Section 4 of 5
Growers
The people behind the pod: two breeders at a land-grant college, the Pueblo farmers who were here first, and the families in Chimayó who kept a seed line going without a catalogue number.
Start here. García's biography as documented at NMSU — his arrival at the New Mexico College of Agriculture, the decades of crossing work, and the 1913 release of New Mexico No.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Fabián García Standardised the Pod — and Nobody Talks About Him Enough
García's biography as documented at NMSU — his arrival at the New Mexico College of Agriculture, the decades of crossing work, and the 1913 release of New Mexico No. 9 as the first commercially standardised chile cultivar in the state. An argument for why his name should be as recognised as the chile itself.
3 pages in Growers. The complete roster of the site is on the archive.
Everything in Growers
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Photo: Wikimedia Commons Read →A Century of Breeding at NMSU, Pod by Pod
The New Mexico State University chile breeding programme from García's No. 9 through Nakayama's Big Jim to present-day heat and disease-resistance work — a chronological account of what each generation of breeders was trying to fix. A walk-through of institutional plant science.
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Photo: Dr Photographer / Pexels Read →Three Sisters, One Ditch: Pueblo Agriculture Before and After Contact
The three-sisters polyculture (corn, beans, squash) as practised by Pueblo peoples of the Río Grande valley, and how the Spanish colonial acequia system was grafted onto — and in some places disrupted — existing irrigation infrastructure. A piece of documented agricultural history.