Home Care In Berino, NM

16 communities in Southern New Mexico improved their water by creating one common utility. Now, they’re serving as a model for others in the state.

BERINO, N.M. — One Southern New Mexico community has found a solution to a problem facing many towns similar in size, and it could potentially unlock millions in federal dollars to help with local infrastructure.

On the Lower Rio Grande, between Las Cruces and El Paso, industrial cattle feedlots line Interstate 10. There are pecan groves that butt right up to the river, and there are water tanks – lots of them.

They hold water that sustains nearby residents and agriculture.

Many communities there are colonias, or areas near the U.S.-Mexico border that have historically lacked safe and reliable water, sewers and housing.

“Budwieser, one time, donated canned water,” Martin Lopez said, laughing.

Lopez manages the Lower Rio Grande Public Water Works Authority, which serves 16 communities, mostly colonias, in Doña Ana County.

He stood at a new pump behind the authority’s main office in Berino, NM with projects manager Karen Nichols and Espy Holguin, the chair of the utility’s board.

“Back in the old days, it was possible, and happened more than once, for a community to be entirely without water if a well went down,” Nichols said.

That would lead to water being trucked in by the government in tanks.

“I was party to the National Guard bringing in water buffaloes because some of the communities didn’t have water,” Lopez said.

The trouble didn’t stop there. Several communities here had high levels of arsenic in the water, and groundwater that was often brackish or too salty.

“If you’re the City of El Paso, you can afford a brackish water treatment plant,” Nichols said. “If you’re little bitty us, not so much.”

The water issues also cause problems for fire protection, which leads to more problems for homeowners, Holguin said.

“So you build a home and your insurance is about three times more,” she said.

People hauled in water and paid high fees and lived with local water that Nichols calls “nasty,” or redrilled wells.

Those communities – which include Berino, Vado, Mesquite, La Mesa, Anthony and others – went to state and federal governments for help.

“We saw ourselves in Santa Fe always competing with each other for the limited funds,” Lopez said.

They were told by lawmakers to come back once they had teamed up.

Nearly 40% of the drinking water systems in New Mexico serve dozens, hundreds or just a few thousand people.

Those systems often lack access to funds and capacity to keep everything in working order.

If they don’t have the people, know-how or support to apply for grants and loans through the federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, that giant chunk of money does them little good.

New Mexico gave communities the option to form mutual domestic water consumers associations in the 1940s in an effort to bring up the quality of drinking water and raise life spans in the state. The state holds these groups responsible for a number of tasks, including reporting water use and quality, paying taxes and holding open meetings.

But those tasks are hard to keep up with – many of them are run entirely by volunteers. And now, they’re dealing with aging infrastructure and more frequent water scarcity.

One solution gaining ground is to simply make those systems bigger by combining them.

“Communities that build capacity, those are the ones that are successful,” said Ramon Lucero, field manager for the Rural Community Assistance Corporation, a nonprofit that provides technical assistance for rural water systems across the Western U.S.

He works with water systems to meet regulatory requirements and helps them navigate options like this to fund desperately needed projects.

He said that on their own, many small water systems don’t have the capacity to do the work that’s required.

“Sometimes because they’re so busy, we might have all the technical assistance available to help them, but they just don’t have the ability to respond,” Lucero said.

Andy Burke with the U.S.Department of Agriculture said it’s not just a problem in New Mexico.

“A lot of the entities that we deal with in rural America are understandably small,” he said. “They have lots of area to cover and they may not have a lot of financial resources to do that.”

That’s why he says the USDA often encourages rural utilities to team up and split resources. That way, they can hire one accountant, lawyer, whoever they might need between them, save money and work more efficiently, Burke said.

“But there are other places where maybe it’s not right for them because of topographical issues or whatever is going on in terms of not having a common idea between the different communities,” Burke said.

Back in Berino, the team at the water authority said combining water utilities made sense, but it took years to get the community on board.

Many had concerns about keeping their water rights and prices going up.

Now, they’ve actually lowered prices and are taking on projects they never thought they’d be able to afford, like the new pump that’s bringing in a more consistent supply of water.

Working as one combined authority gave them the time and capacity to apply for loans and grants to complete the water pump project that will help the 16 communities.

And now, state lawmakers are looking to replicate their work. Earlier this year, the legislature passed the Regional Water System Resiliency Act, which provided a framework for small communities to create shared utilities. The Lower Rio Grande Public Water Works Authority was a model for that legislation.

