I am almost positive most of you know about the two current public gardens in Alamogordo and the one in Tularosa by now, but I’m going to talk about them again, because they’re a huge deal!
The thing about small communities like ours is that the cost of living is pretty cheap compared to everywhere else. And yet, a lot of people have been struggling here for a long time, more so now.
According to 2nd Life Media, With Many Hands first approached Courtney McCary-Squyres in late 2022 about “her love for gardening along with marketing her family’s urban farm located in Alamogordo.” The next few months of building a leadership team and working with local government led to the June 2023 announcement of the Public Land for Food Campaign.
I don’t personally get out to the three current gardens (900 block of New York Ave. alleyway, across from 523 Maryland Ave., on St. Francis Drive between city hall and the fire department) very often because of my allergies and a bum foot, but the few times I have made me feel like I was part of something important, because I was.
The main purpose for these gardens is to address food insecurity in our communities.
According to data from 2022, food insecurity, or not knowing where your next meal will come from and much less if it will be nutritious, affected about 16.5% of Otero County´s population. I can’t say for sure of course, but I would wager that number (about 11,200 people) hasn’t changed much since then.
In an article from November 2023, Elva Oesterreich writes that there are quite a few services in Otero County to address this need, but access is the real problem.
Jennifer Guger, supervisor of Community Connections, reported that a huge hurdle for getting food to those facing insecurity has been delivery. Many pantries and food banks simply don’t have the capacity.
Public gardens within walking distance of communities could be a part of the solution.
As I mentioned last time, we are once again experiencing inflation, and this time it’s impacting our basic needs pretty severely. ONE of those things increasing would be enough to throw us off, but the prices for rent, food, gas… all have kept pace for the past few years. We´re all hurting, a lot. Having to choose between paying a medical bill, keeping a roof over your head, or keeping your family adequately fed is a real Sophie’s choice that many of us have had to come face to face with.
According to a September NPR article, specifically regarding inflation on groceries, greed on the parts of grocery chain and food supplier CEOs is an easy conclusion to come to (and in my mind, it’s a fairly smart assumption to make), but the problem is more complicated than that. Since Covid, it is much harder to keep consistent labor, due to illness, layoffs/budget cuts, or deportation (but the latter’s not in the scope of this piece).
Probably the largest factors behind the current global inflation are the cost of packaging and shipping food, and many companies choose to pass that extra cost to their consumers. Just to break that down a bit further, the World Bank estimates that two major driving forces behind global inflation have been demand and oil prices. That second one is very complicated thanks to many other things outside of this blog piece´s scope, but as it pertains to shipping…it just seems like relying on local sources of food would probably help that, right? Similarly, local food doesn’t have that far to go to make it to local tables, so packaging is less of an issue depending on the kind of food it is.
I´m not saying these public gardens will solve all our problems, but they´re a pretty darn good part of the solution.
The thing about having fairly short attention spans by design compounded by how much work it takes to get public good projects up and running is that all of our involvement needs to be pretty consistent to make those projects work long term. Thursday, and hopefully way beyond that, I’ll highlight some of the ways we can help uplift this Public Land for Food Campaign.
Until then,
Salud!
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