Fidel, his wife, Raquel, and their young son, Tenoch, returned three weeks ago from a visit to Mexico, where they stayed with Fidel’s family and toured the ancient pyramids at Teotihuacán. Fidel tries to visit Mexico at least once a year. Raquel is originally from Puerto Rico, so the family travels there as well. Fidel’s dream is to take his family to India to see the Himalayas. I’m not surprised by this dream; Fidel is a worldly man, a person who understands the importance of appreciating and learning from other cultures. He is an artist at heart, and the beauty of India’s landscape, food, and music appeal to him much like the vibrant culture of New Mexico did years ago. Traveling is most difficult for him during the peak growing season, which is during the school year. The greenhouses allow him to grow year-round, though, unlike most New Mexican farmers. The summer heat can be brutal, but he says proper attention and preventative steps like growing drought-resistant crops and providing extra water or shade can mitigate those problems. If he stops growing, it’s only because he wants to take a break during the slower months.
Traveling is something Fidel can better afford now that his business is generating profit. He survived the three-year waiting period that comes with organic certification, and every year his crops are more productive as his knowledge grows. “The first three years, it was a challenge for me,” he says. “As far as I understood when they were training me, they told me right away, ‘If you put good energy into what you are doing, you are going to see results in the next four or five years. It’s going to take you awhile. You are not going to see money right away. You’re going to make money enough to pay your bills, but a good profit is going to take four or five years.’ This is going to be my fifth. So by now I can tell you that last year I had really good production and I expect this year is going to be more than that. I can just tell you by my experience, even if it’s a short experience, it’s a beautiful way of living economically speaking if you pay attention to what you have to do. Agriculture in general is a good way of life.”
The farmer-to-farmer training program sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee purchased most of what Fidel grew that first year so that he had a consistent market. The program also helped pay for the greenhouses, a rototiller, and a raking machine, and mentors like Bustos provide continuing support. Practical farming knowledge, Fidel says, was the most valuable thing he gained from the program and his mentors. They didn’t just swoop in and set him up with equipment and seeds, then disappear. The program lasted a full year. The training was hands-on and personal. Students and teachers stay in touch, see each other around. The program also created a community of like-minded regenerative farmers, an invaluable resource in a world where agriculture classes and resources overwhelmingly service conventional farmers. I’m reminded of the Chinese proverb, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” The program taught Fidel and others how to fish for the long-term.
But the greatest gift of all came later: personal fulfillment. Farming was just a job at first, he says. It’s way more than that now. “Now I wake up every day and I feel good going out working in the greenhouse, preparing the seeds. I feel that satisfaction when I see my son eating what I plant,” he says. “I remember the first time we gave him chard and collard greens. When I see my family eating what I plant, I feel the satisfaction.”
His days are split two ways now: agriculture in the morning, family in the afternoon and evening. “I want to be there with my son and watch him grow,” he says. A typical day starts with farm work from about 6:00 a.m. to 1:00 or 2:00 p.m. Fidel takes a break, then plays with his son, practices for upcoming shows, or works on recordings. He performs a music gig once a month or so. He wouldn’t trade farming for the musician’s life now, he says, even though music is still an important part of his identity. He’s found another way of feeling alive. “You need to touch the soil, you need to smell it,” he says. “Sometimes when we are harvesting, I just grab the carrots—for some reason I like the mix of the carrots and soil, maybe because of the sweetness of the carrots and how they smell—and you feel like, ‘Wow, this is life for real, man.’ I’m not saying what other people do is not life, it’s just that it means more for me what I’m doing now than what I used to do before.”
This is what’s been lost for many because of industrial farming, what farmers and ranchers desperately need to feel again: a connection with the land. That this is life for real, man. Industrial farming demands that farmers set aside feelings and focus on numbers, profit, yield per acre. This approach makes farmers simple producers, not stewards. People become machines: replaceable by other machines, dispensable, their job secure only as long as they are mechanically necessary.1 They are bodies inside tractors that inject GM seeds into chemically sterilized soil. They are not men and women who feel joy at the smell of carrots and soil mixed together.
