Small-scale growers find ways to reduce food insecurity
A previous version of this article appeared on Working Class Storytelling, a Substack by the author.
Courtney McCary-Squyres was going a bit stir-crazy. It was the pandemic and she was a mom of four, including newborn twins. She had to get outside.
She set her eyes on container gardening, figuring that she could be out in the New Mexico sunshine and “put some seeds in a pot with the kids.”
What she and her children put into those first pots grew, but so did Courtney’s understanding of food, food systems and politics. Fast forward to today, this is how she and a group of neighbors ended up at New Mexico’s State Capitol building in Santa Fe with folders of policy memos under their arms.
Courtney taught herself about gardening the way many of us now learn things: the internet. She read and researched, and as her front and back yards slowly turned into a small farm, she became familiar with terms like “soil health” and “cultivars.” She documented her progress on Instagram.
As her interest grew, she headed to her local farmer’s market in Alamogordo, a desert town of 31,000 in the Tularosa Basin and the Otero County seat. The Holloman Air Force Base had brought Courtney and her husband here, and the area was so beautiful that they decided to stay.
The farmer’s market was “smaller than expected, and consisted of more craft than food vendors,” says Courtney. She began to wonder why, in this rural area, it was so hard to find fresh, locally grown food. The next time she visited the market, she brought five bundles of bok choy from her garden to share.
Alamogordo is a working-class town. Because of its proximity to three military bases, lots of veterans live here. Like many places in New Mexico, housing costs have skyrocketed and rent is taking up a bigger portion of locals’ paychecks, making family’s food purchases—and particularly the quality of food—dwindle. As a result, 16.5% of Otero County’s population is food insecure, higher than both the state and national averages. In the county, 19% of residents live below the poverty line, including 28% of those under age 18 and 13% of those 65 or older.
Food is often the first thing a family skimps on when facing tough budgets; you can’t pay half the light bill, but you can cut back on groceries.
Courtney also saw that Alamogordo neighborhoods had a lot of empty lots. “I think a lot of people bought here when things were less expensive, and just left the houses when they moved away. Or maybe they left houses to family members who didn’t end up utilizing them,” she says, pointing out that houses frequently catch fire or fall into disrepair, leaving the city to bulldoze them.
Seeing the blight and witnessing the food insecurity around her, Courtney thought: Is there anything more our local government could do to address these needs?
Courtney set out to get the Alamogordo city government to respond. In late 2022, she created a petition asking the city to dedicate empty land for fresh food production and help foot the bill. She started with her friends, asking them to sign on, and then asked her growing Facebook following to do so as well. She tackled the petition drive systematically, the way you might lay out a garden bed.
“We set a goal of 500 signatures, because that feels big and representative in a small town,” she says. “I asked my friends to share it, then they asked theirs. We formed a committee and started knocking on doors and going to local events to get signatures.”
They called themselves With Many Hands and they called the campaign Public Land for Food. They set up meetings with the local government and asked for commitments to the project. By October 2023, petition in hand, she and the team were ready to ask the Alamogordo Parks & Recreation department to provide the land.
With Many Hands formed a leadership committee of people closest to the problem: Working-class people who live in the neighborhoods that were food deserts. Courtney knew from growing a garden at home that food production—like community organizing—wasn’t something she could do alone. So she began calling the people who had signed the petition, asking them to volunteer, attend meetings and get involved.
“Through the petition, a lot of meetings, and persistent emails, we got our garden,” Courtney says. “We got our public land.”
The first garden is now growing on Maryland Avenue in the Chihuahuita neighborhood—an under-resourced, historically Black and Brown neighborhood just south of downtown Alamogordo. In January 2024, With Many Hands celebrated a ribbon cutting ceremony at the site, and a few weeks later hosted their first community planting day.
Importantly, the group secured a Memorandum of Understanding with the city, allowing them to share expenses like the water bill and other infrastructure needs. They host regular community workdays and open meetings to organize and plan. “We are not a budget line in the parks and recreation budget yet, but hopefully soon,” says Courtney. (Full disclosure: the author is employed by Addition Collective Action Fund, which supports community organizing efforts across the country, including With Many Hands.)
The project has rapidly expanded since. A church offered up an additional lot. Alamogordo MainStreet, a local downtown economic development nonprofit, contributed raised beds to garden in a downtown alleyway. They even secured a corner of a public park in Tularosa, 15 miles up U.S. Route 54. Today, they have developed three community gardens in Alamogordo and one in Tularosa, with about 100 volunteers participating in some way throughout the year.
The group refuses to lock the gardens or have limitations on who or how much someone can harvest. Volunteers also deliver produce to the homes of people unable to access the gardens. “Sometimes people ask me if they can harvest vegetables even if they haven’t volunteered,” says Courtney, “And I tell them that harvesting is volunteering, because it’s all a cycle and all the parts matter. If we don’t pick the fruit, the plant will die.”
“People say: I thought you all were gardening,” says Courtney, laughing, “And I say: We are!”
But tending a garden meant to address food insecurity takes more than just weeding and watering. In Alamogordo, it means organizing people and power, too.
“I never imagined myself getting involved in political work,” Courtney says. “I was really jaded, like a lot of Americans.”
In just five years, her journey from wanting to learn how to garden to drive three and a half hours to the state capital to meet with her representatives has been a whirlwind.
On February 21, with her family and other With Many Hands volunteers, Courtney joined about 150 hunger advocates from across the state for Hunger Action Day at the Roundhouse (the nickname for the state capitol building).
It was their moment to make their case to state representatives about passing H.B.229—the New Mexico Grown Approved Supplier Program—which would provide $430,000 in state funds to help working-class households in New Mexico become small-scale food producers—even allowing them to sell their harvests to the Alamogordo Public Schools or at the local farmer’s market. She wasn’t able to get meetings with her lawmakers, but she did manage to track them down in the halls of the Roundhouse. “I told them about how small-scale farmers in Otero County could be the key to reducing food insecurity and increasing fresh, local food, but that we need their help.”
Courtney has learned that all soil can be regenerated with a little work and everything needs cultivation. She started off seeing a community problem and dug around to find other people who also cared, planting the seeds for how their local government could help.
Through this organizing she has experienced both the limitations—the red tape, the bureaucracy—and the possibilities of government. Turning those blighted properties into thriving green community spaces has made her even more sure that, with persistence and elbow grease, regular people could get the government to work for them.
Last fall, With Many Hands held a Food and Housing Summit to get working-class people together to talk about food, housing and other local every-day-people needs.
The group made endorsements of candidates running for local office and U.S. Congress, and then canvassed for these candidates across their communities. Their support helped push Rep. Gabe Vasquez (D-02) and State Rep. Sarah Silva (D-53) to victories in narrow-margin races.
“We had learned that we need to have people in office who are going to support what we need and help us with the solutions,” says Courtney. She and her fellow gardeners felt that they needed to help set the agenda for what they want their elected officials to address, otherwise “they’ll never talk about food or food systems.”
When met with skepticism about mixing politics with gardening, she reminds her neighbors of the successful petition drive they held to leverage their people power and show their ability to their local government—and how they now have four overflowing gardens. “We’ve shown that with enough people, enough pressure, things can get done.”
Cucumbers, zucchini, basil, figs and nectarines. It just takes a group of people and a bit of work. Many hands.
Gwen Frisbie-Fulton is a writer and organizer dedicated to amplifying the voices of working-class people in rural communities across the state. With a deep commitment to racial justice and economic equality, Gwen uses her expertise in storytelling and organizing to build multiracial power from the ground up.
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