PORTRAIT OF A FARM

Ashokra Farm is named for Anita Adalja’s father, whose name is Ashok, and for okra, a mainstay of Indian cuisine and the farm’s first crop. Ashokra operates on two and a half leased acres split between four fields in Albuquerque’s North Valley. Although the farm is currently co-owned by Anita and Ash, the farmers have a dream of collective ownership, a model integrating shared responsibility, shared management, and shared profits.

People

Anita Ashok Adalja (left): I was practicing as a social worker in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and I started a rooftop garden with a coworker. It changed my way of thinking and what I wanted to do with my life.

Seasons farming: 12

Side hustles: Food safety trainings for farmers, Good Agricultural Practices auditor

Mallika Singh (center): I’ve grown up learning a lot about food and herbs and medicine, but I started getting interested in farming a couple years ago. Not just growing food but also having a closer relationship to the land and the food system as a whole.

Seasons farming: 2

Side hustles: Catering; cooking; cocreator of OOZE, a poetry event

Ash Abeyta (right): I’m from northern New Mexico. I moved here for college but fell in love with farming.

Seasons farming: 11

Side hustles: Contract reviewer for National Young Farmers Coalition, DoorDash driver Antonia Ruiz was traveling when we gathered in December. Her grandmother was a farmer in Colombia and her father still farms there.

Seasons farming: 3

What It Means To Be A Farmer

Ash: Every season, we have to deal with some new problem, whether it be early wind, or a bug we’ve never seen, or fires—there’s always something new. I think [being a farmer means] being resilient and problem solving along the way and dealing with things as they come.

Anita: For so long we have heralded farmers as heroes doing God’s work. . . . It’s time to understand that farmers are business owners. And also need to be held accountable. Farming is amazing work, but also—and this is something going from worker to owner that I think about all the time—it’s a choice. What’s that Spider-Man quote? “With great power comes great responsibility.” We have a responsibility to treat people well on a farm.

Goals

Anita: Right now we’re growing food and selling it. We want to do more. We have ideas of having educational workshops and access to the produce. We don’t want productivity or success to be measured by how much food we can sell. It’s about the community we’re building and working with and increasing food access. . . . If you look at what we’ve done this year, it feels really good. You can’t measure it by money. But if you look at it as what we’ve built together.

Mallika: How much we’ve laughed.

Anita: That we’ve had access to a bathroom. Honestly, building this composting toilet and ensuring that at any field we’re working at, we have access to a bathroom. That might seem like a low bar but in the twelve years I’ve farmed, this is a privilege. To have a bathroom with a door, and dignity.

Challenges

Anita: Land access has been a big issue for us. It’s not ideal for us to have two and a half acres spread across four parcels. The logistics alone are really challenging. I can’t tell you how many people Ash and I had to contact and interview with to get those four parcels of land, and what it took in terms of showing our résumé, giving crop plans, business plans, and that, I can definitely say, I think is based on who we are, the identities that we hold.

IF RESOURCES WERE NO ISSUE, WHAT ARE THE FIRST THINGS YOU’D DO?

Mallika: Pay all of us.

Ash: Build structures so we’re not out in the cold or heat. And season extension.

Anita: I would love all our properties in one, one land. . . . A ninety-nine-year lease.

Ash: It’s a big gamble for us to invest in something we don’t own because one day they could change their mind and decide that they don’t like how the farm looks in their backyard. We invested thousands of dollars in this compost pile, for example, and if that gets taken away, what do we do? Or the years that we’ve built in soil.

Climate

Ash: This year we had three weeks of 99-degree temperatures. So, starting everything with transplants.

Anita: The wind is huge. Making sure everything is very secure.

Mallika: Realistically, we are gonna continue to be in drought, and probably in drier and harsher conditions. . . . I think we also

I would like to see this myth of rugged individualism, that a farm is one person, to just go away. Farms are multiple people. There’s often a totally invisible workforce that we never see, that aren’t at the farmers market stand, that aren’t talked about by the farm owners. Who is actually doing the work on the farm? It’s not about a divisive ‘farm owners vs. farmworkers,’ just being honest, like what does it take to grow a farm? It’s a lot of people coming together, it’s not just one person. Farming is a collective activity. —Anita have to change what we’re willing to do, what we’re willing to eat, what we’re willing to grow. Lettuce doesn’t really grow here easily.

Anita: We grew thirteen varieties of okra this year. That makes sense for us. We have a relationship with okra. It grows really well here. It is a climate-change crop for sure. And it’s also, what personally do we want to grow? Because farming is such hard work that we have to have joy in it too.

Favorite Crops

Anita: Dry beans was a really awesome thing to grow, and winter squash was a great crop for us. Carrots.

Ash: I like radishes in the spring—they grow really fast, after winter they look really nice. They’re just really pretty after a hard winter.

Mallika: I was super into green garlic this spring. Using the leaves and everything. That’s something cool about farming too, you see every iteration of a certain plant.

Values

Ash: Anita and I really wanted to build something where everyone felt valued and welcomed. Speaking personally, at farms I feel like I’m just another set of hands or just a body. We want everyone who steps on our farm to feel like they matter.

