How can farmers keep their land productive in a hotter, drier climate?

NMAA is working to pass those practices on to the next generation of farmers. Its Los Sembradores Farmer Training Program helps new farmers learn to grow food using practices rooted in acequia culture and adapted to New Mexico’s land and climate. The cohort spends a harvest season on a family farm in Taos County learning soil-building techniques and how to grow food in relationship with the land, the water, and the wider community. These practices can also help farmers reduce their reliance on purchased fertilizers, potentially lowering costs and supporting farm viability. Donne Gonzales, the program’s training coordinator, describes the work as teaching “what it means to be a farmer, what it means to be connected to land, and what it means to be a really good community member.”

The acequias that sustain this agriculture have a long history. Built by Indigenous people before Spanish settlement, acequias are gravity-fed irrigation channels that carry water from the mountains to the fields. Unlike many large-scale irrigation systems, acequias work with natural cycles, allowing water to slowly soak into the ground and replenish the aquifer below.

“It acts like a sponge,” says Bustos, steward of the Acequia de Santa Cruz in Española. Researchers have since confirmed what acequia communities have long understood: the slow, downward absorption of water through soil supports groundwater recharge.

In a state where hotter, drier conditions are making water less reliable for farmers and threatening productivity, these community-managed systems offer a practical way to adapt to a changing climate. Healthy soil retains moisture, acequias replenish groundwater, and local cooperation helps farmers share the water available to them.

The same acequia has irrigated the Bustos family’s land for more than three centuries. It is one of approximately 700 across New Mexico, supporting an estimated 15,000 families. Each operates not only as a water system, but as a local decision-making system. Bustos is a parciante, or water rights holder, and longtime acequia caretaker, known as a mayordomo. Parciantes vote on how water is shared, coordinate maintenance, and can prevent water from being transferred out of the watershed.

“Everybody [gets] a vote, no matter who you [are], how rich you [are],” Bustos says. “If one person drinks, everybody gets to drink.”

That shared governance matters even more when water is scarce. Across New Mexico, hotter, drier conditions are reducing snowpack and spring runoff, the seasonal water sources that many farms depend on, leaving the landscape highly susceptible to wildfires. Wildfires then burn the hillsides that once helped hold water in place. When monsoon rains arrive, water can rush across hardened soil, carrying sediment into waterways and irrigation channels instead of reaching the fields below.

Paula Garcia, executive director of NMAA, has seen these changes firsthand. She grew up near acequias in Mora County and has spent decades working on water rights across New Mexico. In 2022, her hometown was devastated by the Hermits Peak–Calf Canyon Fire, the largest wildfire in state history.

“There was life before the fire,” Garcia says, “and there’s life after the fire. Our complete existence here has changed because the mountains are burned and we’re not getting the same water that we used to.” 

Responding to these changes means helping farmers make the most of the water and land available to them through practices that maintain farm viability, while also caring for the acequias that make farming possible. Each spring, acequia communities clear sediment, repair channels, and make sure water can move from the mountains to farms. It is skilled, hands-on work, passed down through practice.

To help carry that knowledge forward, NMAA launched the Mora Acequia Youth Conservation Corps, the first youth crew in New Mexico dedicated to acequia restoration. Young people work alongside experienced caretakers and community elders to clear sediment, restore flow, and learn what it takes to care for the water that local farms depend on.

For Naomi Mora, who coordinates the Youth Conservation Corps, that work connects directly to her family history. She grew up hearing stories of her grandmother tending the acequia each season. When she joined the youth crew, those stories became her own experience.

“Everything came full circle,” Mora says. “I was finally in an acequia doing what my grandmother told me she was doing when she was my age.”

The farming system supported by acequias also depends on seeds adapted to the high desert. Native, drought-tolerant varieties are part of how communities continue growing food with limited water and unpredictable harvests.

Each spring, farmers from acequia and Indigenous Pueblo communities gather at the annual Ówîngeh Táh Pueblos y Semillas Gathering and Seed Exchange to bless and exchange native seeds that have grown in the same valley for generations. For Gonzales, the gathering is an act of care and continuity. “Every single seed is its own person, its own spirit, its own body,” she says.

Garcia describes these native Indigenous seeds as “the seeds that were the gift of the first peoples, that are adapted to the land and that have been passed on for generation upon generation. They’re the foundation of everything.”

Across New Mexico, traditional farmers show that climate resilience is not only about building something new. It can also come from farming practices and community systems that have been tested over generations: approaches that cultivate healthy soil, help water reach farms and replenish the ground beneath them, keep decision-making local, and teach the next generation how to keep food growing in a drier world.

Learn more about the New Mexico Acequia Association’s work to support water, land, and community-led food systems here.