All university and community members are cordially invited to attend the 2011 UNM Summer Foodshed Field School student media and poster presentations! This free event will be held Saturday, August 27th from 9:30am to 1pm in the Hibben Center on UNM Main Campus. Students will present their media and poster projects, which examine and celebrate the current state of our foodshed. The event will conclude with a delicious lunch of local foods. Please RSVP by August 21st to Terry Horger at thorger@unm.edu.

Local Food Festival and Field Day – October 9th

The Local Food Festival will take place on October 9th from 11am to 4pm at the Gutierrez-Hubbell House in the South Valley. Enjoy local produce and value-added products. Participate in hands-on workshops and cooking demonstrations. Listen to live local music and watch short films. The UNM Foodshed Field School students will be at the festival presenting their posters on various topics related to New Mexico’s diverse foodshed.

Burque Bioneers Conference – October 21st

The ‘Burque Bioneers Conference will take place at the National Hispanic Cultural Center on October 21st from 9am to 4pm. The conference will highlight national speakers from the annual Bioneers Conference, Breakdown to Breakthrough: Reimagining Civilization in the Age of Nature in California, and will bring in numerous local speakers for hands-on workshops, panel discussions and presentations. Local speakers will cover topics pertaining to permaculture, sustainable agriculture, seed saving, homesteading, community building, alternative transportation and water. Our Foodshed Field School students will present some of their short media pieces at this conference.

UNM Foodshed Field School students were given the opportunity to showcase their media projects at this month’s Mid Region Council of Governments (MRCOG) Agriculture Collaborative Meeting. Dr. Bruce Milne, Director of the UNM Sustainability Studies Program, provided a brief overview of the field school to the audience of about 40 community members, and then played the student media pieces.

Six of the fourteen field school students were able to present at today’s meeting. First was Kimberly Barnett’s piece, which featured student voices describing their favorite parts of the field school, and provided a great synopsis of the course. Next, Valerie Gurule presented a short piece on acequias. Amy Jones’ piece followed, with an original take on the concept of ayuda mutua, or mutual aid, as seen in various agricultural communities across the state. Brittany Herrera presented a short piece on Curandera Laura Alonso, which provided a great segue into Layla Wall’s piece about optimizing health and nutrition by eating traditional foods within our foodshed. Tiana Baca-Bosiljevac wrapped up the media presentations with a “green hero” piece on Joe Garcia, Outreach Director of La Plazita Gardens in the South Valley. Strong work, ladies!

The student media pieces were well received by audience. During the panel discussion that followed, students received questions about:

1. The opportunities and barriers apparent in our state’s current food system
2. If the students’ personal eating habits changed during the course of the field school
3. How students will continue their work on campus over the upcoming semesters
4. How we can work to reach the goal of 10% local food consumption in the state
5. How to deal with the issue of the high cost of local food in a global marketplace where food prices are artificially low due to subsidies and unfair labor practices
6. Potential career paths students have identified in the local foodshed

New Mexico and Texas together form the third largest milkshed in the US, after California and Wisconsin. Herd sizes in New Mexico are relatively large: about 2,100 head on average, compared to 170 head average throughout the US. There are 150 dairies in New Mexico – the majority located in the eastern part of the state – and each cow is producing around 24,300 gallons of milk per year. According to Dr. Hagevoort, today fewer cows produce more milk, due to better management, feed and living conditions. This means that the carbon footprint of a gallon of milk has been reduced by about two-thirds since the 1940s. For comparison, the US produced 117 billion pounds of milk from 25.6 billion cattle in 1944, whereas today 186 billion pounds of milk are produced from 9.2 billion cattle. Ultimately, the process is more efficient…but is it more sustainable? Economically speaking, the dairy industry does great things for New Mexico, bringing in almost $3 billion annually in sales of milk and other indirect and value-added business associated with the industry.

Dr. Hagevoort is especially interested in building New Mexico’s capacity for renewable energy and creating novel economic opportunities for the dairy industry. He is currently working toward establishing biomass cooperatives that would aggregate manure from local dairies, and building facilities that would then refine that material into biogas using methane digesters. According to Dr. Hagevoort’s calculations, 5 kWh of electricity can be produced from the daily waste of one cow. With about 350,000 dairy cattle in the state, over 21 billion MWh of electricity could be produced annually, enough to satisfy 3% of New Mexico’s total energy usage.

