La Semilla: Bringing Families and Community Together with Food

La Semilla’s pro­grams range from involve­ment in school gar­dens and cur­ric­ula, includ­ing a youth farm, to pol­icy reform and much more. Staff at the cen­ter have seen young peo­ple lit­er­ally trans­formed by being able to take charge of their own food sys­tem as well as that of their community.

“La Semilla is really about cre­at­ing a vibrant, sus­tain­able and equi­table food sys­tem in the Paso del Norte region, in which our focus is mainly El Paso to Las Cruces,” Aaron Sharratt, co-founder of La Semilla Food Center, told Organic Connections. “It’s ensur­ing that all res­i­dents in our region can have access to healthy and afford­able food. That’s a huge chal­lenge and some­thing that moti­vates us daily—figuring out how that looks and what we can do to improve the situation.”

That kind of trans­for­ma­tion is what inspired the begin­nings of the cen­ter in the first place. “I came down for grad school and ended up in Las Cruces,” Sharratt recalled. “I loved the area and con­tin­ued to do research in Michoacán, Mexico, in food ways and tra­di­tions. By chance, I fell into assist­ing with coor­di­nat­ing some com­mu­nity gar­den projects in sev­eral dif­fer­ent bor­der com­mu­ni­ties here and really fell in love with that work. I found the pas­sion and a call­ing and helped to found La Semilla Food Center about two and a half years ago.”

In its short lifes­pan, La Semilla Food Center has made notable progress. One inroad is with school gar­dens. “Our school gar­den pro­gram has been suc­cess­ful to the point that this com­ing year we’re going to expand the gar­dens by about three­fold,” Sharratt said. “We’re look­ing to expand again the next school year. We’re work­ing with a group here in Las Cruces, the Las Cruces School Garden Partnership, and we’ve devel­oped what we think is a pretty suc­cess­ful model.”

To help achieve that suc­cess, La Semilla has brought aid to seri­ously over­worked teach­ers, uti­liz­ing ser­vice orga­ni­za­tions such as AmeriCorps and FoodCorps. “Teachers are incred­i­bly pressed for time,” Sharratt explained. “The ser­vice mem­bers are charged with over­see­ing the gar­den pro­grams at each of the var­i­ous schools. They usu­ally work with a teacher or a cou­ple of teach­ers at the schools who are pas­sion­ate about gar­den­ing them­selves, and begin to fig­ure out what the les­son pro­gram­ming will look like at each school.”

This par­tic­u­lar work has also extended to address another wide­spread issue: school food.

“One of the projects that we’re begin­ning next year is to move from just focus­ing on school gar­dens to tying in local food pro­cure­ment, and work­ing with the schools in that capac­ity,” Sharratt con­tin­ued. “Recently the city of Las Cruces passed a farm-to-school res­o­lu­tion, stat­ing their sup­port for these types of efforts. We’re work­ing with them now to form a food pol­icy coun­cil, and we are tied in with a few other groups in El Paso to help cre­ate the pub­lic pol­icy frame­work that will allow a lot of these things to grow and thrive.”

A long-term goal for La Semilla has been the La Semilla Youth Farm, on which youth will learn sus­tain­able, agro-ecological and dry-land farm­ing tech­niques, per­ma­cul­ture design prin­ci­ples, desert food her­itage his­tory, and culi­nary and nutri­tion skills. “Last November we received a 14-acre dona­tion of farm­land out­side of Anthony, New Mexico, for our youth farm,” Sharratt said. “We’re cur­rently work­ing with an engi­neer­ing firm to design an irri­ga­tion model and to get a well drilled; and we’re doing a pretty inten­sive and diverse crop­ping plan with fruits, veg­eta­bles, dif­fer­ent herbs and a few flow­ers. The intent of that site is to pro­vide an edu­ca­tion and demon­stra­tion site to show the via­bil­ity of both small scale and organic, sus­tain­able production.”

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There are pos­i­tive prospects for a sus­tain­able food sys­tem in this unique area of the world. “I think the future is look­ing pretty bright for us,” said Sharratt. “We’ve been pleas­antly sur­prised in terms of the response, recep­tive­ness and inter­est there is in the region and com­mu­nity. I think in part it stems from recog­ni­tion of the pretty seri­ous health issues that are faced along the border.”

One local La Semilla Youth Leader, Jose Lopez, speaks to this recep­tive­ness and inter­est in a video on the La Semilla web­site. “If we can help out our com­mu­nity, we can help our­selves,” he says. “And that’s, I think, the big thing that we’re doing here: help­ing every­one in this com­mu­nity, because there’s plenty of peo­ple who need this help. And I’ve seen those faces, of how peo­ple get so happy when they get a bag of toma­toes, when they get a bag of squash. It’s a great joy for them, and it’s valuable—it’s worth more than money.”

In the end, Sharratt has found his dri­ving pas­sion is best served through chang­ing our food sys­tem. “My mis­sion in life, what I’m really pas­sion­ate about, is serv­ing oth­ers,” he con­cluded. “For me food is the mech­a­nism to do that. We’ve become dis­tanced from it in so many ways. We see the results of that in a lot of the health and dietary con­se­quences we face, such as obe­sity and dia­betes. I think it is such a pow­er­ful thing to reestab­lish the tie-in to food. It’s also what brings fam­i­lies together, and what brings the com­mu­nity together.”

For more infor­ma­tion, please visit www.lasemillafoodcenter.org.