“The Silver City Food Co-op is one of the the crossroads of sustainability in our little town.”
Mike Madigan, the Co-op Operations Manager, makes this surprising declaration in a very matter-of-fact tone as we sit together on the small wooden bench outside the Co-op. It’s a cool but sunny day in this small town, and as I watch the growing number of people walk this picturesque downtown street, I ponder his comment.
Silver City is a small town, with a population of just under 10,000 in 2021. Grant County, in which this town sits, is just shy of 28,000. It’s a small purple dot in a sea of red rural communities — not the place you’d expect to hear sustainability cited as driver of a local business.
And yet, sustainability is key here, demonstrated in the 299 nonprofits listed as existing inside city limits in 2022, many of them environmentally-focused. The small university just down my own street offers a sustainable development program, and the Aldo Leopold Charter School here deliberately focuses on utilizing human and natural environments as a learning tool. There’s a regular farmer’s market, the Frontier Food Hub (which works closely with the Co-op) is located nearby, and the regular recycling program (staffed by volunteers) runs a steady pickup and dropoff program that’s very popular.
So perhaps it’s not too startling that the Co-op exists. Considered a cornerstone of the community, it has a long history (beginning in 1974), and many residents list it as a major reason for moving to this small town. Access to such good food in a small community is pretty special.
The Co-op has grown from its inception, often by leaps and bounds. In fact, it grew even more than usual during the pandemic, driven in part by restaurants closing down, which encouraged many to explore healthful alternatives they had never considered before. Many ventured through the doors of the Co-op during that time, and most stayed after the pandemic restrictions were lifted.
Members of the Co-op enjoy a close relationship with the store (full disclosure here; I’m a member), receiving regular discounts on products, as well as special discounts on member appreciation days (MAD). And of course, members have the opportunity – some would say the responsibility – to vote on new officers for the Co-op’s Board, and the chance to attend occasional informational meetings in one of the parks, where a major item of interest is the Co-op’s planned expansion, although that timetable is uncertain.
The Co-op’s vision statement — To promote the inherently healthy relationship between food, community and nature, illustrates its deliberate choice to serve the needs of its community through honoring the environmental, economic, and social pillars, providing a glimpse inside its ethics and its operation. The Double-Up Food Bucks program, for instance, answers all three, providing economic aid together with better and more healthy food, as well as increasing demand for local food in the region, which then drives job growth as well. In addition, the Co-op recognizes that stocking local foods increases ecosystem diversity and thus resilience, aiding both the environmental and human community of the area.
“In terms of organic sourcing, the focus here in the Co-op is on forming relationships with our local growers so we know where our food is coming from,” Mike says earnestly. “We trust that they grow from the heart, and that knowledge of them as neighbors means more than USDA standards. The Co-op encourages our producers to live up to standards, but at the end of the day, the reality here is that we live in the desert, and we place high value on locally grown food.”
It shouldn’t be surprising that the understanding of ‘you’re my neighbor’ underpins everything in the Co-op. It’s all about that relationship with their producers, and everyone on both sides understands that trust. And because organic certification is expensive, some of these producers may be organic in practice and not on paper. Thus, the idea of local food is extremely important, sometimes more so than the organic production process.
“All world problems are actually about sustainability, but the point is to source product locally, preferably in New Mexico. There’s a large number of products in the store that meet that standard,” Mike says proudly, and he’s not exaggerating. The Co-op, for all its seemingly small size, offers many local items for sale, both food and not, many of which are sourced from environmentally-conscious producers, some certified, some not. A variety of local produce is available, as is local fruit – tomatoes, pomegranates, strawberries. Other local items on the Co-op shelves include mushrooms, Tucumcari cheese, beans, some local candy & mints. Local honey is popular, and is often a way to reach folks who don’t commonly frequent the Co-op. And then there’s the non-food items, also local – massage balls, cards, music, plus goat-milk soap, several health & beauty salves, and various botanicals.
