SantaFe.com

What Georgia Maryol is probably best known for in Santa Fe is the popular Tomasita's restaurant.

“I spent half my life there,” she said Thursday of her three decades of ownership. “I raised my kids there.”

But after attending a recent meeting at Santa Fe High about Texas-based Tecton Energy's proposal to drill for oil in the Galisteo Basin, Maryol has added a new passion: supporting local farmers as a way to cut down on the community's need for oil.

Maryol has donated $100,000 as a challenge grant for the Santa Fe Farmers Market Building in the Railyard. Any donation the market receives...

Friday, December 21, 2007
by Polly Summar • Journal Santa Fe

Between the hubbub of Albuquerque’s big-city attitude and the enthusiastic growth of Rio Rancho’s sprawl, sits a rural oasis. In Corrales, abundant cottonwoods arch over bands of green and follow cattail-lined acequias. Horses flick their tails against buzzing flies in yards that seem to go on forever. Million-dollar mansions with intricate landscaping abut mobile homes where chickens cluck and peck–unaware of the pressures of development.

Corrales’s pastoral beauty and its unobstructed views of the Sandia mountains are threatened. Its very essence depends on a mix of farmland, open space...

Tuesday, May 1, 2007
by Pari Noskin Taichert • localflavor magazine

Trained midwife Donna Lockridge, co-owner of South Mountain Goat Dairy on La Farmita de Sue–os ( “it’s Spanglish for Little Farm of Dreams”) in Edgewood, crouches in a pen of straw with a beautiful chocolate brown mother goat. As Donna strokes her, hugs her and whispers encouraging endearments in her ear, the pregnant goat seems almost supernaturally calm.

“This particular breed reminds me of the Navajo women I used to help deliver–very quiet and calm all the way through,” Donna confides to the handful of friends, all women, crowding the kidding barn, informal “coaches” all.

Monday, May 1, 2006
by Gail Snyder • localflavor magazine

Rick Kingsbury’s old ‘93 Ford pickup bounces along the primitive road that parallels the Pecos River. Shovels, rakes, and picks rattle in the back of the truck. His two Jack Russell Terriers, who go everywhere with him, keep us company in the front. He shows me a small dam on the river. Just upstream from the simple concrete barrier and the artificial waterfalls it creates, water is diverted into an irrigation ditch that winds its way for miles along the river, giving life to his ranch. Downstream, he stops in front of a sixty acre pasture, where the herd of cattle that belong to him and...

Monday, May 1, 2006
by Barry Fields • localflavor magazine

Steve Warshawer tosses around words like biodynamic agriculture, dual-purpose breeding, decentralized relationship systems and principles of transparency like the breeze tosses the feathers of his 500 chickens. As we traipse through coops, Steve collects eggs amid the gentle cacophony of chirps and squawks from his black, white and zebra striped hens, explaining the issues of concern to Mesa Top Farm. His egg, bird and vegetable farming enterprise is just eight miles from Santa Fe–eight miles and a world away over dirt roads and through numerically coded gates.

Monday, May 1, 2006
by Kelly Koepke • localflavor magazine

On this northern New Mexico acreage studded with pines, uphill from the tiny village of San Geronimo, Marla Sorrels spent her childhood. They raised cattle back in those days and the whole family helped out. But eventually, Marla grew up, moved away, got married and was making her living as an accountant when her mom offered her “a deal I couldn’t refuse,” as she puts it, to come back and farm.

So Marla, her husband Mike and their two daughters took her up on it, returning to the eastern slope of the Sangre de Cristos beneath Hermit’s Peak to give the cattle their best shot. The...

Monday, May 1, 2006
by Gail Snyder • localflavor magazine

I’d never been to a poultry farm before and I didn’t know quite what to expect on my visit to Pollo Real in Socorro. The truth is, it’s not that fancy; chicken wire and polyurethane sheets become lightweight yurts–trailer homes to keep the chickens dry during the winter and in spring perfectly functional brooding houses. “Everything on the farm comes from what you have laying around to make it work,” Tracey Delehanty told me, noting my curious looks.

Joel Salatin, a guru of the sustainable-food movement who has won cult status among farmers for his innovations in pastured poultry, puts...

Monday, May 1, 2006
by Emily Beenen • localflavor magazine

The standard industry joke: How do you make a small fortune in the wine industry? You start with a BIG fortune!! Actually, there’s a lot of truth to that adage. Most wineries these days are started by people who made their fortune in other endeavors and now wish a change of pace, a different lifestyle, living in Wine Country, or some such reason. As long as they have that big fortune to support that dream, they mostly succeed.

However, if you’re two young guys, just out of college, and want to pursue your dream of having a winery, and don’t have that big fortune to back you up; things can...

Sunday, May 1, 2005
by Tom Hill • localflavor magazine

Organic fruit and herb trials, water-efficient irrigation, cold-frame production, mobile chicken houses, that’s what local farmers have come to expect from Ron Walser and Del Jimenez, the fruit guy and vegetable guy respectively, of the Sustainable Agriculture Science Center in Alcalde. The pair and their colleagues at the Center concentrate on improving existing farming practices and bringing innovative new ideas to the small farmers of New Mexico.

The Center, a project of New Mexico State University, conducts research on certified organic plots that grow everything from apples, table...

Sunday, May 1, 2005
by Kelly Koepke • localflavor magazine

Working at a grocery store did not make 21-year-old Les Harrison happy.

“I saw that I needed to be self-employed,” he ruefully admits. “I’m not too good with authority figures.” It’s the only other job he’s ever had, and he only had it briefly, during one particular off-season at Sweetwoods Dairy. The goat farm is his parents’ creation. Started 14 years ago in rural Peña Blanca, today the 85-goat business produces cheese in ten or twelve varieties (they’re an experimental dairy, always adding some and dropping others). While Les’s mother still does the bulk of the dairy’s cheesemaking,...

Sunday, May 1, 2005
by Gail Snyder • localflavor magazine