FM2473 Farm to Market

09/16/2026

🌶️ 2026 New Mexico Chile Supply Update 🌶️

The New Mexico Chile Association is sharing an important update on this year’s chile harvest and current supply challenges.

We encourage industry partners to communicate with suppliers and plan ahead as availability remains limited.

Thank you for your continued support of New Mexico chile!

09/14/2026

Researchers in Laramie, Wyoming, tagged 204 raccoons over four years and placed puzzle boxes in their backyards to find out which ones could solve a problem nobody had taught them. Nineteen figured it out. When the researchers reversed which button delivered food, 17 of the 19 adapted. Then a raccoon named Great Basin arrived at one of the boxes on a chilly fall evening in 2016, found another raccoon already working it, jumped on top of the cabinet, and solved the puzzle upside down.

Lauren Stanton, then a graduate student at the University of Wyoming, designed the study to test raccoon cognition in the wild. Between 2015 and 2019, her team trapped raccoons across Laramie using live traps baited with cat food, assessed each animal's health and temperament, injected a rice-grain-sized radio frequency ID tag between its shoulder blades, and released it into its home territory. The tag recorded which raccoon visited each puzzle box and when. The boxes operated overnight without researchers present.

The device was a raccoon-sized cubicle with two illuminated buttons. During training, either button dispensed dry dog food. After a raccoon pressed the buttons 11 times, only one continued to provide food. Once the animal chose the correct button nine times out of ten, the researchers reversed the assignment. Food now came from the other button.

Nineteen raccoons learned to operate the device, and 17 completed at least one reversal. The animals changed their response when the food moved and completed an average of 13 reversals during testing. Researchers use this kind of reversal learning to measure cognitive flexibility, or how readily an animal changes a learned response when conditions change.

Great Basin found another way to use the equipment. With another raccoon occupying the front of a puzzle box, he climbed onto the cabinet and worked one of its latches from above. Science reported that he manipulated the latch upside down and opened it quickly.

The researchers had expected the bolder, less docile raccoons to be more willing to use the unfamiliar equipment. The results went the other way. Raccoons that had been calmer and less vocal while handled were more likely to learn how the device worked. Docility did not make them more likely to approach or become accustomed to the box, but among the animals that did, it was associated with learning the task.

In Stanton's backyard, a mother raccoon solved one of the earlier puzzle boxes, and at least two of her kits later used it successfully. Stanton could hear them working on it at night. “Mom knows how to do it, at least two of the kits know how to do it,” she told Wyoming Public Media. The observations did not establish whether the kits learned by watching their mother or worked out the solution independently.

Image is for illustration purposes only

Source: Stanton et al. (2022), Journal of Experimental Biology / Stanton et al. (2024), Proceedings of the Royal Society B / University of Wyoming / Wyoming Public Media / Science / UC Berkeley.

09/13/2026

He was born enslaved in Mississippi in 1843. He became one of the most trusted cowboys on one of the most dangerous cattle trails in the American West.

His name was Bose Ikard, and his story is one Texas should remember.

Ikard came to Texas as a child and grew up near Weatherford. After emancipation, he became a cowboy at a time when the cattle industry was exploding across Texas. Historians estimate that Black cowboys made up a significant share of the men who worked the western cattle trails, yet relatively few became household names.

Ikard rode with legendary Texas cattleman Charles Goodnight.

Beginning in the 1860s, Goodnight and Oliver Loving drove enormous herds of Texas cattle west through some of the harshest country imaginable. Their route became known as the Goodnight-Loving Trail, stretching through West Texas and New Mexico toward markets farther north.

This wasn’t the romantic cowboy life Hollywood would later create.

Cowboys faced stampedes, flooded rivers, extreme heat, freezing nights, cattle thieves and long stretches of country where help could be days away.

And Bose Ikard became one of Goodnight’s most trusted men.

He reportedly carried money for the outfit, helped protect the herd and rode through country where judgment and reliability could mean the difference between finishing the drive and never coming home.

Goodnight never forgot him.

Decades later, when Ikard died in 1909 and was buried in Weatherford’s Greenwood Cemetery, Goodnight had a tribute placed on his grave describing him as his “most faithful and best hand.”

That relationship eventually reached millions of people in a way neither man could have imagined.

Author Larry McMurtry drew inspiration from Goodnight and Ikard when creating elements of Woodrow Call and Joshua Deets in Lonesome Dove. Deets became one of the story’s most memorable characters.

But Bose Ikard wasn’t fiction.

He was a real Texas cowboy.

And his life tells us something important about the history of the West.

The cattle trails weren’t built by one kind of Texan. Black cowboys, Mexican vaqueros, former Confederate soldiers, immigrants and young men looking for wages all rode the same enormous stretches of open country.

Some became legends.

Others almost disappeared from the story.

Bose Ikard came into the world enslaved and lived long enough to become a respected cowboy, husband, father and landowner. More than a century after his death, his name is still carved into Texas history.

Sometimes the people who helped build the legend of Texas weren’t the people who ended up in the history books.

