Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

Preserving rare heirloom varieties is more than preserving the past. This
is esp personal since we know Charles Martin at NMSU and we lived in
Chimayo a while back. The Chimayo chile is a landrace passed down through
Hispanic families since the 1600's.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net

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N.M. Farmers Work To Preserve Native Chile
Thursday, May 07, 2009
http://www.abqjournal.com/news/state/apchile05-07-09.htm

By Melanie Dabovich
Associated Press

      Gene Lopez has just finished planting his chile field in the same way
he's planted his heat-packed crop for three decades, but as the years pass,
there seems to be more immediacy behind each seed he places in the ground.
    A retired employee of Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lopez, 70, is not
your typical chile farmer. He labors in his small field in the tiny village
of Lyden not for profit but to preserve a cultural and gastronomical
treasure passed down for generations — native northern New Mexico chile.
    Farmers, researchers and advocates worry that native chile lines could
vanish forever, taking with them invaluable plant genetics and the cultural
heritage of an entire region.
    As farmland becomes covered with homes and younger generations abandon
farming, Lopez is unsure who will preserve the tradition of growing the
native chile crops that have sprouted in the area for more than three
centuries.
    "No one in my family wants to keep up the farming. I don't know who's
going to keep the tradition up," he said. "The number of farmers around
here is decreasing and people are coming in with trailers. The farmland is
going away."
    Charles Martin, assistant professor at New Mexico State University's
Sustainable Agriculture Science Center in Alcalde, holds educational
workshops for growers to help traditional chile farmers preserve their
crops and compete with the larger elements of the industry.
    "These traditional lines and crop biodiversity is rapidly being lost,"
Martin said. "The farmers themselves are not even aware of the value of
maintaining their traditional lines. They believe their crops are inferior
because they're small and they don't have the yield of modern varieties."
    Preserving native chile is important to maintain genetic biodiversity,
he said. Native chile lines are more disease-resistant and have been
adapted to grow without fertilizers, he said.
    "Native chile lines are often the parent material from which modern
plant breeders rely upon to create new varieties. It is in everyone's
interest to maintain these crop lines," Martin said. "Chile production has
been a part of the traditional and sustainable level of agriculture in this
area for generations."
    Often when people think of New Mexico's signature crop, their images
are of the sunny southern part of the state where acres of chile pods ripen
in the hot sun on large, commercial farms.
    In northern New Mexico, small farmers grow native chile varieties that
have been passed down within families for hundreds of years and selected
according to individual family tastes. The lines are unique to where
they're grown and are named after those areas — including about a dozen
varieties such as Chimayo, Velarde, Dixon, said Paul Bosland, professor of
horticulture and director of the Chile Pepper Institute at NMSU in Las
Cruces.
    Native chile has grown in popularity in the artisanal chile and
specialty foods market and is sought out by gourmet restaurants.
Aficionados claim it has a richer flavor than modern commercial varieties.
    Because native chile acreage is quite small — less than 2 acres per
farm — farmers get premium prices.
    JoAnn Casados, owner of JoAnn's Restaurant in Española, serves both
native and commercial chile. She says she's willing to pay more for native
chile because "the taste is so much different" in dishes such as enchiladas
and tamales.
    "It's the flavor. You ask the old timers here in the valley, and they
know if it's not native chile. There's a bigger demand for it but people
aren't growing it," she said.
    It's likely some chile farmers switched to commercial varieties for
economic reasons, said Mark Uchanski, assistant professor of vegetable
physiology at NMSU.
    "It's more consistent, so when you plant 100 seeds you know that 95
percent would be true to type. So it began to shift more towards getting
... seed from more commercial sources and that kind of art slowly began to
shift away from on-farm selection," Uchanski said.
    Native chile farmers fear their lines could be ruined by cross
pollination with modern chile varieties or intercrossing with other native
lines.
    Lois Stanford, an associate anthropology professor at NMSU, said the
ramification of the disappearance of native chile lines is a loss of a
sense of culture and identity for the area's historical farming community.
    "There are a lot of practices that go with the conservation of those
varieties, such as stories and legends and history and memories. There's
seeds that have been passed down and seeds that have been extracted," she
said. "It's the cultural heritage of food, and all that is lost if you're
buying your seeds from the Wal-Mart seed section."
    In an effort to keep native chile viable, the Native Hispanic
Institute's Chimayo Chile Project is working to increase awareness and urge
more northern New Mexico farmers to grow it.
    Around 50 farmers in the project work with each other to promote their
product and to assure their precious seeds will be preserved for future
generations, said Marie Pilar Campos, president of NHI in Santa Fe.
    "We are making sure there is some investment to make sure seeds are
being preserved and identified and to start cataloging them," she said. "We
have a treasure of native seeds here in northern New Mexico."
    Campos said the project is looking for funding to create an
apprenticeship program for youth to work side-by-side with older farmers.
    "These senior citizens are passing away, and they take all that
cultural knowledge," she said.
    The Arid Crop Seed Cache in Monticello also is working to preserve
native northern New Mexico chile in its seed collection, said Joshua
Cravens, project director for the seed cache.
    The seed bank is doing what it can to help native farmers preserve
their crop in tough times, he said.
    Lopez hopes this year's crop will be a good one to sell at nearby
farmer's markets.
    "I've been growing this chile all my life. We like it and we want to
keep it in the family. I don't ever want to lose that seed," Lopez said.
"Once I go to the next world, I don't know who will plant it, but the seed
will still be here."