I am a country girl at heart. Living in the city can be fun, especially in sunny South Florida, but most of the time I feel boxed in, like I can’t quite breathe. I miss my parents’ ranch: thousand-acre prairie pastures with nothing but cows, antelope, deer, grass, sky, and the occasional barbed-wire fence. No people, except me riding my paint mare. No sounds, except the wind in my ears, the chirping of meadowlarks, the rustle of grass. On weekends my husband and I flee in our Jeep with a tent and a cooler of beer for the solitude of places like the Everglades, Ocala National Forest, or Florida’s wildlife management areas. But our jobs require a city, so for now we stay.
Seeing Kevin’s farm, though, cracks open a door of hope. He’s proof that perhaps I, too, could go back to the land, even if it’s only ten acres on the outskirts of town. Surely other people feel unfulfilled in the city and want to get their hands in the dirt. Maybe like Kevin, we’ve only grown organically in our backyard garden, maybe we didn’t grow up on a farm, maybe we’d be taking a financial risk, maybe we can’t stray too far from the city. But maybe we feel it’s time to return to the land in some way. How, then, do people like us get started?
I’m sitting on a plastic lawn chair in front of a small, red-brick house. A yellow lab puppy rubs his face into my pant leg and I instinctively scratch his back, not realizing I’m doing it until he wanders off and my hand is left dangling. Two grown labs, one chocolate brown and one black, doze in a patch of sun. The yard in which my chair is located is mostly hard-packed dirt—this is the desert, after all—yet the gnarled cottonwood tree nearby seems unconcerned. It stands like an ancient statue with its leafy arms spread over the house and the street beyond. In fact, yards all over this neighborhood boast photo-worthy mature trees like this one, their roots sucking water from the Rio Grande riverbed below.
The Rio Grande—the most romantic-sounding river name—is just across the street, hidden by more trees and the built-up bank. I hear geese chatting about who-knows-what. When I crossed the river in a taxi earlier, the water looked like melted chocolate ice cream and was moving just as slowly, muddy and sluggish. It is a February afternoon and the temperature is in the fifties. No clouds, just stark sunshine glaring off the brown yard. In the sun it is warm—I get a light sunburn on my chest, just below my neck—but when a shadow creeps over my chair, I reach for my coat. This is my first time in the American Southwest. Officially, I’m presenting an academic paper at the Southwest Popular Culture/American Culture Conference in Albuquerque’s sterile, quiet downtown. Unofficially, I’m doing research for this book: interviewing Fidel Gonzalez, an organic farmer making his living just outside the city limits. I’m here to tour his backyard greenhouses and learn what it’s like to be an urban farmer.
I found Fidel by contacting the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) office in New Mexico.1 AFSC operates a farmer-to-farmer training program under the leadership of codirector Don Bustos.2 Bustos and others provide personal, hands-on training to beginning farmers for one year. The participants learn about crop selection for desert environments, soil health, irrigation, harvesting, food-handling techniques, business planning, and marketing. They are students of the earth for 365 days and are then released into the wild that is running one’s own organic farm. Thankfully they can call their mentors anytime. The program also provides economic assistance in the form of tools, seeds, equipment, and other as-needed items. No agricultural experience is necessary, only the will to succeed.
Fidel, forty-seven, graduated from the program and has farmed organically for the last five years, a job that literally and financially feeds him, his wife, and young son. Like Kevin, Fidel looks nothing like a typical farmer. No John Deere green in sight. He wears a straw hat with a black hatband, a black-and-white plaid jacket, and a yellow T-shirt underneath with a funky Aztec-inspired sun-and-moon graphic. Beaded necklaces lie against the collar, and I spot a flower tattooed on his hand. His black hair is clavicle-length and loose. He wears a thin, close-fitting silver nose ring, two silver earrings, and round, gold-framed glasses à la Elton John. He looks . . . ruggedly hip.
Fidel was born and raised in Mexico City and moved to the U.S. at twenty-two years old. Before going into agriculture, he was a professional musician. When he moved north of the border, he jammed with South American musicians in New York City and they formed a band. They played at the Gathering of Nations Powwow, the country’s largest Native American cultural festival, at the Atlanta Olympic Games, and all over the country, more than a decade of windshield time. Fidel lived on the road, always performing, always moving. On tour once, the band stopped in New Mexico. “I fell in love with New Mexico,” Fidel says. “I was trying to come back every year to play.”
