El Bosque Garlic Farm

Stan and Rosemary have been farming since the late 1960s and selling at the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market since the 1970s.

El Bosque garlic Farm received the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market Institute’s “Farmer All Star” award in 2009.

Stan is also a writer, and has published several books, both fiction and non-fiction. You can learn about each title here. He also has written a monthly column for the Albuquerque Journal, published articles in the NY Times, the LA times, Smithsonian Magazine among dozens of others, has reviewed books for the New Yorker, the American Book Review and others, has received numerous awards, fellowships and residencies, and, has been farming in Dixon since he and his wife Rosemary, a playwright, moved there 40 years ago.

The moment began with the moment I stood on a wooden plank bridge and looked down into the slow-moving waters of the Acequia del Medio in Dixon, in the Embudo Valley, as it flowed through the backyard of a crumbling adobe my wife and I were about to rent for $35 a month. I watched the water swirl down around an old apple tree and under a fence, into the backyard of a neighbor’s place. The moment I saw this thing, whatever it was, beyond a small channel of water, I knew I had found a home. That was late in the Indian Summer October of 1969. With certain brusqueness the acequia began to teach me about physical labor. It prodded Rosemary and me to plant a garden just above its banks, the most laborious garden we have ever grown. It taught us to feed ourselves and therefore about that special form of health that comes from growing and harvesting and preparing and eating your own food. This was serious business now. Our son was a year old and our daughter on her way…

Stan and Rosemary took their corn, zucchini, lettuce, tomatoes to the Taos Market starting in 1973. After a couple of years they switched to the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market because the hours suited them better. For a spell, switched to selling to restaurants, then at crafts fairs, and then at La Chiripada in Taos. But Stan missed the Markets and the production cycle that went along with it – the planting, harvesting and selling. He said it felt like he was just the caretaker of the their farm, and that’s no fun. He missed the remarkable encounters and conversations he had with people, how serendipitous it all was.

In 1984, he went back to the Los Alamos market with mostly walla walla onions and garlic and learned another life lesson after Don Usner’s father told him he looked very tense. Stan said he realized that when you aren’t selling, you have to do something other than glower at people. Suddenly selling was more fun, and in 1986, he and Rosemary went back to Santa Fe. From then on, like MacBeth, his destiny was pretty much laid out for him.

He led the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market board of directors from 1984 to 1998, and during that time, the Market grew from what Stan called a zucchini market to include jams and jellies, then cider then by the time they got to Sanbusco, it included nursery and dairy, then later meat.  By the summer of 1997, Stan and his board could see the writing on the wall, that the Railyard would be built out eventually, and a more permanent location for the Market was going to be needed. They talked to the Ford Foundation and got a big two-year grant, which allowed Stan to resign as President after 14 years and became the project director in search of a new site for the Market. He and Pam Roy, then the director of the Market, made two trips to Washington where they met with the NM Congressional delegation and came home with ¾ a of million dollars from HUD that was used on the Railyard infrastructure and to figure out the programming of today’s Farmers’ Market pavilion.

Stan said he’s had many frivolous jobs, but he thinks that growing food, and growing it well, is probably the best job he can ever do. Writing gives meaning to his growing, and being a grower, and mayordomo of his acequia association for about 30 years, gives meaning to his writing. He said, in this world, there are not that many good things to do, and this, he says, feels like a good thing to do.

Stan’s commitment to local produce continues. He has been fighting a major corporation that has been flooding the US market with garlic from China. He has asked the US Department of Commerce for an administrative review of garlic imported from China, which unfairly undercuts domestic garlic growers, both large and small. Simply for requesting this review, he is being subjected to legal action by the largest importer of Chinese garlic, Zhengzhou Harmoni Spice Company. The response of Harmoni has been a flood of legal filings (some 2000 pages and counting).  According to Stan’s attorney, this is unprecedented in his forty years’ experience with international trade law. The issue may well become a national landmark case. Their efforts are infringing on the constitutional right’s of small farmers to petition the government for redress of grievances.