A Tale of Two Crops: Chile vs. Cannabis

And yet, two seasons ago, Romero nearly packed it in. He didn’t want to leave his three-acre farm in Alcalde, but he was looking for greener pastures. “I’m a farmer, right in my heart, right in my core,” he says. “That’s what I was meant to be.” He had a new plan: Trade one of New Mexico’s oldest crops for its newest—cannabis. It’s not hard to see why. Although New Mexico grows nearly 80 percent of the country’s chile and exports it worldwide, the crop has been valued at a mere $132.5 million over the past three years. Meanwhile, cannabis, which can only be sold within the state, has raked in more than $1.5 billion. 

Chiles and cannabis. Peppers and pot. For all their differences—and there are, obviously, many—the plants have plenty in common. Just look at the varietal names: For peppers, you’ve got Big Jim, Rio Grande, and Pinata; for weed, Jim OG, Rio Bravo, and Pinata Candy. The obligatory “Red or green” question you get from your waiter is not unlike the “Indica or sativa” question you get from your budtender—with “hybrid” being the weed equivalent of “Christmas.” 

Above all, chiles and cannabis represent the two crops that speak most clearly to New Mexico’s past, its future, and to farmers’ evolving relationship with the land here. One crop symbolizes a seductive and much-needed revenue stream. The other is a historic and culturally consequential touchstone seen on license plates, grocery shelves, restaurant menus, portales, and kitchen tables. Growing chile is a source of pride so integral to New Mexico’s psyche that in 2023 we became the nation’s first state to claim an official aroma: the smell of green chiles roasting in the fall. 

Yet as vital and vibrant as these crops are, when photographer Alex Harris and I visited farms throughout the state—some with neat rows of chile, others with forests of cannabis—what we saw made us uneasy. Farmers who are deeply connected to the land and staunchly committed to sharing their crops with the world are facing potentially devastating marketplace and environmental challenges. For these growers, and for the state itself, the stakes feel immeasurably high. 

HOLLY BRAUSE, AN ENVIRONMENTAL ANTHROPOLOGIST at New Mexico State University, studies slightly nerdy-sounding subjects like “transboundary water resources.” But minutes into our conversation, her enthusiasm turns to New Mexico burritos. She ordered her first at Albuquerque’s Frontier Restaurant. “It came out in a swamp, all covered with cheese and chile,” she says. “It was incredible!” 

Brause, who has been focused on chile for more than a decade, sees palpable threats to the crop’s future. New Mexico’s chile-growing landscape is changing because of water shortages, labor shortages, temperature changes, and the rising cost of farming materials, pesticides, and even the propane that fires the chile roaster—all of which puts enormous pressure on farmers. These are not just academic concerns: In the early 1990s, farmers here were harvesting 34,000 acres of chile. By 2023, that number had fallen to just 8,500 acres. Likewise, in the past 20 years, the amount of chiles produced in New Mexico dropped from 106,500 tons to fewer than 50,000. 

How did this happen? NAFTA had something to do with it. Chile has been grown in the region for at least 400 years, even if there’s some dispute as to whether it was introduced by Spanish colonists or thanks to barter between the Toltecs of Mexico and the local Puebloans. But when the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect in 1994, the market changed significantly: Suddenly, chiles could be imported from Mexico—where labor is considerably cheaper and there are fewer environmental concerns—without tariffs. The shift hit local farmers like a 10-ton sack of Sandias: Today, Mexico’s pepper industry’s estimated value is well over $1 billion a year—leaving New Mexico in the dust.

One of Mexico’s key growing areas is in Ascensión, Chihuahua, a mere two-and-a-half-hour drive from Hatch, the chile capital of New Mexico (and yes, the entire United States). “We can literally see the trucks with Chihuahua license plates coming by our farm entrance,” Tyler Holmes, assistant manager of Morrow Farms in the Las Uvas Valley, tells me. Started by her grandfather, father, and uncle in the 1980s, the family-run farm plants anywhere from 100 to 250 acres of chile—comprising their heirloom varieties like Ms. Junie, Sandia Original, Lumbre, and Big Jim, as well as high-yield varieties they grow for large chile-processing companies. The peppers on the trucks don’t compete directly with Morrow’s heirloom chiles, most of which are sold directly to consumers in burlap sacks. But, she says, some of her fellow farmers have had to “adapt or die.” 