After the presentation we drove out to the Do-Rene Dairy, where we got a tour by owners Doug and Irene Handley. Recently the Do-Rene Dairy received the New Mexico Environmental Department’s Green Zia award for its commitment to environmental protection and effective management of waste. The Handleys manage two dairy sites, one with 2,100 head and the other with 3,100 head of cattle. Together, the two locations produce between three and five tankers of milk per day (for reference, a tanker holds about 9,000 gallons of milk). The Handleys sell most of their milk to the Clovis-based Southwest Cheese Company, one of the largest cheese producers in North America. Southwest Cheese can process 200 tankers of milk into cheese every day! According to Dr. Hagevoort, about 60% of New Mexican milk goes toward making cheese.

At the Do-Rene Dairy, cows are milked twice a day by an automatic milking system. The animals file into a raised chute where they are separated from one another by small metal gates. An attendant attaches a milking apparatus to the udder of each cow after cleaning the udder with an iodine solution. The apparatus detaches itself after a prescribed amount of time, the iodine cleaning process is repeated, and then the cattle are released. The milk is pumped in plastic lines to a number of chilled tanks, where it is held before being transferred to the tanker truck. To milk the Handley’s two herds of cattle using their current automated setup requires two 8-hour shifts of continuous milking beginning at 5am. After touring the milking barn, we drove through the covered dirt areas where the cattle are kept outside and fed. We ended at the calf hutches, where the female calves are kept in individual plastic shelters and fed buckets of milk until six months of age. After that the calves are transferred to a larger group pen until they are old enough to be bred and become milk producers.

Our final stop on the trip was at the Mennonite-run Fort Sumner Processing Facility in Fort Sumner. It was akin to taking a step back in time: As we entered the store area, a Mennonite woman wearing a simple cloth bonnet, long-sleeved white blouse and long dark skirt stepped in and asked for a dozen eggs. After a moment she realized she had no cash with her and asked to have the cost of the eggs put on her account. That sense of individual care and personal interaction echoes through much of the work that is done at the Fort Sumner Processing Facility.

We met with Darren Burns, owner of the facility, and he showed us around the cut and wrap room, the aging room and the kill floor. In the aging room, mirror-image sides of beef hung from the ceiling; the fat on the grassfed carcasses was yellow (due to high levels of omega three fatty acids), whereas the fat on the cornfed carcasses was a pale white.  Darren had slaughtered a cow (with a single shot to the forehead) just before our arrival and we watched as he skinned the animal, drained its blood and disemboweled it. For many, it was the first time to witness such an event, and we felt humbled that this animal had died to feed a local family. We learned that offal and blood from the facility are composted with woodchips at the nearby landfill. Hides are packed in salt and picked up periodically by a buyer who uses them in his upholstery business.

The Fort Sumner Processing Facility is set up mainly to serve the surrounding community. Darren can process up to four animals per day, and due to excessive customer demand no longer carries the USDA Inspection seal. Darren found that when his meats were certified USDA Inspected, he was overwhelmed with customers from all across the state demanding specialty retail meat orders, and was no longer able to serve all of his smaller local customers. Even though the USDA Inspection seal brought in business from a larger part of the state, it became an impediment for Darren because of the restricted work hours and lost profit. USDA Inspectors are paid by the federal government to work Monday through Friday from 8am to 5pm; any overtime must be paid by the facility. Because Darren normally starts work well before 8am, and also works on Saturdays, he would either have to pay the Inspector overtime wages or reduce his own work hours just to secure the inspection seal – so, he decided to give it up. This means that meats processed at his facility cannot be sold through a grocery store or co-op, but can be sold to private parties, like families or individuals.

On the drive home, about 45 minutes east of Albuquerque, the skies turned dark and we got the first substantial rain of the summer. We rolled the van windows down and stuck our arms and faces outside, savoring the cool drops on our skin. Rejuvenation. Growth. The rain led me to reflect on our experiences over the past month. Our understanding of the breadth and diversity of the current foodshed (and opportunities for future growth) has grown immensely. However, this was possible only because our numerous hosts were gracious enough to share their most precious resources with us – passion, knowledge and time.

From the solar array, we walked across the road to a lush, shady pecan orchard where Bruce described the history of Haley Pecan Farm. The land was once farmed by his father in alfalfa and cotton production. Over time, his father saw how lucrative the pecan business was becoming in New Mexico and slowly started transitioning his fields into orchards. This move required some patience – and faith – as it takes about 12 years for pecan trees to become established and begin producing. It was at this point that Bruce became involved in the farm, and eventually took over.

