Quivira Coalition

Working within the framing question: What can be done to accelerate the return to and wider-scale adoption of regenerative agricultural practices?, the Zone collaborative, supported by the Quivira Coalition, came together to develop a strategic and holistic approach to building the capacity of farms, ranches and nonprofit organizations, and to advocate for and implement these techniques throughout New Mexico. 

During the grant, the group increased its capacity by hiring additional staff to engage in deep, culturally informed, conflict conscious dialogue around the tense, cultural, often colonial history of water and working lands in New Mexico. The resulting impact was the New Mexico Coalition to Enhance Working Lands (NMCEWL), a collaborative that rooted itself in understanding the historical and cultural background of working lands in New Mexico, and integrated these land stewardship lessons for future farmers and ranchers. 

While the COVID-19 pandemic created challenges in bringing the network together to engage in dialogs around faithful stewardship of water and working lands, the collaborative successfully shifted their gatherings to virtual, hybrid and in-person formats when possible, as a way to preserve the efficacy and impact of coalition building and educational meetings, especially during times of crisis. 

The collaborative has trained and worked with emerging leaders in the agricultural workforce that are committed to effectively stewarding working lands in New Mexico. These efforts to support a growing agricultural workforce are critical in building viable futures in sustainable agriculture and land stewardship throughout our state. Many of these individuals are fellows with the New Mexico Coalition to Enhance Working Lands. These are some of their stories. 
 

Rick's Story

My name is Rick Martinez. I worked at car dealerships in the backend-service department area for 35 years, and retired because of COVID. I saw how ugly people got and how they became, and I just wasn’t enjoying my job much anymore. I spoke to my wife and she said, “You know what, you’re not having a good time. Maybe you ought to start running the farm full-time.” 

We always talked about how when we retired, we wanted to live off the land. We have just under three acres in Espanola. My wife wants to retire in a few years and it was time for me to get everything ready on the land – I had to get to the farm to the point of where it can pay the bills. 

I decided that I needed to get involved in the acequia. In order for us to thrive off our land, we’re going to have to have water. And, water in New Mexico is a very big issue. I had always told the acequia folks that once I retired, I would involve myself more with the acequia. One day, we were cleaning the ditch and complaining about how far down on the ditch we are – and we get the last of the water. Sometimes, we don’t get any water at all. I was talking to my neighbor about how we needed to start paying closer attention, and he took it to heart and nominated me for treasurer. When elections came, I got elected. 

It was about two weeks into the job, that I realized being treasurer wasn’t just about balancing a checkbook; it’s about going after funding, getting capital outlay and making sure the acequia thrives. We had $20,000 that we were about to lose in December because we hadn’t used it; spending that money became my priority. 

The first thing I did was ask what we needed for the acequia. Where the water comes in – where the gate is that opens to the river and feeds the ditch – had issues. It leaks and that’s what the money was earmarked for, so we needed to get it fixed. I was able to reach out to the legislators and get an extension. We started getting designs for the gate and now we’re ready to start construction, but it’ll need to wait until after the irrigation season.

Around the same time that I started as treasurer, I began seeing posts on Facebook about the NMCEWL fellowship. All my educational background is in automotive workshops and leadership seminars that the dealerships would send me to. Nothing about the environment and agriculture. I thought, “This fellowship will help me meet people who know what they’re doing.” Through the program, I want to learn about acequia funding and figure out the irrigation system issues – because they’re not going to go away. 

Nobody irrigates off of the first mile of our ditch – it goes through federal lands and Indian lands. Maintaining that section is where we have the most expense year after year. If we could line or tube that area, we wouldn’t have to deal with the maintenance as much. That’s where my project for this fellowship is focused – to get funding and start phases of lining that part of the ditch so the water will flow faster downstream to the farms.

Being a farmer, it feels like I’m bringing back what I took for granted. My grandfather was a farmer in Pecos. He always had a massive farm, and he had cows that we had to go feed. I hated it. I thought, “I don’t want to do this.” But, once I hit my 20’s, I started to miss it. I admire all of our local farmers. We’re feeding the community. During COVID, everybody came to us for green chile. We dehydrate a lot of our vegetables – so we dehydrated our green chile and our tomatoes. We were set in COVID, and nobody in our family went without chile or vegetables. 

My wife does canning and she wrote a cookbook on Northern New Mexico recipes. It was published and it took off like hotcakes; it’s sold close to 6,000 copies. Tied into that cookbook and everything else we’ve got going on with the farm, that’s going to be our retirement. But it’s going to involve making sure that we’ve got the water to do what we want to accomplish. 

We only have one child – a son in his 30’s. He’s an air traffic controller in Roswell. If there’s an opening in Albuquerque, he’ll transfer up there. But, the number one rule for us as a family is: “Never sell the farm.” The farm is going to stay in the family to kids, grandkids, godchildren – someone in our family who is interested in farming, but it is going to stay in the family. It’s a family legacy. 

My wife and I bought raw land in 1996 and worked it to what it has become now. Before it was just pasture land; half of what we grow is just pasture for our one cow and now her calf. We’ll breed the two of them when it’s time. If we drop a bull, we’ll castrate it and that’s our meat. Right now, our freezer is full of meat; it goes to our family. That’s what my wife and I do for our family. It’s our goal. We don’t want to get rich; we just want to survive. 
 

Casey's Story

My name is Casey Holland and I’m the farm manager/director of Chispas Farm. We’re a four-acre, diversified vegetable market farm. We also have a large CSA program, and do a number of different community initiatives throughout the year. We grow over 120 varieties of heirloom fruits and vegetables; we have goats, sheep, ducks and geese, and a flock of laying hens, in addition to rabbits. We do a little bit of everything on this tiny-big farm. 