Adapting sometimes means that local growers buy Mexican chiles to use in their processing plants, where much of the chile you find in supermarket jars is packaged. They then turn over their former chile-growing land to crops that don’t compete with those farmed over the border. 

Not everyone can adapt. Perhaps the most poignant sign of hard times came early in 2023, when Glen Duggins, then president of the New Mexico Chile Association, announced that after 37 years, his chile-growing days were over. The one-two punch of the cheaper chile from Mexico and a severe labor shortage at home made pepper farming unsustainable. When I ask Holmes if she has farmer friends who have also hung it up, she takes a beat, looks away. “Yeah, it’s sad. Farmers who’ve been neighbors for, you know, generations …” Her words trail off. She wipes her eyes. 

I’d assumed the complaint I kept hearing about a “labor shortage” was actually code for farmers not wanting to pay pickers a higher wage. I was wrong. In fact, it’s become extremely problematic to find anyone who will do the backbreaking work of chile-picking in some of the hottest parts of the state during the hottest months of the year—a situation exacerbated by the crackdown on migrant workers. 

The solution, it turns out, may not come from higher wages, but from the lab. That’s where Stephanie Walker, an expert in chile pepper genetics at New Mexico State University, comes in. Walker has spent the last 12 years trying to reduce the dependence on manual labor by breeding a pepper with the precise physical characteristics that would enable the plant to be picked by machine. 

Chile bushes, with their multiple stems and low-lying peppers, make mechanical harvesting next to impossible. So Walker and her colleagues focused on breeding a pepper plant with a single stem and fruit that sits higher on the bush. Her creation, the NuMex Odyssey pepper, is the first green chile ever bred for mechanical harvesting. It was test-planted in 2023 and deemed a success—in terms of efficient picking and with respect to the pepper itself, about seven and a half inches long and with a consistent mild flavor. It has, she says, “been my lifelong goal to help the chile industry this way.”

But chile farmers face challenges beyond the reach of the microscope. Holmes says that farther north, developers are buying up old family farms—maybe to build subdivisions, but maybe to play a longer game: water rights. “They’re hoping it’s going to be the next gold rush,” she says. That echoes something Matt Romero, whose land in the Española Valley backs up to the Río Grande, said. “There’s been farming here for thousands of years, since way before the Spanish. Everything just grows like Jack and the Beanstalk,” he told me, as he ran his hands through rich soil that crumbled like chocolate cake. “But now we’re being squeezed by Santa Fe, Los Alamos, and Taos,” he explained.

“People want to build homes here, and once you put a home on land like this, with septic and whatnot, it won’t go back into agriculture.” As less land is devoted to farming, the food supply becomes more reliant on foreign imports—and farming culture withers. 

For farmers in the south, near Hatch, the issue is less about land and more about water. “Every year, we’re seeing the water table go down,” Holmes says. “The drier climate, less rainfall, less snowpack—it’s nerve-racking.” 

In one of the state’s scorching regions, where her farm sits, the lower water table means less grass and more crop-damaging dust storms. The warming climate is also starting to mess with one of the key factors that makes New Mexico’s chiles so uniquely tasty. Our temperature differential—warm days, cool nights—acts as a stressor that causes the peppers to produce more capsaicin, the naturally occurring irritant that gives chiles their signature kick. But a little stress goes a long way. As the days get hotter and the differential gets more extreme, the flavor can change. “The pepper’s heat is less consistent now,” Holmes says. “I’ve had longtime customers who are, like, ‘Well, this is a little different.’ ”

The difference may not be so little. For years, New Mexico’s chile industry has been promoting the importance of terroir, a word that usually describes highly specific environmental factors (soil, climate, topography) that give a wine its characteristic flavor. Just as Champagne can only come from that specific region of France—by law, everything else must be labeled “sparkling wine”—in 2012, the state passed its own law stating that only chile grown in New Mexico can be called “New Mexico chile.” 

