Food fights: Hunger in a robust local food system

San Acacio Bottomlands, CO.  As the harvest winds down, the smell of adobe ovens filled with chicos is now but a memory. Every time I walk by the spent hornos, I can still catch that smoky aroma of the chicos roast. Embers and corn cobs lay scattered about the grounds, a reminder of the two frantic weeks of horneadas.  

More than thirty people participated in the seven oven roasts we did this year as a collaboration of the Corpus A. Gallegos Ranches and Rancho Dos Acequias. It is good to be part of a community that maintains deep-rooted agricultural practices and foodways as the soil medium for renewing our cultural and familial ties. 

Certainly, this time of year is one of great bounty as we brought not just heirloom corn to harvest but also bolita beans, calabacitas, habas, cilantro, beets, parsnips, turnips, potatoes, apples, pears, plums, chokecherry, elderberry, and numerous other row, orchard, and field crops.

I appreciate the deep wisdom guiding this unique agroecosystem and its food-related practices. The roasting of chicos illustrates this wisdom. The original practice of adobe oven roasts of corn began with the Pueblo first nations and has roots even further deep into the time of the Pueblos' ancestors, the so-called Anasazi. 

The roasting of corn was an adaptation to the long harsh winters that made it impossible to farm for much more than four months out of the year. Lacking refrigeration or elecricity, the Hispanos that came to inhabit the Rio Arriba bioregion adopted the extant Pueblo practice of roasting corn for the vital winter stores. This was food sovereignty at its very best.

Our community still has a robust local food system based on the acequia agroecosystem and a huge capacity for the production of traditional food and forage crops that have been adapted to the environment over dozens of generations.

Yet, despite the persistence of the capacity to be completely food self-reliant, there is much hunger and malnutrition in the acequia communities of the Rio Arriba. This hunger, like other parts of the U.S., remains largely hidden. 

Research on hunger in Costilla County, like other areas of the Rio Arriba, is scarce and social scientists have not yet shown much interest in documenting hunger and malnutrition beyond the "remote social science" surveys that are routinely done by concerned federal and state agencies.

Judging from the county level statistics available on-line at the State of Colorado websites, and extrapolating from what we know about rural hunger in other parts of the country, it seems likely that fully 30 to 40 percent of the full-time residents of Costilla County, are receiving some sort of food assistance including food stamps, "WIC," meals for the elderly, and emergency relief on a routine basis. 

So, could one surmise that the safety net has worked and that there is no hunger in Costilla County? Such a conclusion would be inaccurate and misleading. There is not only hunger but extensive malnutrition in our communities as indicated by a childhood obesity rate that remains one of the highest in Colorado.

Just because people have access to food does not mean that they have access to the right kinds of food or that they are no longer hungry or malnourished. Indeed, one of the most devastating consequences of the rise of convenience shopping, fast food, and supermarkets is that people, even when capable, have stopped producing their own heritage cuisines.

Why should this matter? Is access to food not the key to resolving hunger and malnutrition? Nutritional anthropologists and other social scientists have long documented a strong correlation between the health of a given population and the persistence of traditional diets and food practices. Distinct human groups co-evolved with their environments; we are not just skin-bags filled with immutable genetic destinies. You know the saying: We are what we eat.


Indeed, the co-evolution of human health is profoundly affected by the nutrients, vitamins, minerals, and anti-oxidants that we derive from our own place-based, multi-generational cuisine and food practices. It is the breakdown of heritage cuisines that is as much as anything else to blame for the continued deterioration of our health status in rural Hispana/o communities. That, and the closing of our health clinics.

How do we restore a more healthful and culturally-appropriate heritage cuisine? Is it enough to denounce fast food when fresh, natural, and culturally appropriate foods may not be available or accessible? How can we become healthy when our grandmothers' recipes are gathering dust in an attic somewhere above the kitchen table with a KFC spread for tonight's rushed family dinner?

While hunger and malnutrition are mostly aspects of the structural violence unleashed by global capitalist commodity-chains that are the dominant food system, we are also responsible at the local level for regenerating and sustaining our own autonomous local food systems.

I did an informal survey the past four months (June through September) to begin to get an idea of how much local food is actually consumed. When the first alberjon (summer peas) show up in May, they do indeed become the talk of the town. I visited with a dozen random families and all of them were enjoying the fresh peas that they purchased from local growers like Adelmo Kaber. 

So, at least for peas and other summer vegetables, there does seem to be a direct link from field to a good portion of local tables.

However, the same cannot be said for the crops that are vital for the winter stores. Despite the rage for chicos indicated by the high demand from grocers spread from Denver to Albuquerque, local people are not generally taking advantage of local access to this vital crop that figures so prominently in the winter seasonal cuisine.