Bose Ikard deserves to be remembered.

Did you know his story before today?

09/12/2026

More Than Just Hominy: The Indigenous Chemistry Behind Our Winter Pots

Field corn is not food on its own. It is too hard to chew, the hull will not come off, and anyone living on it plain will slowly get sick. Across the mountains and valleys of New Mexico, households long solved that with a bucket of clean wood ashes or a bit of slaked lime.

Here is what was happening in the yard on a cold winter morning.

The ashes from clean juniper, piñon, or cedar had been gathered from the fogón, the fireplace, or the outdoor cooking fire. In some yards, water was strained through a wooden ash hopper to draw off strong amber lye water. In traditional New Mexico and Pueblo households, the clean, sifted ash was added directly into a big cast iron kettle of boiling water along with shelled white or blue corn, while others used cal, which is slaked pickling lime.

The alkaline ash or lime water did something the corn could not do on its own. It softened and broke down the tough pericarp, the outer hull, so it slipped right off with gentle rubbing. The kernels swelled, split open, and turned soft and fragrant. Then came the wash, and it was serious rinsing in cold water, basket after basket and pot after pot, until the alkali was rinsed away and the skins were gone. In the South they called the finished whole corn hominy. In New Mexico, it is the foundation of posole, and when dried and ground, it becomes the nixtamal masa for tortillas and tamales.

Now the part almost nobody was told in modern times, though Indigenous peoples understood its importance for millennia. This process, known historically as nixtamalization, comes from the Nahuatl word nextamalli, meaning ash corn. Treating corn with alkaline wood ash or lime fundamentally changes its chemistry. It unlocks bound niacin (vitamin B3), making it bioavailable, and provides essential dietary calcium. In the American South and across Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, communities eating untreated corn suffered epidemics of pellagra, a devastating niacin deficiency. Yet throughout the Pueblos and Mesoamerica, where nixtamalization was woven into daily life, pellagra was virtually unknown.

In Pueblo communities, nixtamalization is not just food preparation; it is a sacred culinary science. Blue corn is nixtamalized with wood ash, often from juniper or chamisa, which not only frees the nutrients but chemically preserves and brightens that rich blue-gray color. The ash adds subtle minerals and flavor to atole, chaquegue, and piki bread. It is an unbroken line of botanical chemistry developed by Native ancestors and shared across cultural lines for centuries.
Dried or frozen, that prepared corn carried communities through the hardest winter months. When simmered slow with pork, garlic, and pure red chile, it becomes the bowl of posole that anchors New Mexico feast days, Pueblo celebrations, Christmas Eve tables, and cold winter mornings.

If your elders made posole or hominy outside in the yard over an open fire, somebody in your family still remembers the earthy, pungent steam coming off that kettle, and the nourishment that kept generations fed.

New Mexico History and Everything Land of Enchantment
Sources:
Katz, S. H., Hediger, M. L., & Valleroy, L. A. (1974). Traditional Maize Processing Techniques in the New World. Science, 184(4138), 765-773.
Pueblo Indian Cooking (Cheryl Alters Jamison & Bill Jamison); Native American Foodways and Nixtamalization studies.

09/02/2026

08/23/2026

You might want to check labels when buying food. You don’t even know what ingredients the restaurant is using to make their foods!!

A silent revolution has breached the aisles of America’s largest retailers, changing the very fabric of the food supply without the flash of a single warning label. Pioneer biotech firms, most notably The EVERY Company with its OvoPro protein, have successfully bypassed the traditional chicken coop by engineering a “lab-grown”, animal-free egg white protein.

By extracting egg-white genes and fermenting them inside industrial vats with genetically modified yeast, they have created a substance “molecularly identical” to a real hen’s egg—completely eliminating the bird from the equation. Armed with official FDA “no questions” clearance letters, these stealth ingredients have already infiltrated everyday consumer products. From the bakery section to the health aisles, this “bio-identical” protein is secretly texturizing and fortifying baked goods, protein bars, protein powders, sauces and dressings currently on the shelves of Walmart and Target.

The corporate masterstroke that allowed this rapid, nationwide infiltration relies on a decades-old regulatory backdoor known as the “GRAS” (Generally Recognized as Safe) loophole. Originally established in 1958 to exempt benign, everyday staples like vinegar and baking soda from grueling federal oversight, the policy has evolved into a procedural superhighway for food-tech giants. Under the current framework, a company can simply hire its own panel of scientific experts to self-affirm that a new, lab-created compound is safe, allowing them to introduce it into mainstream food products without ever receiving formal, independent pre-market approval from the FDA.

By utilizing this self-determination pathway and filing a voluntary notification to which the regulator responded with “no questions” The EVERY Company avoided years of bureaucratic delays. Because final labeling mandates remain contractually confidential or obscured under generic terms, consumers are left completely unaware that their morning protein bar or favorite salad dressing is a product of cellular agriculture rather than nature.

🚩Check out the comments section for key terms to avoid on food labels as well as labels that guarantee real eggs 🥚❤️