“We’ve gone from being the miner’s canary to the guinea pig,” Nichols said. “Now, we’re the poster child.”

This coverage is a collaboration with Source New Mexico and is part of a series made possible by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Water Desk at the University of Colorado-Boulder.

The finished site will have hydroponic growhouses, onion-drying rooms, and seed nurseries. But first, there's the cleanup.

In its heyday, the McAnally Enterprises egg farm processed eggs from more than a million chickens at a time and served as a key employer for residents of Berino, New Mexico, a tiny community of about 1,400 people.

But widespread contamination at the plant, which was owned by Moark, LLC, a subsidiary of the Minnesota-based Land O’ Lakes farmer-owned cooperative, and had been operating in Berino since the 1970s, wasn’t discovered until 2010. A U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent was doing aerial surveillance, according to a report by the Center for Latin American and Border Studies at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, when he discovered acres and acres of chicken feces.

Moark shut the plant down that year and put it on the market. Not surprisingly, there were no takers.

Outside, the groundwater was useless.

And though the facility may have caused an environmental catastrophe, its closing was an economic blow. One in five New Mexico residents lives below the federal poverty level, making it the nation’s second-poorest state behind Mississippi. The jobless rate is 6.6 percent, the nation’s second highest after Alaska.

The situation is even more dire in Berino, which is what’s known as a “colonia”—a designation given by the federal government to some 2,000 border settlements in Arizona, Texas, California, and New Mexico. Colonias, which tend to have predominately Latino residents, typically lack sewer systems, power, paved roads, and decent housing. Schools are struggling. Employment is scarce.

When the plant closed, Berino lost 64 jobs it badly needed. The land sat unused for years.

Google Maps

The first time New Mexico farmer Jay Hill laid eyes on the abandoned egg processing plant on a dry mesa a few miles from the Rio Grande, the spooky, boarded-up buildings and disused equipment draped in spider webs looked like images from a nightmare.

Outside, the groundwater was useless, contaminated with nitrates from the manure of the millions of chickens that once roosted on the sprawling 270-acre site. The smell, especially on a hot day after a rain, was awful.

Now Hill owns the old egg plant—with ambitious plans to clean the water, restore the arable farmland, build processing facilities, and generate jobs—and it still keeps him from getting a good night’s sleep.

“The solution to pollution is dilution”

“There’s a lot of nights that I still get up at 2 o’clock in the morning,” says Hill, the 32-year-old manager of New Mexico’s Wholesome Valley Farms, which produces over 65 varieties of crops. “I go sit in the office and write stuff down. These projects will come back and haunt you in the middle of the night,” he says.

It will be a big job, but Hill won’t have to go it alone. The remediation project is what one state official called “a perfect picnic basket”—a group effort involving public funds and private support, corporate responsibility and entrepreneurial spirit, imagination and guts.

Hill will bring the property back to life with the assistance of the state of New Mexico, which is helping to clean the contaminated water through a New Mexico Environment Department Voluntary Remediation Program (VRP).

“The whole point of a Voluntary Remediation Program is to bring brownfields back into viability,” says Allison Scott Majure, spokeswoman for the New Mexico Environment Department. (“Brownfield” is the Environmental Protection Agency’s term for a site so polluted with hazardous substances that expansion, reuse, or rehabilitation becomes complex enough to warrant government support.) The VRP money comes from the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the state administers its distribution and oversees its use, says Majure.

“With a project this big, it doesn’t take long to spend your nest egg in a hurry.”

And cleanup of this contaminated egg plant is part of a broader effort by EPA to restore brownfields and other polluted sites nationwide. Other state voluntary cleanups include converting waste water lagoons on the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe Reservation in Minnesota into fish hatcheries, and redeveloping a former spark plug manufacturing plant in Toledo, Ohio to grow fresh produce.

However, President Donald Trump is seeking a 31 percent budget cut at EPA, which is expected to lay off nearly one quarter of its staff and scrap or scale back dozens of programs that include restoration and remediation projects.

To treat Berino’s nitrate-contaminated groundwater, a well of roughly 70 feet will be punched into the shallow contaminated water table, and another, deeper well will be dug lower, to a depth where the water is clean. The two sources will be combined, with the clean diluting the dirty, to create water for irrigation with the right amount of nitrogen for fertilizer.