I tell Fidel it sounds like he sees agriculture as a spiritual experience. He says yes, that agriculture is part of what it means to be human. “I do see agriculture as a way of life, a way of living,” he says. “Agriculture means everything in life. Everything comes from agriculture. We are talking about social, political, artistic, religious, whatever, anything.” Having food allows a society to create art, contemplate philosophy, make music, discuss politics, things that aren’t directly connected to physical survival. I hear an echo of Phil in Fidel’s words. If we don’t do our job right, there isn’t room for others.
Fidel’s three labs bark at people who ride by on horseback or stroll past on foot. The neighborhood is silent except for these dogs, and their barks echo down the street. The yellow puppy barks at everything: his shadow, the toys in the yard, me if I stand up too quickly. Downtown Albuquerque is less than ten minutes away by car, but sitting under the ancient cottonwood tree, I would never know that if I hadn’t passed through on the ride over. This side of the river, a thirty-nine-square-mile neighborhood called the South Valley, is outside the city limits, but with its streets and houses, it’s clearly not the country. Tiny one-hundred-year-old adobe houses still exist here, but so do fancy equestrian parks. Not urban, but not rural. A local real estate website calls it “rurban.”2 The lack of land for sale in the South Valley is an issue for Fidel. “The land is not even our land,” he says, waving toward his second greenhouse down the street. “We have friends who allow us to use their land. Because we are limited in that part, we are trying to figure out how to make it productive. Ideally the best thing would be to use it one year and let it rest one year. But that can only happen if you have a good quantity of land.”
By resting the land he means planting cover crops to replenish the nutrients used by the cash crops, like Kevin does. With only 5,760 square feet of land, however, Fidel can’t afford to devote any to covers, so he needs to expand. The planned addition of two greenhouses is a start, but he’ll still lack the security and flexibility of land ownership. Bustos told him that three acres of land, when managed properly, can produce enough food and income to provide for a family. “So we need double that to have the other half in cover crop, so we need six to ten acres,” Fidel continues. “That way you will be sure you are taking care of the soil and the earth while you are doing business, too.”
“Having land is not about being a more powerful farmer or whatever, it’s about creating the community,” Fidel continues. “Having our own land, a good piece of land, means producing more jobs, too.” Fidel recognizes—and I do, too—that he has the potential to lead people, to be a job creator, to use agriculture to improve people’s lives not only in terms of their health, but also their career. Expanding production would allow Fidel to employ locals as Kevin does. “Let’s say I could use somebody else’s land, another acre. That means I can produce a job for another two or three families,” he says. “We produce healthy food, we make the economy stronger in New Mexico, and we produce local jobs.” Fidel’s “we” means the state’s organic and regenerative farmers.
In a desert the most secure place to farm is near a water source. Though the Rio Grande is at record-low levels, it’s still one of the most stable water sources in the region, so Fidel is hoping to acquire land near it. He also wants to stay close to his urban customers, keeping the transportation footprint of his produce minimal. “If I can find something like this”—he points at his backyard—“no more than thirty minutes away that would be great,” he says. Fidel was quoted $105,000 per acre for a piece of land near the river, not far from his house—an exorbitant cost compared to what other farmers pay. Farmland in Iowa costs, on average, $8,750 an acre, according to the USDA. Farmers in New Jersey pay $13,000, the highest in the nation. The U.S. average is $4,100. Other New Mexico farmers shell out just $1,450 an acre—the second-lowest nationally.3 But Fidel isn’t trying to buy farmland, he’s looking at prime riverside property that could be developed into expensive homes. At the quoted price, he would pay more than $1 million for ten acres. He doesn’t have that kind of money, and it’s unlikely that he ever will. His options are either to finance a large purchase or buy small pieces over time. Even if he abandons the river idea, staying within thirty minutes of his house means he’ll still pay Albuquerque prices. This is the challenge urban and rural farmers alike face if they don’t inherit farmland—and with the nation’s farmland consolidating into fewer hands every year, the challenge only grows more difficult.