During this informal survey, one thing I noticed is that some families have a sharp generational divide over the matter of food and diet choices: The elders (grandparents and parents) still want to eat root-cellar tubers like beets and turnips, but the youth hold sway and get the family instead to go out shopping for fast food or processed foods from the supermarket. Our youth have lost their sense of appreciation for the local place-based heritage cuisine.

In this regard, we have a lot of work left to do in the acequia communities of the Rio Arriba. While we produce enough food to be self-reliant, we are not engaging in the other extended practices that allow the local people to eat locally and seasonally. In the middle of winter, instead of heading to the root-cellar to grab some beets and parsnips to go along with that delicious chicos stew, our families head to Walmart in Alamosa to purchase cheap meats and processed foods or to grab a burger and fries at McDonalds.

The community needs to extend its heritage agroecosystem into a more elaborate local food system that reaches every family in the watershed. More root cellars; more adobe ovens; more canning and preserving practices; all these and other practices could become part of a strategy to transform our fast food nation addictions into a local place-based heritage cuisine that is in balance with our bodies and the seasonal changes brought by nature.

Acequia farming families can lead us back toward the healthy heritage cuisines that located us as a place-based people who ate with the seasons and recognized the limits imposed on us by the forces of nature, the environmental conditions of our existence. Getting our youth to eat chicos stew for a week with home-grown beets and turnips this winter might just be a place to start.

The Challenges of Acequia Farming - Part III

Un anciano comparte su sabiduría/An acequia elder shares his wisdom

Adelmo Kaber

Moderator's Note: Today's contribution is by our oldest acequia farmer in San Luis, Adelmo Kaber (83 years old). The selection is excerpted from a chapter in a forthcoming book, Voces de agua y tierra: Cultural and Environmental Histories of Acequia Farms in the Rio Arriba (forthcoming from University of  Arizona Press).

Adelmo Kaber

Parciante, Acequia del Cerro

Adelmo Kaber cultivates the corn field at Rancho Dos Acequias

My mother, Romaldita, will be 95 years old on August 13.  Many years ago, she gave me some seed for calabasita (Mexican squash).  I planted the seed again this year like I have since I was a boy.  This seed has been in my family for at least one hundred years because my grandmother gave the seed to my mother when she was a child.  The bolita bean and the corn seed we plant are also very old.  These seeds have been in the family for many generations.

You cannot buy this kind of calabasa anywhere because they call it calabasa mexicana.  The sweet peas, I buy those from Rocky Mountain [Seed Company] there in Denver.  Joe [Gallegos] has given me seed for corn but it is the same as me and we pass it back and forth. But these old seeds, you just can’t find those varieties in stores or with the suppliers.

The alfalfa seed, I buy that from Denver also.  And the name of the alfalfa is Colorado Comet.  That’s the way they call it.  The potato seed, I used to buy that in Center at a warehouse there.

I have been farming the place since the time when I lived in Pueblo and I would come to San Luis to help my Dad, Charlie K. Lucero.  He was adopted by Ramon Lucero.  His real last name was Kaber, a German name.  But twenty-two years ago my Dad passed away and that is when I started to run the ranchito by myself.  My Dad used to run a lot of cattle.  He had sixty head of cattle.  He also had a lot of sheep, about two hundred.  My Dad was about eighty-five years old when he died.

I was ten or twelve years old when my Dad first showed me how to irrigate with the acequia.  In the old times, we used to plow and cultivate with horses.  There were no tractors back then.  So I learned how to work with the horse team at an early age.

I remember that we used to cut the alfalfa with the horse teams.  There were no bailers then so we had to bring the alfalfa and hay in on wagons with wooden wheels.  We called these huarañas (hay wagons) and my Dad built them.  We had to go for fire wood on horses too.  On the wagons.

The first time I went to get fire wood I was about fifteen years old.  I used to go with my Dad.  We used to bring the wood from la Mesa, Wild Horse Mesa now.  Everybody could go there and get it.  And from Taylor Ranch too.  But that was before it was the Taylor Ranch.  You could do it any time up there. No one would stop you or nothing.  You didn’t have to ask for permission or nothing.  But not anymore.

I get about two and a half [cubic] feet [per second] of water.  That is all the water I can get.  To water the whole thing I have planted it takes me about eight to ten days.  The alfalfa has to be watered about four times a year.  The beans, I have to water that, and the corn, at least four times a year.  The sweet peas has to be watered more.  Five times a year.  That depends if we get a lot of rain.  It has been raining a lot now, so this year the is the last time I have to water the alfalfa.

We have had different ditchriders.  We have to pay for the assessment and the ditchrider.  The assessment is to keep some money in case we need to do some work on the main ditch.  Like this year, they had to clean the main ditch.

In the old times, they put a certain day, and everybody had to go and get the willow out of the ditch, and the branches.  They had to get a drag line this year.  It was getting to narrow and we had to widen the ditch.  And we get the water from the Culebra.  This is the Cerro Ditch.