This safeguard made sense, Brause says. “There are unique flavors that develop in New Mexico chile based on the minerality of our soil, our growing conditions, our temperatures, even our cultural practices that create certain flavor profiles that can’t be replicated in other regions.” Yet she worries that shifting climate and agricultural methods might actually “undermine claims of terroir.” In other words, it’s possible that in the coming years, chiles grown in New Mexico might be harder to distinguish from those grown in California. 

On a beautiful yet unsettlingly warm February day in Taos—sunny and nearly 60 degrees—I’m sitting in the outdoor smoking lounge of Big Horn Weed, a dispensary specializing in organic cannabis grown by local, independent farmers. Big Horn’s 39-year-old owner, Steve Weiner, a former naval officer on nuclear submarines, is explaining why the environment in northern New Mexico is ideally suited for growing cannabis. 

“At 7,000 feet, our high-desert elevation, as well as the climate and topography, is very similar to the areas of Central Asia where cannabis has grown naturally for thousands of years,” Weiner says. The same temperature differential that stresses the chiles in a good way also works its magic on locally grown cannabis, he adds, while the dry climate and steady sun also makes mold less of an issue than in legendary growing states like California.

Still, cannabis growers face challenges that would leave your average chile farmer slack-jawed. Romero, for instance, can pick a bushel of Highlanders, toss it in his truck, and head to market. But the strict, highly specific state regulations concerning the “operational requirements” for cannabis—spelled out in 76 single-spaced pages that even detail the size of the lettering for the signs on a farm’s perimeter—require cannabis growers to give every mature plant a unique registration number so that it can be tracked from soil to store. Farmers also must send a representative sample from each batch they harvest to a lab for inspection to ensure it’s free from mold, harmful pesticides, and heavy metals.

“It’s very different from growing chile,” says Ben Lewinger, the executive director of New Mexico’s Cannabis Chamber of Commerce. “For one thing, cannabis is federally illegal, so there’s no financial loan products a grower can use, no bankruptcy protection, and the federal tax code prohibits cannabis businesses from writing off traditional business expenses. The profit margin narrows and narrows.”   

The “green rush”—the cartoonlike stampede that happens when a state legalizes recreational cannabis and everyone wants a piece of the action—brought its own problems. “Initially, the state limited the largest producers to growing 10,000 mature plants at any time,” Lewinger explains, “but at the last minute they raised it to 20,000.” 

Far more cannabis is now being produced than is consumed, and that glut has driven down prices: An ounce of weed that once went for $90 now sells for $60. For small farms, that’s been brutal, but it’s squeezed dispensaries too. As of February, New Mexico had 670 open recreational-use dispensaries. Of those, Lewinger points out, 462—nearly 70 percent—were earning less than $50,000 a month, an amount that puts them teetering on the edge of long-term viability, while 8 percent of recreational stores were earning less than $3,000. “We just have way too many plants in production right now,” Lewinger explains. Weiner agrees: “A reckoning is coming,” he says, ominously. 

Growing weed, it turns out, is not like smoking weed. Between navigating regulatory, packaging, security, and marketing concerns—not to mention the actual growing—there’s nothing chill about cannabis farming. But local cannabis growers are a creative breed who, like all farmers, exhibit an enthusiastic hacker mentality when it comes to real-time problem-solving. 

Four years ago, Rhea Estrada and Adrienne Hubbard, both in their late 30s, bought a home on nearly three acres in a dry, dusty, remote patch of land south of Socorro to establish Gold Fish Farms. “We knew water would be a limiting factor,” Estrada says of the thirsty crop. So they invested in a water consultant, who spent 18 months helping them secure water rights. 

Starting a farm based on organic methods was a tough climb, especially in an industry that doesn’t always take women growers seriously. But Estrada and Hubbard approached the business strategically. Early on, they decided to lease half of their property to an out-of-state concern eager to grow in New Mexico, a move that instantly reduced their expenses while increasing the number of watchful eyes on their cash crop. Then they did something else: Hubbard, who has a master’s degree in mechanical engineering, built a high-tech lab in which they began producing Gold Fish’s now-celebrated rosin, a concentrated, wax-like form of cannabis. They sell their rosin under their own name and white-label it for other companies. As challenging as it’s been, Hubbard and Estrada seem endlessly inspired by their drive to harness the plant’s healing power, and as Estrada says, to “just help sick people feel better.” 

