farm Owner in California

We as a country wouldn’t be able to survive without farmworkers. They work long, thankless hours in fields under all kinds of extreme weather conditions picking the produce that we later buy at the grocery store and use to feed our families. But their pay is so low that upward mobility and promotions are incredibly difficult to achieve. That’s why we love hearing stories like Maria Catalán‘s, who recently made history as the first Latina farmworker in California to own her own farm. She currently owns 55 acres of land in Hollister, located in San Benito County south of San Jose, where she runs her organic farm Catalán Farm. This historic feat comes during a time when 92 percent of farmworkers in California are Latinx and 77 percent are male, according to the California Research Bureau. Of the 3.4 million agriculture producers in the U.S, only 3 percent identified as Latinx in 2022. Catalán’s journey is truly one of a kind but she also recognizes that there are many migrant women who are farmworkers and also mothers who don’t get the same recognition.

“My story is not only mine. It’s the same as thousands of women that, like me, are single moms and migrate with their kids,” Catalán told KCRA, a Hearst affiliate in Sacramento.

Catalán was born in Guerrero, Mexico to a family with a long history of farming. Her grandfather was a farmer and cattle rancher who migrated to Texas in the ’60s to participate in the Bracero Program, which allowed Mexican citizens to legally work in the American agricultural industry to make up for the labor shortage caused by World War II. Maria grew up attaining farming experiencing and immigrated to Salinas Valley, California with her four children when she was only 25 years old. There, she worked as a farmworker in the fields for about a decade until she was invited to participate in an organic farm training program hosted by the Rural Development Center in Salinas, Monterey County.

In 2001, she used her training to rent half an acre of land and harvest different kinds of produce. Today, she grows and harvests tomatoes, cauliflower, kale, and other organic produce on 55 acres of land. As an activist, she is passionate about fighting for the rights of migrant workers and developing equitable food systems to make fresh produce more accessible to marginalized communities, including community members at schools, churches, and those experiencing homelessness. She even founded Pequeños Agricultores en California (PAC), a nonprofit organization that helps migrant farmers get their organic certification and apply for funds to buy their own plots of land. For her efforts, she has received recognition from the USDA and the Center for Latino Farmers.

“This is my life mission. To feed my family and my community while helping bridge the gap of an unequal food system,” she said in a statement on her website. “Here in the United States they call it organic agriculture, but for us Latinos, it is the only way we know how to farm, it is the agriculture of our culture.”