In 2000 an exhausted Fidel realized that he did not want to be on the road so much, that he wanted to stay in touch with music but needed to put down roots. He hadn’t married because he couldn’t stay in one place long enough to date. Later, he moved to New Mexico, where he set up a home recording studio and started producing other people’s music. But he couldn’t generate enough income. He took odd jobs. His bank accounts dried up. In need of cash, he helped make a documentary with a friend, Pablo Lopez, who was also working with Agri-Cultura Network, a farmer-owned produce brokerage that markets certified organic, local produce from Albuquerque to restaurants, public institutions, and farmers’ markets. Fidel asked Pablo if he knew about any open jobs, anywhere, doing anything. Pablo suggested going into agriculture through the AFSC farmer-to-farmer training program. Maybe Fidel could join Agri-Cultura Network someday and market his produce through the organization, Pablo added.
“I had never done anything in my life with agriculture,” Fidel says. “When Pablo talked to me about greenhouses, drip systems, drip irrigation, cover-cropping, he was talking to me in a different language. Words I had never heard in my life.” Like most Americans, Fidel was a city dweller, a man of asphalt and concrete, not soil. He’d never considered farming as a career. Financial desperation fueled his decision more than a commitment to organic and sustainable living and eating, a commitment he has now but didn’t then. “At that time, it was more about saving my skin from being kicked out of the house where I lived,” he says. “So I told him yes. Five years later, I am here running my own business.” He smiles and gestures toward the greenhouse behind the brick house. The sun glints off his nose ring. A rocker turned farmer.
Fidel’s farm is USDA certified organic, with nothing that will hurt the earth, the crops, or humans, he explains. He grows lettuce, arugula, carrots, tomatoes, radishes, chard, kale, and collard greens, with plans for more varieties of herbs and vegetables. “Lettuce is all over,” he says proudly. Blood meal and bone meal, both approved biological additives, provide most of the soil’s supplemental nutrients. “Blood meal and bone meal are welcome in the organic world, unless you want to be totally vegan,” Fidel says. The greenhouses, not pesticides, control insects. Instead of herbicides, crop rotations effectively keep most plant diseases and weeds in check, with hand-weeding as the final defense.
Fidel irrigates the crops using a system of drip lines, much like Kevin does. “Traditionally, here in New Mexico, one of the techniques that they used to use for watering was the ditches that overflowed on the land,” he says. Indigenous people living along the Rio Grande dug irrigation ditches that date back to the 1500s.3 These ditches carried water to corn and vegetable fields, allowing human life to flourish in the desert. “The drip lines are a small version of that,” Fidel says. “The idea is to preserve energy in general, and water is one energy source. The drip system really helps us because we save lots of water. We just water the land that we want to get water, and you don’t waste energy cleaning the piece of land that you didn’t plant and all you have are weeds.”
Water stewardship is more important than ever. Drought has plagued New Mexico over the last three years, Fidel tells me. The previous two years were the driest ever recorded, and the region in general is warmer than it was fifty years ago. Groundwater supplies have dwindled, and some farmers along the Rio Grande don’t have enough water to irrigate. Dust storms sweep through, eerily reminiscent of the Dust Bowl.4 The entire Southwest, in fact, has experienced drought, which is only predicted to worsen: a 2014 study indicates an 80 percent chance (90 percent in some areas) of a decade-long drought in the American Southwest and, depending on how much climate change worsens, a 20 percent to 50 percent chance of a megadrought, or one that lasts thirty-five years or more.5 Even a decade-long drought, short compared to thirty-five years, hasn’t hit the U.S. since the Dust Bowl—and with the return of farming practices from that era, such as continuous cropping and massive fields with few fencerows and shelterbelts, we can expect such a drought to have a devastating effect on agriculture. Meanwhile, sprinklers keep golf courses and front lawns green and plush across the Southwest.
The problems New Mexico faces are actually nationwide problems, just amplified. In every state, industrial agricultural exacerbates water problems, drought or no drought. The environmental effects of agricultural runoff—fish and amphibian deaths, algae blooms, plant die-offs—only worsen in sources that contain fewer gallons of water and are therefore more concentrated with agrochemicals. Yet the Southwest is at the epicenter of what is already a water crisis, which could by default become an agricultural crisis in which the region produces far less food. In a pre-climate-change world, an extended drought in a single region and the collapse of its agricultural sector would be relatively manageable in terms of its effect on the national food market. Other states could compensate for reduced agricultural production in the Southwest. But we no longer hold such an insurance policy. The future of agriculture is shaky all over the United States as the effects of climate change reveal themselves: rising temperatures that cause crop failures, water shortages in some areas and severe floods in others, increased carbon dioxide levels that reduce the nutritional quality of pastures, and desertification. Very few farms now produce the majority of the nation’s food supply—this lack of diversity means that if anything happens to those big farms because of climate change, we are in trouble.