I was the ditch rider one year, about four years ago.  They [the irrigators] call you and ask you when they can have the water.  You have to work hard to make sure everyone gets water on time.They irrigate about two thousand acres, but over there where it starts [the ditch] holds about thirty feet.  There are about sixty people that are farming now on the ditch.  A lot of people are just wasting land any more.  They don’t irrigate.  But back then, everybody got along.  You have to ask permission before you irrigate.

NOTE: This essay was originally written in 1998.

The Challenges of Acequia Farming - Part II

Cambiando aqua:  Water, landscape, and place

Cambiando agua at Rancho Dos Acequias. Photos by Elaine H. Peña

Devon G. Peña
Parciante, Acequia de la Gente de San Luis

San Acacio Bottomlands, CO.  In 1989, I received my first lesson in acequia flood-irrigated practice. My lesson was under the expert guidance of the late Corpus Aquino Gallegos. He was irrigating native hay meadows for a friend in the San Pablo bottomlands and invited me along. It was the first of the many five o'clock-in-the-morning chores I have learned to love over the years. Corpus called this activity, "Cambiando agua," or "Changing water."

Flood irrigation, he explained, involves patience, diligence, and above all your willingness to "listen to the water." Corpus waved his hand at the water gently burbling through the ditch: "The water will tell you what to do, if you listen."

Over the past two decades, I have listened to the movement of acequia water as it percolates and saturates the soils at Rancho Dos Acequias. I have learned much about flood irrigating but this year presented a unique set of challenges.

My sister, Tania, and I acquired 200-acres of San Acacio bottomlands that are home to Rancho Dos Acequias and The Acequia Institute in 2007. We inherited a fairly large mechanical center-pivot sprinkler run by diesel in the middle of the north half of the ranch. The use of center-pivot circles is an anomaly in the acequiahood where gravity-driven flood irrigation across the riparian long lots is the local art of preference for the acequia farmers.

The mechanical centipede on wheels.

We used the sprinkler that first year (2007) but the results were less than satisfactory and the use of the mechanical sprinkler seemed contrary to our expectations for a more sustainable and fossil fuel-free approach to farming in the Rio Culebra.

The sprinkler delivered an adequate amount of water to the hay fields but it had two serious drawbacks: First, it cost a good sum of money to run the sprinkler and our annual fuel cost that year exceeded $800 for the diesel engine that runs the apparatus. Second, I noticed that the sprinkler method does not flood the meadow very well and so one result is a profusion of prairie dogs and their endless tunnels, which of course undermine soil quality and reduce the productivity of the hay fields from the effects of their tunneling and mound-building.

Prairie dog tunnels and mounds.

In 2008, we decided to dismantle the sprinkler and reintroduce acequia flood irrigation methods to this middle meadow. This is a bigger task than one might surmise because this meadow has not seen this method applied since the mid-1970s and the reach from the San Luis Peoples Acequia Madre to this middle section is a long stretch.

With the "mechanical centipede" disassembled, we now faced the challenge of irrigating the former circle without the benefit of acequias. In 2008, we ran water through the acequias that irrigate the upper (north-end) fields but this proved inefficient and ineffective as little water reached the lower half of the circle. Without ditches reaching to the middle circle, the water could not be spread evenly across the landscape. Our hay production went down that year by about 40-50 percent in the circle.

Finally, about two weeks ago I worked with Corpus's son, my neighbor, Joe C. Gallegos, to cut three new ditches, two linderos (pathway acequias, so-called because these follow a perpendicular line away from the acequia madre) and one espinazo (spinal acequia, because it delivers water to either side of the ditch). We constructed the three ditches to more easily and efficiently reach both the upper and lower halves of the circle hay field.


I have been flood-irrigating the circle with these new acequias for the past five days and I have learned some fascinating details about the "lay of the land" and my own "sense of place." I have been "listening to the water."


Only now I realize that listening to the water, as Corpus long ago instructed me, is much more than a "technical" skill. It is almost like a principle right out of "Buddhist economics," the kind of principle that emerges only through sustained lived experience in a place.


This is not something one can learn in a classroom, unless of course one thinks of the irrigated landscape as a place of learning. Only a lengthy artisan-styled apprenticeship can produce an irrigator with such compassion for the land, that she or he cannot help but be filled with "mindfulness."


Since the circle is populated with a prairie dog "town," the flooding of the area is forcing the critters to abandon the meadow for the drier margins along the fence lines.


Everytime the flood reaches a mound with its hidden maze of tunnels, the water starts singing. "Blurp, blurp, bloop, bloop," it goes.  The water slowly enters the tunnel entrance and then pops up like a spring, un ojito de agua, issuing forth from under the land a bit down stream from the entrance. I know Corpus is watching me, smiling and nodding his head as he too listens to the water.