Bruce estimates that there are about 40,000 trees in his orchards; in total, he and his staff manage 92 separate fields in the area. Pecan orchards require a certain amount of maintenance: the orchards must be flooded every two weeks (pecans require 5 acre-feet of water for maximum production), fed with zinc foliar sprays four to five times per season, and thinned regularly so that sunlight reaches through the canopy. Bruce sells his nuts to New Mexico pecan shellers and also directly to Chinese buyers after the harvest in late November. Pecan production is extremely variable from year to year. Last season, the farm brought in a bumper crop of about 6,000 pounds of pecans per acre; this year Bruce is expecting to harvest 500 pounds per acre. In total, the farm produced 6 million pounds of pecans last year – about 10% of New Mexico’s entire pecan crop. Because of the variability of pecan farming, Bruce hedges his bets by getting creative. He owns specialized equipment like tree-spades (used for transplanting full-grown trees) and tree-shakers (used for harvesting nuts) that he contracts out to local farms. He also helps smaller growers in the area by buying their harvests at a fair price and then aggregating the nuts with his product. This is necessary because the smallest sale that most distributors or buyers will make is on the order of 48,000 pounds. It was great to see such creative and thoughtful management of an orchard this size.

After we bade Bruce goodbye and had a quick roadside picnic lunch, we headed northeast toward Portales. Our next destination was the Sunland Peanut Butter Plant. Sunland Inc. was formed in 1988 and aggregates, processes and distributes Valencia peanuts grown by local farmers in eastern New Mexico and west Texas. Portales is known as the Valencia Peanut Basin of the Nation, as about 90% of the Valencia peanuts produced in the US are grown within 120 miles of the Sunland Plant. Veronica gave us a tour of the processing facility and warehouse, where both organic and conventional peanut butters are made and stored. Sunland makes its own brand of peanut butters, and it also has contracts with numerous other brands, such as Trader Joe’s, Costco and Sunflower Farmer’s Market. In fact, most of the organic and additive-free peanut butters available in the US are made at the Sunland plant. We also toured the roasting and shelling facility, where both in-shell and shelled peanuts are roasted, bagged, stored, and then shipped across the world.

We were lucky enough to have the opportunity to speak briefly with the Sunland Inc. CEO, Jimmy Shear. He has been managing Sunland since its inception in the late 80s. Even though the company has grown substantially over the past two decades (it now has 100 employees), Jimmy still operates Sunland as a small, family-owned business. In order to save on operation costs, he is currently looking into investing in some form of onsite renewable energy – preferably wind – to generate electricity to run the energy-intensive plant. Jimmy has also found an economically viable way for Sunland to coexist with the expanding local dairy industry. Peanut hulls are now sold to local dairies to use as cattle feed, and some of the Valencia peanut production has moved just across the border into west Texas, where arable land is plentiful and more affordable.

Our last stop of the day was at a recently planted peanut farm in Portales that sells its harvest to Sunland. For most of us, it was our first time seeing a field of peanuts! Peanuts are legumes that, unlike beans and peas, grow underground and are irrigated by center-pivot systems. They are usually planted in May and harvested in the early autumn. Each plant grows about 20 peanuts that have three to five kernels per shell. The sandy soil of the Portales valley and surrounding high plains is favorable for plentiful peanut production.

In 1968, George Ranney bought two adjoining properties that became the Ranney Ranch. Upon his death in 2002, he left the ranch as a family partnership to his four children and their spouses and his ten grandchildren. At that point in time, Nancy and Melvin began seriously looking into holistic management practices, in order to improve the ecological condition of the rangeland. They decided to combine the 21 separate herds of cattle that were once dispersed across the ranch into one, and move the larger herd on a planned rotational grazing basis in order to give the land ample time to recover and the vegetation regenerate. Originally the ranch had been dominated by a blue grama grass monoculture; within three years of practicing rotational grazing, over 25 species of native perennial cool and warm season grasses and legumes had returned. At the same time the ranch was seeing increased biodiversity and soil organic matter, it decreased its fuel costs associated with checking on the herd by 50% and feed costs by 60%.

The ranch sold its first range-raised, humanely handled, grassfed beef in 2004. Now most customers come to Nancy via the internet or through word of mouth. Calves are 100% grassfed; they have never been given any grains, hormones or antibiotics, and their meat is low in fat and cholesterol and high in vitamin E, beta-carotene, antioxidants and heart-healthy fatty acids. Each fall, beeves are sold to customers and humanely slaughtered and dry aged by the Mennonite-run Fort Sumner Processing Facility.

