NM farmers work to preserve native chile varieties

ALBUQUERQUE -- 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.

The 70-year-old retired employee of Los Alamos National Laboratory is not a typical chile farmer. He works 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, holds 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."