Tucked away at the end of Kenaf Road just west of Raymondville is a small farm that has commercially produced a little-known tropical delicacy for seven years. Pitaya, more commonly known as dragon fruit, is a reddish oval-shaped fruit grows from the arms of a plant of the cactus family. Largely unfamiliar to Rio Grande Valley residents, this new crop has yet to be a common ingredient in a fruit…
The Texas Workforce Commission has awarded 23 grants totaling $4,998,598 to public junior colleges, public technical institutes, public state colleges and independent school districts for programs that focus on supporting high-demand occupations through the Jobs and Education for Texans (JET) grant program. Of note, eight of those grants went to local community colleges and school systems. “These grants will focus on advanced technical training, and will keep our Texas businesses…
Christopher Wycoco was the first man to graduate from the Entrepreneur Boot Camp at the Women’s Business Center of Cameron County. This year, the Women’s Business Center nominated him for, and he received, the 2018 Minority Business of the Year Award from the Small Business Administration. A native of the Philippines, Wycoco came to the Rio Grande Valley to pursue a career as a registered nurse, taking a position at…
Most funeral homes in the Rio Grande Valley are located in the more heavily populated cities like Brownsville, McAllen and Harlingen, with many of them owned by large corporations. But a few are still family-owned and operated. The small Willacy County city of Raymondville has two of them, down from three just a few years ago. Duddlesten Funeral Home and Good Shepard Funeral Home are both located along West Hidalgo…
VTX1 Companies has acquired Ranch Wireless Inc., a provider of fixed wireless internet service based in Seguin, Texas. Adding Ranch Wireless customers to VTX1‘s existing customer base will gives the company close to 20,000 total customers, making it one of the largest rural service providers in Texas. “This acquisition is important for VTX1 Companies in that we overlap approximately 4,000 of their 17,000 square-mile service area through our northern exchanges,” said Dave Osborn, CEO of…
Some may call it a dying industry as technology keeps swallowing one tradition after another, but the only bootmaker left in Raymondville and one of a few in the Rio Grande Valley keeps defying the odds against dozens of commercial bootmakers. Armando’s Boots Co. has been producing the custom-made footwear for nearly 40 years and is not showing any signs of slowing down. The 77-year-old owner, Armando Duarte Rios, comes…
Ever since Raymondville posted a whopping 66-percent increase in sales tax revenue for October 2017 over the same month in 2016, the small Willacy County city has continued to see gains with percentage growth among the highest in the Rio Grande Valley. With a population of fewer than 12,000 people, the Raymondville economy took a blow when Walmart closed in January 2016, laying off 149 workers. At the time the…
When Charles Edward Wetegrove and his brothers Joe and Raymond inherited the family’s 500-acre Las Majadas Ranch in Willacy County, they knew they wanted to keep the ranch, their heritage, intact. Their great-grandfather had come to the Wild Horse Desert in 1872, began rounding up wild horses and cattle and herding them north to markets. Eventually he established the 6,800-acre ranch where the homestead’s 1886 chimney ranks as the oldest…
Pitaya Farms growing in Raymondville Exotic in looks and name, dragon fruit is grown on structures similar to those found in vineyards. Chuck Taylor, owner of Pitaya Farms of Texas LLC, west of Raymondville, said dragon fruit is actually the domesticated version of the pitaya, a native cactus which originated in Mexico and central America and was transported to Asia, where it acquired the dragon fruit label. Pitaya Farms harvested…