Recently, Ranney Ranch has made a foray into alternative energy. On a smaller scale, they have replaced several older windmills at watering troughs with efficient solar powered pumps. On a larger scale – and in conjunction with the Southern Corona Landowners’ Association – the ranch has signed a contract with FirstWind, a wind power company out of Boston, to install turbines and transmission infrastructure on their property. Although Nancy knows that this decision will negatively impact the land in a number of ways, she is hopeful that the revenue generated from the lease will allow the ranch to be more profitable. This move may also help convince other landowners in the area to move toward a more sustainable future by investing in renewable energy.

After the in-depth overview of the ranch, we loaded into pickups and headed overland across bumpy dirt roads to get a sense of the ranch’s scale. We stopped at a number of water tanks to see the cattle and horses. We also explored an ancestral Puebloan ruin and searched for potsherds. The highlight of the day was a lunch of home-made Ranney Ranch brisket sandwiches in a shaded side canyon, and an afternoon adventure into a cave with a freshwater spring seeping out of the sandstone wall. At the end of the day we were physically exhausted, but mentally invigorated. We had seen a progressive, sustainable model of ranching that really seemed to work! The excitement among the students was palpable, and dissipated little as we pulled into Roswell that evening.

Rebecca gave us a tour of the Anthony Community Garden, a project created by the grassroots Colonias Development Council and maintained in partnership with La Semilla Food Center. The community garden was founded in December 2008; the quarter acre site has a greenhouse, a compost area, numerous family garden plots, a small orchard, a functioning horno (built by YCC youth), and an outdoor adobe ramada classroom in progress. Out of the community garden initiative have grown school gardens and garden clubs at nearby elementary and junior high schools. Community members and youth associated with the garden have also helped Anthony families establish backyard gardens at their homes. A new program – Raíces de Tradición – now engages community garden youth and their families in gardening, cooking and nutrition activities, and is held at the neighboring Women’s Intercultural Center.

After our tour of the Anthony Community Garden, we walked over to the Women’s Intercultural Center for a delicious Tex-Mex style lunch (prepared by women in the facility’s commercial kitchen) and more conversation about youth and community food initiatives. The center is a fascinating organization that “intertwines learning opportunities, economic development options, and relationship building with the larger community for purposes of mutual consciousness-raising.” Its mission is to provide bilingual education and economic opportunities to women who have recently migrated to the US from Latin America. Center participants have created viable handicraft, food-based, and other entrepreneurial businesses, and have become well-respected border/immigration/human rights advocates. The feeling of empowerment in the center is tangible – in fact, local women were trained in alternative construction techniques and in 2001 built the center’s beautiful 7,000 square foot rammed earth/recycled tire structure themselves!

After lunch we headed north to Las Cruces, to the New Mexico Farm and Ranch Heritage Museum (with a quick detour past fragrant onion fields, and through shady tree-lined roads to Stahmann’s Pecan Farm and Store). Students explored the Farm and Ranch Heritage Museum exhibits – some of the highlights being the green chile, New Mexico dairies, and Dust Bowl exhibits – and then spent the remainder of the afternoon working in a museum classroom crafting their research posters. After the sun set and the temperatures dropped below 100° F, the group enjoyed a delicious New Mexican dinner in Old Mesilla and strolled around the plaza in the sultry evening.

At the Sheep is Life festival, informational booths and vendors were spread across a shady field next to the college rodeo grounds. Workshops on spinning, felting and weaving were taking place. Assorted fleece, yarn and weaving supplies were for sale. Churro sheep were being shown in the rodeo grounds. Bags of fleece were being judged on their quality. A weaving exhibition – Chant of the Spider: A Holistic Journey into Diné Fiber Arts – and weaving sale were set up in the campus museum. The group spent a few hours enjoying the activities at the festival, and then jumped back in the vans and headed home for a brief reprieve before the final week of the field school. Next week we’ll be wrapping things up in the southern part of the state.

In the canyon we visited with Adam Teller’s aunt, who raises sheep and grows much of her own food. She no longer works and lives in Chinle, having decided to farm full time in the canyon and make a living by selling her weavings. We watched her weave part of a small rug of naturally-dyed fiber on an upright loom, and listened to the story of Spider Man and Spider Woman (the holy people who taught the Navajo how to weave). We also got to try our hand at turning carded wool into coarse yarn using a wooden spindle. Next, we viewed the verdant fruit orchards, the small vegetable garden and the corn fields. The water table is surprisingly high in the canyon – less than a few feet below the sandy wash. Even during periods with little rain, the high water table allows plants to grow relatively easily in the canyon. When more water is needed, large trenches are dug into the sand; the water that collects is then carried in buckets to the fields, and each plant is watered sparingly.