I never in a million years thought I’d be a farmer. I grew up in southern New Mexico. Outside was just oppressive when I was a kid; I hated it. But even as a young one, I had a desire to do something about all of the struggles in the world and I didn’t really have language for it. I went to UNM for sociology and psychology, and was really turned onto the plight of the world we’re facing – the societal structures and oppressive power systems, and all the “isms.” I was given language with which to describe some of the intensity that we’re experiencing now and how it came about. I really wanted to do something about it, but I had no idea what I could do. It can feel pretty hopeless as an individual sometimes when we’re faced with all these big problems.

I was lucky enough to go to school during the Occupy Wall Street Movement, and I got really involved with those folks. Through that, I was connected with some food justice organizations, specifically Southwest Organizing Project’s (SWOP) Project Feed the ‘Hood. When people talk about food systems, it’s often language of destruction, chaos and ruin, but SWOP was talking about liberation and creation and something constructive that we could do. 

I was studying Peace Studies at the time, and had to do a community internship. I reached out to SWOP to do my internship with them [Project Feed the ‘Hood]. They said “yes,” and that was the single most transformative semester – my very last one – at UNM. It changed everything for me. I started out on the Feed the ‘Hood farm. Then I jumped around to a few different farms – doing field labor for a few seasons. Then I got connected with Red Tractor Farm in the South Valley. I was there for over four seasons, and was connected with Chispas in 2017.

This space, more than any other space I’ve been on – particularly because I’ve been here the longest and it’s the space over which I have the most autonomy – has been the biggest lesson in environmental stewardship. When I got here, this whole place had been abandoned for a few seasons. I was trying to listen and see and respond to what the land needed. At first, it was just cover crop, some seeds and water now and again. Slowly, over the years, it developed. We haven’t needed any pesticide application since 2020. Nothing – not even organic. We don’t need to purchase fertilizer anymore. I have a really strict soil management regime that we follow, so now we can just use our on-farm-chicken-manure-compost. That’s all we need for the entire farm. 

One of my goals has been to make the space hospitable to more-than-humans. Last year was the first year that we had toad sightings, and now we have three or four resident toads. Yesterday, we had a snake spotting. When you’re caring for the ecosystem, it becomes a home for other beings. The more beings that want to come and share the space, the more you know that you’re on the right path. 

There’s three pillars of sustainability: social-community, economic and environmental. We try to address all of those areas in the systems we’re creating on the farm. As far as social goes and paying our folks a fair wage, this year we were finally able to offer $13 an hour with a three percent profit share. Next year, I’m hoping to do $15 an hour with a five percent profit share and just keep increasing from there. 

We do a number of different community initiatives; we host free cooking classes on the farm throughout the summer in partnership with Sprouting Kitchen. We also accept Double-Up Food Bucks and accept food stamps directly on the farm, so we opened a farm stand specifically for the local community to be able to come and access food at a price that’s affordable to them and fair to us. I really like the food being as much direct-to-consumer as possible. Mostly, we’re able to keep the food within a five-mile radius for our community. 

Economically, we do break even every year. It surprises me sometimes. We’ve been very intentional over the years to develop crop planning in ways that maintain the diversity of our plants, while prioritizing the ecosystem and working with the fields in order to get the production that we need to meet our numbers. 

One of the most challenging aspects of this work, particularly as a young person who doesn’t have many resources of my own, is that none of this is actually mine. It’s all a matter of how long the property manager wants to keep us here, and whatever he decides to do with the land as he gets older and makes those life decisions. It all feels so tenuous. This is technically my third start on a new place, where I’ve really brought it up. I don’t know how many new starts I have left in me. This is a place that I’ve developed and have this intense, wonderful bond with – but I also realize that it could all potentially just go away if the next person who’s here doesn’t want the same thing. 

A lot of the work I do, for me, is centered in radical politics. I don’t think that when people think of farmers, they think about farming as being really rooted in this idea of creating systems that work for ourselves which are outside of existing systems. Many of us are here trying to create the networks that will support our communities when we’re no longer getting existing system supports. I think the pandemic really opened people’s eyes to how unrealistic our existence is. We had been able to survive on consumerist goods that were readily available at really cheap prices, but are based off of the exploitation of people around the world in ways that cannot continue.

Many of my peers who are growing and farming are trying to figure out how we can at least mitigate some of the losses when those systems are proven to be fragile and they actually do start collapsing. When it gets really hard out here, that’s what keeps me going. I remember during those first few weeks of the pandemic, when no one really knew what was going on and we had no idea what would happen. We already had seeds in the ground, and I thought, “If things get really bad, at least my neighbors are going to eat.” That’s what so many other farmers were thinking, and I’m glad that people realized that in the moment. 

It's heart work – the three H’s: head, heart and hands. I feel so honored and privileged to be able to build this relationship with my community and provide healthy and nutritious food, and meet all the beings in this space. People express their gratitude [to farmers] all the time, but what does it actually mean? 

Thanks to the person who owns this land, we’re able to have a no-cost lease, which is really important. We need more people who are willing to do that. There are too many people who have a spare acre in their backyard and they’re going to charge a farmer $2,000 a month to farm it. But, what are they doing with the land otherwise? It’s literally dust. Then we come and put our heart and soul into the land and make it into something, and they think they can make a profit. That’s not what it should be about. It’s really about challenging those people with resources to start thinking of ways in which they can offer those resources to people who are trying to do good work, and who are trying to support and keep our communities alive.