“The solution to pollution is dilution,” says Hill, quoting a saying once popular among environmentalists.

Jay Hill

The state grant for the remediation system will amount to about $200,000 to $300,000, along with technical, hands-on advice, says Majure.

“By doing that, we can prevent people going down dead ends as they approach remediation,” she says. “We’ve been through this a lot of times, and that’s why we like to hold people’s hands tightly while they’re going through it. “

Successful VRPs in New Mexico include contaminated groundwater cleaned up at a 50-acre rail yard in Santa Fe, she says. At its conclusion, a VRP provides liability protection from lenders and future buyers.

The restored site will feature hydroponic greenhouses to grow lettuce, tomatoes and bell peppers, facilities for cultivating vegetable seeds, and specialized rooms for drying onion seed.

Additionally, New Mexico’s Economic Development Department will invest up to $620,000 in Local Economic Development Act (LEDA) funds.. LEDA funds are designed to boost businesses in New Mexico and attract new business to the state as well.

Hill’s Wholesome Valley Farms, with an investment of roughly $12 million over the next five years, is expected to create 90 permanent jobs and up to 90 seasonal jobs each year, the department says.

“We are extremely proud to partner with a community-based company to bring jobs to Berino,” said economic development secretary Matt Geisel in a statement.

Jay Hill

Born and raised in southern New Mexico, Hill, who cheerfully takes business calls from his lettuce fields, grows peppers for The Fresh Chili Co. sauce-makers, and processes two to four million pounds of pinto beans a year through Organ Mountain Produce, which distributes produce to local restaurants.

He produces an annual pecan harvest, expects to grow 18 million pounds of lettuce this spring, and provides vegetable seed to Bayer AG’s Crop Science division. Also in the works is FARMesilla, a farm-to-market retail operation in Las Cruces that Hill and others hope to open this spring for local farmers to sell their produce directly to consumers.

All the money invested—a million dollars—is Hill’s. None of the public monies is yet in hand.

Once completed, the Berino project will allow him to expand his operation. The restored site will feature hydroponic greenhouses to grow lettuce, tomatoes and bell peppers, facilities for cultivating vegetable seeds, and specialized rooms for drying onion seed, Hill says. The cleaned-up water will be used to irrigate some 150 acres of crops such as wheat, barley, corn, and Sudan grass, grown for hay.

Hill expects to commit more than $15 million over the next five to seven years to get the project cleaned up and running. He also hopes to exceed the state’s job creation expectations and provide 130 permanent spots.

But so far, he says, all the money invested—a million dollars—is his. None of the public monies is yet in hand. Hill is mid-paperwork with the state on the water remediation money, and the state funds for job creation come after the plant is online and the jobs actually exist, he says. The state’s job-creation funds will reimburse Wholesome Valley Farms as Hill meets goals laid out in the project agreement. Once four greenhouses are completed and 32 jobs created, in a projected time of 20 months, the state will pay Hill $180,000 in LEDA funds. The second phase—another 32 jobs in three more completed greenhouses in 40 months—will pay $320,000, and so on.

In the end, Hill will be reimbursed $620,000 in state funds over five years if all goes according to plan.

For its part, Land O’ Lakes, the Minnesota-based agricultural giant, is pitching in on the water remediation by providing equipment, and the parts recently arrived, Hill says.

Asked about its participation, a Land O’Lakes spokeswoman said: “As part of the sale, we agreed to assist with cleanup.” She declined any further comment.

Hill closed on the property last May and started clean-up operations in midsummer. “With a project this big, it doesn’t take long to spend your nest egg in a hurry,” he says, adding that Wholesome Valley Farms will have to pace itself to do the job right. “I’m making a lot of promises,” he says. “I want to make sure I’m a man of my word.”

Las Cruces Sun-News

LAS CRUCES - Gov. Susana Martinez and several state and local officials on Monday announced the investment of more than $18 million in public and private money which is expected to create more than 100 new jobs in the agriculture industry.

The state will provide $620,000 in Local Economic Development Act funding for Wholesome Valley Farms' new facility in Berino and $150,000 for New Mexico Greenhouse Holding's expansion in Mesilla Park. The businesses plan a combined investment of roughly $17.4 million in private funds.