From the Co-op’s perspective, a 500-mile radius is considered local, which sometimes plays havoc with state lines, as both Tucson and El Paso are closer than Albuquerque and Santa Fe, even though the latter two cities are in New Mexico proper. The money flows generated through this local emphasis thus circulate within the region, remaining to benefit the communities involved.
Honoring both the idea of local food and the importance of sustainability creates a sometimes uneasy tension between the two, with the very strong emphasis on sustainability on one side of the ledger, and the equally strong and sometimes conflicting understanding of the importance of local food on the other.
Complicating this set of diverse drives is the question of food system security. Silver City is located in the desert, and their food system is not secure – a point driven home by the pandemic, and echoed by Mike’s assertion of living in a desert ecosystem. Local food becomes more important when this security is added into the equation, although sustainability remains a driving force as well.
The Co-op as a Regional Player in Southwest New Mexico
In an attempt to relieve the above set of conflicting tensions, the Co-op and the Frontier Food Hub – which acts as a go-between for many producers and the store – plan to work together to create a local seal that certifies product from ecologically-aware ranchers and farmers in the region.
“The viability of our food chain relates to this question,” says Ben Rasmussen, Executive Director of the National Center for Frontier Communities (NCFC), parent organization of the Food Hub. “Co-op shoppers care about how their food is grown, and the Hub works with regeneratively-focused, environmentally-conscious growers. We’d like to check all the boxes for both growers and the Co-op, and creating a local seal that certifies these growers meets these standards. [Such a local seal] would be a way the Co-op could use its leverage to support and expand this kind of work.”
The Co-op is unique as a retail location in the area, and is thus a major player in the regional food system of southwest New Mexico, valued by the Food Hub and the NCFC for that reason.
“It’s a nexus for the health-conscious buyer, and the socially-conscious buyer, and a reliable, grower-centric buyer in this region,” Ben comments seriously. “In terms of the local food system, it’s a small to mid-size market outlet that’s really accommodating to local producers. Pending their planned expansion, if they leverage their weight, they have potential to really increase the sustainability of local food businesses.”
Local Food, the Co-op, and a Farmer’s Story
This land is hot and dry, subject to heavy monsoons in the summer, aquifer-sourced – making OG Farms a perfectly typical example of agricultural terrain in New Mexico. And yet, in this seemingly harsh environment, Andre Gutierrez grows summer and winter crops on a space of two acres and sometimes less, a small acreage but very effective. He sells his product to the Frontier Food Hub, which in turn supplies the Silver City Food Co-op with his produce.
Andre grew up in El Paso, where he worked in landscaping, set up irrigation, cultivated and managed plants, and other similar tasks. Coincidently, it was at this point that Oscar, his father, retired from the military, bought land, and started farming, opening doors for Andre to practice his own stewardship of the land.
He became involved with the nonprofit La Semilla Community Food Center, located in Anthony, NM, which operates as a “production, education and demonstration farm guided by agro-ecology principles.” With them, Andre expanded his knowledge and experience of cover crop rotation and livestock management, gaining an appreciation of soil quality and why it mattered, as well as how to build it. And at the same time, he took his growing proficiency home to his father’s farm, working at both places simultaneously.
In the beginning of his work with La Semilla, he was a contracted tractor operator. Nothing fancy, but before he had completed the three months of his contract, Executive Director Cristina Dominguez convinced him to stay on with the nonprofit, and that decision launched Andre’s journey in regenerative agriculture.
He co-managed La Semilla‘s community farm of thirteen acres for four years, serving in a leadership position to produce marketing and public workshops for farmers. He also helped to start and then co-manage their “Farm Fresh” program, which created access to food for people and places located in “food deserts.” This work entailed setting up a mobile produce booth that then travelled to service low-income residents as well as folks with reduced access to fresh and local foods.
Eventually, Andre left La Semilla, focusing on growing multiple varieties of both mushrooms (shiitake, oyster, lionsmane) and chile (jimmy nardelos, hashitos, purple jalapeños, habanero, black pasilla, and more) at OG Farms. He invested in the vertical integration of the land’s product, buying a mushroom operation (Myers Mushrooms EPTX), and serving weekly orders from restaurants and hotels.
