Help for small farmers
Headquartered in Lower Ranchitos, new nonprofit hopes to link local growers
William “Buck” Johnston is nurturing links within Taos Valley’s small regional farming community and hopes those connections will bear fruit — both from the Earth and as inspiration for local growers.
Johnston, a local farmer and environmental activist, is helping to unite small farmers through a nonprofit organization called Earth Land and Water Stewardship (Earth LAWS) by providing equipment, information, advice and active collaboration.
During an event Sunday (July 21) at the Earth LAWS headquarters in the old HEART of Taos building at 1213 Lower Ranchitos (State Road 240), locals met with representatives of the Rodale Institute, New Mexico Healthy Soil Working Group, Rio Grande Grain and other organic farming organizations.
“We are an organization with a 100-percent indigenous board of directors and have an interest in training indigenous landcare professionals, but are working with anyone who shares similar values and interests,” Johnston said in a statement to the Taos News.
The event was designed to expose local small farmers to the networking possibilities available through Earth LAWS, including training for “acequia flood irrigation techniques, use of small scale farm equipment and implements, as well as soil science to regenerate the land through microbiology,” Johnston said.
He explained Earth LAWS attained its nonprofit organization status in November 2023, after three years of operating as Turquoise Mountain Farms LLC. “We found that professional landcare work was in high demand, and with our very unique agricultural systems in the Taos Valley, there wasn’t the workforce present to keep up with the incredible need for labor to keep up with acequia maintenance, field restoration and weed mitigation.”
With a crying need for healthy, homegrown foods in reaction to rising prices and questionable corporate farming practices, Johnston and his team decided to confront these issues head-on. But, as he explained to Sunday’s gathering, standing amid a small field of potatoes, this kind of farming is not something from which one should expect to make a profit.
“As a farmer who has been growing for over a decade,” Johnston told the Taos News, he “found it incredibly difficult to turn any sort of profit off of food crops for two key reasons: the amount of labor and time required to maintain a large vegetable garden; and the enormous cost of the equipment required to grow food efficiently, such as tractors, planters, root harvesters and vegetable washing machines.”
He said the kind of networking Earth LAWS offers — through sharing information and equipment loans — hearkens back to a time when people in this region grew their own food for their family and community needs.
“We want to be able to help with these issues by providing training with specialized farming equipment, as well as [a] lowto-no-cost equipment sharing program for other experienced farmers in the region,” he said.
“We are not aiming to train brand new growers, but rather to supplement some of the needs of those who are already on the path of being local food producers.”
Born and raised in Northern New Mexico, Johnston said he looked at conscious irrigation use, and “field management practices over the last 16 years that do not include herbicides or pesticides, that I should share our experience in responsible land and water stewardship with new up and coming landcare professionals so that we can maintain our valley’s traditional practices.”
Johnston said some local farmers may not be able to do the physical work on their properties themselves. That’s why, he said, they “are offering contracted service to restore fields and acequias.
“Currently, we are completely booked,” he added, “which is why we are developing a training center to help increase the available workforce for land care, and take on some of the enormous workload in the Taos Valley on beyond.”