Anita: Another value is making sure the space is accessible for you to show up as your authentic self. That means race, class, gender, but also ability. I worked on a farm where the owner would tell people to lose weight to work faster. We’re trying to create a space where farming is for everyone. For every ability level. And also to move away from that blood, sweat, and tears mentality. This is about sustainability for your physical body too. I feel like I’ve given some of my strongest years to building other people’s farms, and you can’t get that back. We really want a place where people want to stay and can sustain.

Mallika: Productivity, success, efficiency—some of the values we’ve talked about mean measuring those things outside of speed or money. A value for me is having fun. We’re also here to learn and be able to ask questions and make jokes. Because it is important work. This is the kind of work I want to feel connected to.

Find Ashokra Farm at the Downtown Growers’ Market in Albuquerque. instagram.com/ashokrafarm

Portrait Of A Farmer

Jesus Guzman farms on about six acres split between four parcels in Nambé—one at his home and three that he leases. In addition to farming, he’s been a landscaper, a property caretaker, and a dairy worker. Among other things, he grows blue and red corn, chicos, beans, onions, peas, garlic, and, lately, drought-tolerant asparagus.

WHY FARM?

My father started me when I was seven where I grew up down in Mexico. I’m the second kid in the family. It was me, my older sister, my dad, and my mom at that time. And you don’t work there eight hours a day. You get up at five o’clock in the morning, and if you don’t get up, somebody will get you up and take you there. And they feed you and everything, but they work you until—they give you a little time for lunch—and then when the sun goes down and you can’t see the weeds anymore, then it’s time to go home.

When I came over here, I was a twenty-twoyear-old guy. I started doing this because I like it. And I had a job, and I started doing this on the side.

I think it’s a comfortable life.

Dreams

So then, like everybody, the dream was, I’m gonna work hard and own my own house one day. I did work hard. I never worked eight hours a day. I used to work at the dairy, start at three o’clock in the morning, to eight, go to breakfast, start at nine back in the fields, to three o’clock, start back in the dairy three o’clock in the afternoon to eight or nine at night.

Accidents

When I was in Medanales, I had a property that was 2.2 acres. I had eleven cows. I had like ten goats and eight or nine sheep. I had twenty pigs. I had a couple of dogs. I had like eighty chickens. In the summer, I had to make sure I had enough hay for my cattle and enough feed for my animals. I had a big barn built and I put everything underneath it in the summer for the winter.

Then, in 1999, I fell off a tree and I broke my back in two parts. So I got rid of the cows, I got rid of the goats, and sheep, and pigs, and I just left the chickens. I wasn’t able to go and load up my flat trailer with 120 bales of hay by myself into the field. So after that I couldn’t do it anymore.

My second accident was in 2010, I fell off a ladder and broke my right shoulder.

The last one was in 2013; since then I’ve been less of a farmer or anything else.

Climate

I’m originally from a town that is called Yuriria, Guanajuato. Here, we grow with flooding. There, we used to farm with the rain, just dryland. But it rained enough to where you can harvest anything.

Here, we’ve got a shortage of water since 1996. We didn’t irrigate not even one time that year. From there, there have been bad years, somewhat good years, but never like before that. Between 1980 and 1995, we had water to throw away. The ditches were running from the first of April to the first of October. Last year, it was okay, but we’ve never had what we had in those days. I don’t know where we’re going with this as far as farming here. Now I’ve got that pond dug out for the same reason. To store water. That helps me with my seedlings when I transplant. Nowadays we get four days of water in the ditch every so often. Maybe three or four times in the whole summer. I’m trying to switch to things that grow with less water.

The sun is more intense than before. The last two to three years, I’ve been noticing that some of the plants get curled, the leaves get burned.

If this continues, it’s gonna end. There’s no way that you are going to be able to farm outside in this heat and no water. I hope that it will change.

Value

Especially here, we all got little gardens. We don’t got big gardens like other places. And we’re barely making it. Because you put a lot into it to get very little off of it. If you’re gonna add every minute that you work on it, let’s say fifteen bucks an hour, and then your seeds, and then your time to go running up to the water in the middle of the night, and do all of these things, I think that people who eat my stuff should be proud of it. And say, “This guy really worked for it.”

The Farmers Market

I think we’re lucky to have customers to support us. Because we have high prices. I don’t believe that a pound of beans is worth five bucks. And I don’t believe that a pound of asparagus is worth eight dollars. I don’t believe a pound of chile will be worth thirty or forty dollars. I sell my chile powder at twenty dollars a pound, which I think is a little stiff, to tell you the truth.

I base every price on what I believe that I would be able to pay for it. I figure that the people that come to the farmers market and support us and buy our stuff, I think that they work for their money. I think most people work for what they have.

Community

You know, a lot of people here don’t like us Mexicans. They’ve said it to myself, “People from Mexico don’t deserve to own land here.” And I said, “Anybody that can buy it with their own money, they deserve it.” They’re very proud to say, “Well, I’m an American, and I don’t own one inch of land over here.” Well, why is that my fault? How do they see it that way?

When I came over here and I started working and I started meeting people, the one thing, when I knew I wanted to be here for the rest of my life, I contribute to the community as much in the way that any citizen does. Even since I was illegal. Then I became legal, then I became a citizen. But that doesn’t mean anything—it’s just because it’s me, it’s not because I’m Mexican. If I see somebody who needs my help, then I will help. And I will do it without hesitating about what’s for me. That’s by defense of being an alien here. Hey, I did my part. I contribute to my community like a human being.