The question of who gets water is at the center of the climate-change discussion. Setting water aside for agricultural use is a good and necessary thing, as long as the users operate sustainably. As a society, we shouldn’t allow the careless use of water by giant, environmentally disastrous CAFOs, but we should encourage the reasonable use of water by carefully managed, grass-centered ranches. We shouldn’t stand by as industrial farmers fill eight-hundred-gallon tanks with water and pesticides, but we should applaud as organic farmers increase the carbon levels of their soils so that they absorb and hold water better than conventionally managed soil. For now, though, all farmers fight for a share of the water pie, and it’s a battle that grows fiercer with each year of drought.
At least water goes to good use in Fidel’s greenhouses: it helps feed people, mostly schoolchildren, nutritious and chemical-free produce. Still, he’s careful to conserve. “We have to be extra careful with water,” he says. “The idea of farming using the drip system is precisely about how to take care of the water we have as a community. We are in the middle of the desert.” The dry air chafes the inside of my nostrils with every breath as we sit and talk. I remember the airplane’s descent into Albuquerque: the brown that extended as far as I could see, crisscrossed by slightly lighter brown roads. The listless Rio Grande is across the street. We are in the desert, that’s for sure. One growing hotter and drier by the year.
Living where one works is the blessing and curse of being a farmer and rancher. There’s the physical beauty just outside the farmer’s doorstep: the hayfield shimmering with dew, the yeasty smell of grain inside a bin, a pasture dotted with cattle. By inhabiting the land, the farmer experiences a oneness with it, a sense of being pleasantly caught in its rhythms. These emotions can lead to feelings of completeness, of deep fulfillment, of having been called to this particular occupation.
But there is also the unending work visible through the kitchen window and audible in the bawl of a calf in the corral. When things are stressful—if there’s a drought and everything is dying, or if a blizzard has dumped so much snow that just getting from the house to the barn is a challenge—then there is no escaping the stress. On conventional farms, living where one works can even be a health hazard. Agrochemicals drift from the field to the farmhouse and seep into the groundwater that feeds the farmer’s private well. The stench from hog or chicken confinements or cattle feedlots ruins air quality and pollutes water sources, and makes children struggle to breathe and suffer skin rashes.
Life on my family’s conventional ranch is just such a mixture. The ranch’s towering flat-top hills, lazy creeks, rolling grasslands, and tree-lined gulches provide picturesque scenery. The prairie is all solitude and stillness, grand vistas and open skies. Some people feel exposed on the prairie, unable to hide; not everyone feels comfortable there, and I like that I do. It’s a place whose beauty never fails to inspire in me a sense of being very close to God. But all this falls away when I smell Roundup on the evening breeze as I sit on a lone hay bale watching the sun go down, or when I see the arrow-straight rows of GM corn, their brown tassels sharp against the blue August sky. Now I fear the water running from the kitchen tap, the beef on the table. One is exposed here—there’s nowhere to hide from the toxic effects of conventional agriculture.
To say Fidel lives where he works is an understatement. Half of his farm is literally in his backyard, closer to the house than any farm I’ve seen. He spends his days in two thirty-by-ninety-six-foot greenhouses, which together comprise the total growing space on his urban farm (he has plans to build two more on rented land roughly ten minutes away). One greenhouse stands behind his house and the other fills a neighbor’s backyard a couple of houses down. The farm also includes a brick side building for storage and starting seedlings, a walk-in cooler, and a shed. A waist-high iron fence separates the greenhouse from the rest of the yard so that the dogs cannot dig up or contaminate the produce. The greenhouse rises like a cathedral, and the sunshine makes its white plastic appear to glow from the inside out. A wood-and-metal frame holds the rounded structure together. Seven long beds stretch from end to end, filled with lettuce, arugula, and radishes. One bed is heated using solar panels installed by a local university, perfect for cold desert nights that might harm the plants. Squatting down, he shows me some lettuce mix that will be perfect for harvest on Monday.
Fidel markets his produce in four primary ways: through the city’s public schools, through restaurants, at farmers’ markets, and via a community-supported agriculture program that provides boxes of produce to member families.6 Agri-Cultura Network is the go-between for all transactions except for what’s sold at the farmers’ markets, which Fidel handles himself. He works two markets a week, one in downtown Albuquerque and another about ten minutes from his house. About 50 percent of what he grows ends up in restaurants, CSA boxes, and the farmers’ market stand. The rest lands on the lunch trays of school children (the public schools purchase only salad right now). “They are supporting the local agriculture and feeding the kids healthy produce,” Fidel says. “They haven’t changed completely—they still give them hamburgers and stuff like that—but this is a step ahead. It’s a really big step to feed the kids healthy vegetables and salad greens with no chemicals and stuff like that, and to support the agricultural movement right here in New Mexico. That will keep the money here with us and make the economy stronger.” It also means that Fidel’s farm doesn’t primarily serve the rich, but the entire Albuquerque community.