He also created the Chuco Chile Company, which sold OG Farms’ excess chile to farmers markets at the end of the growing season, eventually opening a small kitchen with a menu focused around various chile products, including hot sauce. Soon, the farm was well on the way to producing thousands of bottles of hot sauce for market. The business was booming.
And then the pandemic hit.
Like many others, Andre had to rethink his life. “It [farming] was a hamster wheel in the beginning,” he commented. Always busy, with no breaks and a lot of stress. He was always running, trying to catch up. The pause the pandemic offered allowed him the time to realize there was more to life than an always frantic drive that sacrified his happiness on the altar of security.
Andre hit the brakes, sold the mushroom company, and stopped producing food. He was broken and lost. He took a year off to rethink and regroup, focusing on eliminating bad habits. He began to practice deep meditation, observing everything and everyone in a new light. And as he did so, he started to approach farming with a new perspective and at a much slower pace.
He began to practice the lean farming method, which envisions farming through a minimalist approach, prioritizing maximum efficiency in every aspect of an operation, resulting in no excess and no waste. Andre melded this model with the holistic land management he had already practiced for years, a combination that resulted in a new understanding of the business of farming as one whole ecosystem, creating a closed loop cycle that served both his own needs and those of the land and his community.
Committing to that paradigm allowed Andre and his family to step back and examine the land with a deeper lens, investing in regenerative projects of various types, exploring new opportunities and a new future. The farm now grows several types of melons, as well as tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, lemon squash, sunflower sprouts, and the like. Organically-grown but not certified, these crops offer a textbook example of the producers that the Food Hub and the Co-op work with, who honor the land and its ecosystems but shy away from paying the high prices required by the USDA label.
He’s done well, and is now branching out into several different practices, all sourced from the agro-ecological approach he learned from La Semilla, who is now a customer of OG Farms, illustrating how the wheel has turned as Andre matured from novice to experienced farmer.
One such new practice is his decision to stock his irrigation ditch with Gambusia minnows or “mosquito fish,” which feed on the mosquito larvae in the water, thus eliminating the need to spray harsh conventional chemicals to control the pests. In addition, the fish waste so produced then acts as a natural nitrogen source for the field and crops and soil.
Another future-focused practice revolves around the pecan orchard which his father has actively cultivated. Very heavy pruning has opened the field up to more sunlight, interspersing crops within the rows of trees. The orchard is currently in trial mode, where Andre gathers data on the pecan yields and the additional food produced from the inter-cropped vegetable production. His hope is to showcase this more efficient example of water use as an effective option that other farmers in this arid region could adopt, gaining multiple revenue sources with less waste of a valuable resource, and creating more job opportunities as well. He’s passionate about this vision, saying: “Let’s respect Mother Nature, her precious lands and her life-giving waters, and with this healthy relationship we can help heal and feed the community.”
And finally, Andre and his father are setting up two greenhouses, one to grow greens of various types, the other for tomatoes (romas, slicers and cherries). The greenhouses also display two different types of high quality shade cloth that OG Farms now offers to the public, composed of material that is particularly suited to shield various crops against the extreme heat and high UV of the Southwest.
OG Farms now looks toward a future focused on establishing aquaponics, pollinator habitats, livestock flocks, no-till and low-till systems, and other regenerative practices, constructing a vision for the land that actively benefits the farm and Andre’s family, his community and his region. He seeks to live a life that is balanced across all its aspects, rather than stressfully focusing on the short-term of the ‘hamster-wheel.’
And everyone, including himself, is the better for it.
Jody Norman
Jody is a sustainability writer, currently coordinating the Gila River Festival in Silver City. Her first novel, New Trails, Book 1, was published in 2020 (https://trail-talk.com/). She loves cosmology, quantum physics, and the paranormal, and hiking the wilderness with her dogs and her partner of thirty-six years.