Fidel isn’t letting land woes get him down, though. Overall, he says, his worries are few. Despite being a city, Albuquerque is not a bad location for growing food: no hailstorms, tornadoes, major floods, or long winters. The economic and social environment is even better. “It is a good thing to be a farmer now in these times in New Mexico,” Fidel tells me. “We have had really good reception from the community.” Fidel is right: it is a good time to be a farmer, particularly in Albuquerque. The city is about to undergo a quiet agricultural revolution. Farmers like Fidel are part of the city’s larger goal of reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050. Albuquerque’s Climate Action Task Force has proposed an eight-part plan, pending city council approval, to achieve reductions.4 One part involves local food and agriculture.5 This piece is further divided into four strategies: (1) increase the amount of food produced inside city limits; (2) support the development of the food shed in New Mexico (“food shed” means the geographic region that produces food for a specific group of people, the goal being to encourage New Mexicans to buy within Albuquerque’s food shed, or within a three-hundred-mile radius of the city); (3) incorporate food and agriculture in city planning, landscaping, and design; and (4) engage every city department in promoting local food production and consumption. The proposal is chock-full of concrete ideas: gardening classes for children and seniors, incentives for private and commercial greenhouse farming, land to be set aside for community gardens, edible landscaping, bus service to farmers’ markets, and the establishment of a “buy New Mexico” preference for city food purchases. Urban farmers like Fidel represent a new component of Albuquerque that the city wants to nurture in order to achieve an energy savings target of 25 percent from 2000 levels by 2020. In short, the city wants to encourage agriculture and revolutionize the food supply.
I look at Fidel and see the future that Albuquerque’s climate task force must have envisioned: a city agriculturalized from the inside out. A diverse collection of farmers and livestock producers working within city limits and beyond to feed people in a way they haven’t been for more than a century: locally, regeneratively, and thoughtfully. The city’s carbon footprint drastically reduced. People armed starting in childhood with the knowledge to feed themselves, people supplementing their grocery lists with produce from community gardens, edible landscaping, and backyard gardens. It’s an inclusive future, one that welcomes young and old, rich and poor, service workers and wealthy business owners. This is what we need nationwide: regenerative agriculture happening in the city as well as the country as part of a broader commitment to responsible living.
Fidel and I climb into his small, battered Ford pickup, similar in size to a Chevy S–10. He’s driving me back to my hotel for the night; tomorrow I will present my paper. We cross the wide Rio Grande. I ask how he responds to those who might say his farm is too small, doesn’t feed enough people, isn’t a real, honest-to-God farm. Making a difference is a matter of perspective, he says. “Some people will say, ‘This is nothing compared to what we have.’ Some other people will say, ‘I wish I could have at least a ten-by-ten planted! How do you put the seeds in? How do you do this?’ It’s all relative,” he says.
He opens a bar of dark chocolate with almonds and Stevia. He offers me some and I snap off a square of the pleasantly bitter, nutty chocolate. Fidel, a trim man, says he is trying not to eat so many sweets (the opposite of my approach to them). He was actually prediabetic at one point, but that went away after he changed his diet to mostly organic food. As we munch the chocolate, Fidel points out that you can never make everyone happy. Half the world thinks the Dalai Lama is a saint and the other half thinks he’s a devil, he points out as an example. Same with the pope or the Aztecs of old. There is no way to make everyone agree on what is right and good, he tells me. So how do you know what is right and good for you, I ask. Fidel pauses, then says, “Your heart is always going to tell you the truth. When I see my son eating, when I see my wife smiling, when I see my friends happy when I give them some lettuce, in my heart I know I am doing the right thing.”