Fidel’s days now revolve around the growing cycles of arugula and carrots instead of the cycle of summer music festivals. His fingers pluck weeds out of the lettuce more often than they pluck guitar strings. He sells produce at farmers’ markets instead of performing at them. He recalls how he used to strum away next to the produce stands and see that people enjoyed the music—but they spent money on food, not CDs. Food is the first human need, he realized. “Music is great! But with music I cannot take your hunger away,” he says. And this is a hungry community. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, almost 22 percent of New Mexico residents live in poverty.7 Only Mississippi’s poverty rate is higher. Fidel feels good about the fact that public school kids, no matter their socioeconomic status, eat his organic lettuce for lunch. But not everyone can afford what he sells at the farmers’ market. He sees that when families make food decisions, money often drives the choices. “It’s hard when there are families with five, six, or seven kids that they have to feed and they are thinking, ‘One pound of lettuce at the farmers’ market is eight dollars organic, versus two-something at Wal-Mart.’ In a moment like that, I do not judge anyone because I am not in their shoes,” he says.
Fidel understands the fraught connection between food and poverty. He says the best thing he can do as a farmer is educate people about the benefits of organic and regenerative food and the artificial cheapness of conventional food. He tries to “lead others to change their consciousness” and to “wake people up rather than ignore the problems” that industrial food creates. The cliché that change begins with one person suddenly takes on significance as Fidel describes his vision for creating a regenerative agricultural future. He leans forward in his chair, elbows on his knees and palms pressed together as if he’s praying. “We have to have a sustainable community,” he says. “I believe that in order to have a sustainable community, you have to begin with you.” He points a finger at his own chest. “You have to be a sustainable person yourself. Then you will be able to have a sustainable family. Then you will be able to have a sustainable community. Then you will be able to have a sustainable society. Then we will be able to have a sustainable country. But the whole entire thing begins one person at a time, us. It’s a consciousness movement.”
Changing people’s consciousness about food and agriculture, he says, will also help expose the heavy influence of conventional marketing. “Before the industrial movement, before being called organic or pesticide-free or chemical-free, that’s the way everything used to be before. Anyone could have it at their tables. It was so easy before industrialization,” Fidel says. “Everyone could eat just the way we try to eat right now, healthy. Then they came with all the changes, all the propaganda of, ‘Eat this and you are going to look better, smoke that and you are going to have class, drive this kind of car and you are going to feel like a king.’ All that materialism, we can’t deny it is here. Now the problem is, how does that affect us to such a point that people start to feel comfortable just with fast food? So it’s not all about classism, it’s about how people want to live their lives. Like I said, I understand if there is a family with more than five kids they have to support. But at the same time the leadership of that family, the father and mother, can understand that instead of spending money on something they do not need, they can feed the children properly so they don’t have to worry about diseases later. We know it’s expensive at the time, but when you see over time the benefits of it, in reality it’s not expensive at all.”
Given his Mexican heritage, Fidel feels a special responsibility to reach out to Albuquerque’s Latinx community that makes up 48 percent of the city’s population.8 Though they’re half the city, Latinx families are overwhelmingly the minority when it comes to farmers’ market attendance, Fidel says. He wants to change that. “Of 100 percent, about 75 percent are women. But you see all kinds of people. Unfortunately you don’t see too many who speak Spanish, Latinos, buying organic food. It’s something we need to work more with, education, to educate our people,” he says.
The conversation takes a philosophical turn (I’m noticing a trend with my interviews for this book: a return of the farmer-philosopher of old, the yeoman). Fidel sees the lack of education about food—and the lack of wholesome, nutritious food available to all regardless of socioeconomic status—as an injustice. But injustice is everywhere, he points out, so how do we decide which of the many forms of injustice to fight? Fidel mentions the wars of the world and the drug-fueled chaos in Mexico City, his hometown. He muses that he could have been a soldier and fought injustice that way. But he doesn’t think violence is the best use of our energy. “How am I going to be more beneficial for the human race, with a rifle in my hands or with seeds in my hands? I respect what people are doing in places because they have to. There are no choices sometimes. It’s what you have,” he says. “But thankfully right here with us we have the opportunity to choose what we can do to help. And I don’t see anything else better than agriculture.”