The Dream

What is our dream relationship to food and the food system that feeds us? Imagine the year is 2025 and we've done everything right. What might New Mexico's food system look like? The Dreaming New Mexico project engaged with many involved citizen-experts, gathered data and researched neglected topics. We conjured the poster map as a celebratory understanding of contemporary agrarian life, custom-designed a Big Picture of "Food in the Land of Enchantment" and distilled a complex tangle of topics into a long single-sentence shared dream.

DREAM: A future food system that nourishes all New Mexican citizens, especially the food insecure with affordable, safe, fresh and nutritious food, seasonally grown and raised with eco-friendly, humane and climate-friendly methods, processed and distributed as close to home as possible (local foodsheds); that preserves long-term agrarian life by protecting lands, water and assures intergenerational sales of farms; supported by new government policies, rules, laws and payments to help transform the food system, create new jobs by local import substitution, sustain profits and ensure equitable working conditions at every step of the food chain.

NM has six AGRO-EOCREGIONS, encouraging eaters to ask: Where does my food come from? How did it arrive on my plate? Who grew it and how? Agro-ecoregions nourish regional identities through food. Chiles and apples. Sheep and Three Sisters. Wheat and cattle. Pecans and onions. They engender respect for weather and land, for home as a productive place. Three milestones begin to describe success teaching agro-ecoregions in schools and colleges; branding of local crops for niche markets; and creating research/extension services to help farmers adapt to climate change and find new profitable crops.

FOODSHEDS are a geographic area that can feed a region, provide eaters more reliable, tasteful and trusted food from local farms; the sense that purchasing food is more than a cash transaction; and the hope that local farms are less likely to abandon NM for cheaper-labor nations.

Milestones: 25% of NM's consumed food is grown locally by 2025; a resurgence of local meat processing; the reduction of freight distances to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; localized food-chain linkages; a higher percentage of foodshed owned by local operators; the growth of farm-to-table programs, farmer's markets, CSAs and food events; more banks making local agricultural loans; and the viability of co-op enterprises like La Montanita.

FAIR TRADE. While our State can produce some foods better than other locales, other regions produce certain desirable foods (chocolate, tea, coffee, rice and mangos) NM can't. Fair trade simply says: "receive from others as you would give unto them," i.e. with biosafety, no child labor, gender equity, good-working conditions, eco-friendly farming and living wages.

Milestones: fair trade product certification for both State exports and imports; labels for supply chain so that every step is transparent, traceable and part of a moral economy; and State sovereignty laws and fair trade agreements.

FOOD SECURITY dreams to aid the hungry, end hunger and provide fresh, nutritious food to the food insecure and those with nutrition-related diseases. Long-term food security requires: preserving farm/ranch landscapes as well as farmers and ranchers; preserving or regenerating the soils and water that support crops, orchards and grasslands; ensuring traceability of all foods to prevent food-bourne illness and bioterrorism; and preparing for climate change impacts.

Milestones: a reduction in obesity and diabetes, fewer New Mexicans needing emergency food aid; a greater proportion of fresh foods through food banks; land-use protection for the best farmland; a real-estate company specializing in the transfer of available farm operations from retired to new generations; source labels with the origin of green, leafy vegetables as well as meats; and payments for carbon-sequestration.

GOVERNANCE is essential to attain a "restorative" food economy.

Milestones: compensation for on-farm ecosystem services like watershed and wildlife protection; new incentives and the removal of disincentives to level the playing field with industrial agri-biz--for both the niche-markets of local foodsheds and the embryonic, globlocal fair trade system; State and local government purchases of local foods for public institutions; and appropriate rules for small-farm meat processing and monitoring food-bourne illness In short, facilitating an age of Local Foodsheds and a Fair Trade State requires action by local, State, tribal, regional, federal and international governments---the most complex transition.

The dream is ultimately of a new moral economy. We'll have to learn new ways to live together and make conscious choices of "how" and "what" to feed ourselves. Food--good, healthy, fair and enough--connects us from local farms to the whole planet. Maps portray some do-able dreams.