From Gold Fish Farms, I drive three hours north to Abiquiú, over the winding Río Chama, past red hills and green cottonwoods, and into what can only be described as an oasis. Three years ago, David Grey, a former graphic design professor, and Chris Rain, a longtime cannabis grower, convinced the open-minded owner of a 59-acre grape and alfalfa farm to rent them a small plot on which to grow cannabis—a smart move, given rising property prices.

As microfarmers, they adhere to all the same strict regulations, but their growing license costs only $1,000 per farmer and allows them each to grow 200 plants. “For small farms like ours,” Rain says, “that was a godsend.” Now Rain’s UpRiver Herb and Grey’s Abiquiu Cannabis split a half-acre. Last fall, just before the harvest, their treelike plants—organic, sun-grown, and fed by the Chama—were easily 10 feet tall. 

We haven’t been in the fields three minutes when Rain nods me over to a plant, closes his eyes, and gently inhales. I do the same, catching a whiff of orange so fresh, it was like I’d just broken the peel. Rain and Grey work side by side on their own separate plots, sharing expenses and taking their goods on sales trips to dispensaries together “like a couple of Bible salesmen,” Rain says. The going has not been easy: “We expected a hungry market,” Grey tells me, “but we got put on the bottom shelf.” That’s partly because cannabis grown outdoors doesn’t always have the same quick-glance “shelf appeal” as weed grown indoors under controlled conditions. “But I didn’t want to grow indoors,” Grey explains, gazing over their dreamy half-acre and the soaring cliffs behind it. “The point was to be an artisanal farmer and—” 

Rain jumps in to finish his thought. “The point was to be outdoors in the dirt with the butterflies and hummingbirds.” 

Sixty miles north, in Taos, I pop in on Mario Vargas and Miguel Montoya and their three-year-old farm, Taos Mountain Grown. Vargas, Montoya, and their partner, Joe Rodriguez, met while working at what they describe as a “big-box chain dispensary.” Disillusioned with the cannabis quality and business practices, they decided to grow their own. Prudently, they hedged their bets by growing both indoors and outdoors (“Indoor is more manageable and higher yield,” Vargas explains, “but outdoor grows bigger”) and quickly snagged an award for their Sensi Star indica. 

As Vargas mentions this, he reaches for a plant the way a father reaches for his young child’s hand, tenderly bending it toward me for a better look at its large purple bud. Given the competition for space on dispensary shelves, the partners decided that “vertical integration” was the best way to reach customers directly, and so they opened their own on-premises dispensary, not unlike a farm shop. 

In the end, Matt Romero set aside his cannabis dreams in 2024 and decided to stick with growing chiles in his chocolate-cake soil. The regulations for cannabis farming seemed daunting, there were hiccups with his business partner, and he realized he couldn’t control the economics. But mostly, he says, he’d miss the human interaction he’s come to love from chile farming. 

“When you grow people’s food, you become part of their lives, part of their life cycle, part of their family,” he says. “They trust you.” Every Saturday at the farmers’ market, he adds, “I have people walking up and thanking me for farming. You just don’t get that in most jobs. With weed, I would have been a step removed from the people enjoying the product, and for me, that human connection is everything.”

Romero’s words were on my mind early one Saturday morning last September as I pulled into a parking spot at my local farmers’ market in front of the Taos County Courthouse. Even before I got out of my car, I could smell the chiles roasting. It smelled like fall. 

I walked by Freshies peaches, past Wild Leaven bread, past a giant tortoise on a leash (hey, it’s Taos).  As I approached a farmer selling roasted chile, I picked up another familiar smell: the wafting aroma of weed, earthy and pungent. I instinctively scanned the lot, looking for the source, an old habit. I didn’t spot the smoker, but in that moment, as I surveyed the farmers and the shoppers—people celebrating our connection to the land and all that it gives us—the two scents mingled in the air. I couldn’t separate one from the other.  

Read more: A former chef, Matt Romero brings the heavenly scent of roasting chile to the Santa Fe Farmers' Market.