Wholesome Valley Farms is taking the site of the former McAnally Farms in Berino. The company plans to convert 600,000 square feet of chicken barns into greenhouses. It will invest $12 million of its own capital over the next five years to create hydroponic greenhouses, seed drying facilities, fields for crops and a mill for cotton seed. They will create 90 permanent jobs during those five years and employ up to 90 seasonal workers a year on adjacent farm land.

Also, one of the goals of the project is to mitigate environmental damage left by the poultry farm in the form of nitrates from chicken manure which was leached into the community's groundwater supply. Wholesome Valley Farms plans to seek future funding from the New Mexico Environment Department in the form of a voluntary remediation loan to assist cleaning up the groundwater contamination.

Butch Tongate, secretary of the NMED, noted this was the first time the department would consider remediation funding for nitrate contamination. Bringing that program into play for job creation was a natural approach in this case, he said.

"This is going to be one of our high marks," Tongate said. "It will be a model for years to come. Take a problem. Find a solution. You have jobs for hundreds, food for thousands and improve the environment."

New Mexico Greenhouse Holdings, which invested $2 million to re-open the old Aldershot Nursery in Mesilla Park in 2015, will invest an additional $5.4 million, paired with $150,000 in state LEDA funding, to expand its operation. The expansion of the greenhouse operation will create 13 new jobs in addition to the 75 positions filled since they opened.

"This is truly a community event," said Davin Lopez, president and CEO of the Mesilla Valley Economic Development Alliance, the economic development group that worked to seal the two deals. "With this announcement, we are experiencing the growth of new industry and opportunity rooted in the historical agricultural assets of the region. After over a year working closely with the company and community, we are proud to help bring this project to fruition."

Martinez noted the funding for the two projects comes at a time when the Legislature is considering cuts to both LEDA and Job Training Incentive Program funds in order to help close a budget deficit. The governor credited LEDA and JTIP for the creation of 30,000 jobs in the state during her administration and vowed to resist any legislative attempts to reduce the programs. She said cutbacks to those programs would set back the state's efforts to attract new employers from a diverse range of industries. She said that diversity would help to insulate the state from reliance on oil and gas revenue.

"We have to protect the tools we have to keep us competitive," Martinez said. "This is one of the tools we use. Now (legislators) want to pull some of that back. I'm determined to protect those tools ... I'm not going to let go of that. There's going to be a fight. Every other state has (incentives) and we need to keep ours."

Addressing the more than 100 residents of Berino and several county leaders, Jay Hill, of Wholesome Valley Farms, said the funding would allow for cleanup of an environmental stain on the community and creation of new jobs.

"I look around and see the progress we have made in six months," Hill said of the cleanup efforts at the new Wholesome Valley Farms facility. "I can't wait to stand here in another six months and say 'Look at what the community has done.' We are humbled by the support from the people of Berino and we look forward to a long and fruitful relationship with the community. Because of the community support and the LEDA incentives that Governor Martinez has championed, we are able to bring life back to this abandoned facility."

He said the farm could employ well more than 100 people once fully realized, a process he acknowledges won't be instantaneous. Instead, it will be "slow growth, slow success and long-term jobs for the community," he said.

Matthew Stong, of New Mexico Greenhouse Holdings, said easing of regulations and the availability of LEDA and JTIP funding have helped make the state more attractive to greenhouse businesses.

"Greenhouses in Texas and Arizona are billion-dollar businesses," he said. "In New Mexico, it's small, very small."

Don?a Ana County Commissioner Billy Garrett said both businesses were perfect for the historically agricultural region. As people have left the industry in the face of increased mechanization, the funding creates an opportunity for people to seek employment in agriculture, he said.

The state's agricultural secretary, Jeff Witte, said it was a perfect solution for taking New Mexico grown produce to New Mexico tables instead of shipping agricultural products out of state to be processed and then moved to markets. Roughly 97 percent of the state's agricultural production is exported. Getting the state's harvest directly to the state's dinner plates has a great impact on the entire industry, he said.

"A 15 percent increase in consumption of homegrown agricultural product would have $375 million in economic benefit" to the state, he said. "We can sustain and grow agriculture through a project like this. We want to see the agricultural industry in Don?a Ana County continue to grow."

Jason Gibbs may be reached at 575-541-5451, [email protected] or @fjgwriter on Twitter.