After our farm visit we continued walking in the sandy canyon wash, passing by Junction Ruin and First Ruin, ancient Anasazi cliff dwellings. After a few hours of hiking through the spiritual landscape we climbed triumphantly out of the canyon, emerging at the Tunnel Overlook on the South Rim Drive. Feeling refreshed after a rest and a number of iced teas, part of the group decided to make the most of the remainder of the day by taking in the viewpoints on the South Rim Road. The highlight, of course, was the last: the sacred spire of Spider Rock where Spider Woman is said to live.

The Navajo Dam is an earthen dam that was constructed on the upper San Juan River during 1957-1962.  It was built as a part of the Colorado River Storage Project, a system of dams and reservoirs across the Southwest that manage the water supply and distribution in the Colorado River Basin. The reservoir behind the dam, Navajo Lake, is 35 miles long and stores 1,708,600 acre feet of water at full capacity. The Navajo Dam provides flood control and water (municipal, domestic, industrial and agricultural) to northern New Mexico and water to the middle Rio Grande Valley (including the City of Albuquerque) through the San Juan-Chama Diversion Project. The City of Albuquerque, with a population of almost 550,000, has annual rights to 48,200 acre-feet of San Juan-Chama Diversion water. Compare that to the 508,000 acre-feet from Navajo Dam that is allocated to NAPI on an annual basis!

An interesting fact to ponder is that most US dam/reservoir systems have been constructed to have an expected lifetime of 100 years, based on average siltation rates. Some may last as long; some may not (a good example of a reservoir that has experienced faster-than-expected siltation rates is Lake Powell). Very little planning has taken place to prepare for that point in the future when the large dams of the Colorado River Storage Project can no longer function at their present capacities. One has to wonder how Southwestern cities and large-scale desert agriculture can be sustained when the current water supply cannot be guaranteed much past the year 2050.

For environmentalists, Navajo Dam has been a mixed blessing. Although the reservoir affects the fluvial and terrestrial ecosystems of the San Juan River up to 35 miles upstream of the dam, the flows are now carefully monitored to ensure that enough water is released downstream – and diverted through the San Juan-Chama tunnels – to keep up the flows of the Rio Grande south of Albuquerque in order to sustain the endangered silvery minnow.

After a roadside picnic lunch in Farmington, we drove back in the direction of NAPI on our way to the NMSU Agricultural Science Center Experiment Station. The landscape was a strange juxtaposition of things both sacred and profane, traditional and modern. In the foreground the Four Corners Power Plant belched black smoke, slightly obscuring the more distant monolithic Shiprock, which solemnly towered above the gently undulating desert plain.

At the NMSU Agricultural Experiment Station, we were given an in-depth tour by station researchers Drs. Kevin Lombard and Mick O’Neill. Although the Experiment Station was originally established in collaboration with the Navajo Nation (and NAPI) to research which crops grew best in the sandy soils of the Four Corners region, it now serves a much larger community – from small agricultural producers to industrial operators, as well as rural and urban homeowners and growers.

The diversity of research performed at the station, and the progressive nature of much of the work was extremely impressive. Numerous viticulture trials of both wine and table grapes are underway. Linear forests of fast-growing poplar are being cultivated for the fibrous filling in swamp cooler pads. In other sections of the poplar forest, studies on the uptake of heavy metals and pharmaceuticals from humanure (biosolids from the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority) are being performed. Offsite, the phytoremediative properties of poplar are being tested in areas contaminated with nitrates (dairies) and free product (natural gas exploration and extraction wells). A number of hops varietals are being cultivated for high yield production in the arid Southwest, for the benefit of numerous regional microbreweries. Researchers are also experimenting with trendy, high value specialty crops like goji berries.  In addition, the Experiment Station maintains an urban xeriscaping demonstration garden and various low-water use turf grass trials. Sometimes, scientific research can seem gratuitous and irrelevant; however, the projects at the NMSU Agricultural Experiment Station are especially relevant to the current (economic and climatic) condition of our region. In all, researchers at the facility strive to expand the economic opportunities available to local growers and value-added producers, as well as develop low water use crops better suited to the area.