Miss Sun City Pageants director, Marco Alvarado, is trying to help a Berino, NM woman get her roof fixed on her home. Photo Credit: Karina Carbajal

BERINO, New Mexico (KFOX14) — It’s the season of giving -- and that is exactly what an El Paso man is hoping to do for a New Mexican family in need.

Carmen Carbajal and her daughter Karina have been staying in their home in Berino, NM, without a roof, because they have nowhere else to go.

At least that was the case until Marco Alvarado, director of Miss Sun City Pageants, got involved.

"This is - this is it,” Karina Carbajal said. “This is us. This is our life right here."

She told KFOX14 that asking for help isn’t something that comes easy.

Luckily, in a moment of need, someone found her.

"It was just very tragic,” Alvarado said. “It hit me - hard.

The Carbajals have been living in their home in Berino for 33-plus years.

For the past several days and nights, they’ve been there without a roof.

"I mean, it's been cold,” Karina said.

Alvarado told KFOX14 that when he saw a photo circulating on Facebook of Carmen sitting in her home, he knew he had to get involved.

"We help a lot of the community members, but this has been the worst case that I've seen,” he said.

He said the Miss Sun City Pageants program does its best to be involved within the local community.

He said he immediately started a GoFundMe account and started calling for backup.

Alvarado told KFOX14 some roofers have offered to volunteer their labor to the cause and the fundraising account will go towards materials needed and a hotel stay for the family.

"I'm so grateful,” Karina said. “I'm so really appreciative."

She said the damage was due to a fire that happened several years ago and years of rain water.

"The roof was, like, literally falling like above my mom's head,” she said. "She's elderly and she's really sick."

She said their home is a symbol of her late father, who passed away in June, which means it’s not just a house, it’s their home.

"This is it,” she said. “This is where we grew up. This is our life and this is where my dad, may he rest in peace -- he built this for us."

Alvarado said donations are still needed to help.

If you’d like to donate, you can contact him at (915) 269-4485 or by visiting the GoFundMe account.

You can also drop off donations at 6811 Doniphan Drive.

LAS CRUCES – Artico Cold Management, a Chicago-based startup, is promising to employ up to 60 people at a new facility in Las Cruces' industrial park once construction is completed. It could help local businesses expand and hire more workers as well.

The company will erect a 120,000-square foot cold storage warehouse in the Las Cruces Innovation and Industrial Park off of Interstate 10 just south of the city airport. It is one of several facilities Artico plans to build in North America.

The New Mexico Economic Development Department announced the $30 million investment in Las Cruces on Wednesday in a deal that includes nearly $1 million in incentives.

The state awarded Artico $600,000 from its local economic development fund, which exchanges grant funds for specific job targets. Additionally, the City of Las Cruces has pledged $281,400 and El Paso Electric pledged $100,000 from its New Mexico Economic Development fund.

The state grant, known as LEDA (for the Local Economic Development Act that created the fund), typically includes "clawback" provisions to retrieve money if companies do not employ the promised number of workers.

The warehouse is expected to open for business in September 2023.

"Cold storage is in short supply across the United States," Artico CEO Richard Taveras said in a news release, "and we see the need in New Mexico for more capacity — there are significant opportunities to help producers of chiles, dairy, pecans, meats, vegetables."

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Ed Ogaz, whose family has farmed in the Hatch Valley and Don?a Ana County for several generations, owns Seco Spices, with facilities processing and packaging chile products in Berino and Artesia. He said Artico's services fill a need local producers have been talking about for many years — a need that has intensified during supply chain interruptions in the midst of the pandemic.

"This brings a lot of things together," he said. "We ship a lot of our product to the East Coast and West Coast as well as the upper Midwest. This allows our business to grow, because now we'll have the ability to do more in a shorter period of time and keep it holding for the customer."

Mesilla Valley Economic Development Alliance director Davin Lopez credited Ogaz with much of the market analysis that assisted MVEDA in recruiting Artico. Building in the industrial park just west of the city allows Artico to position itself as "a logistical hub in the southwest for food logistics" with proximity to the Mexican market as well, Lopez said.

"It's not just a situation where it's an outside group that sees a market opportunity," Lopez said, "but it was also local industry seeing an opportunity and bringing robust capital into our region to make it happen."

Las Cruces City Manager Ifo Pili said Artico was initiating the first new construction at the park since 2017 and celebrated "the amount of investment and amazing job opportunities (Artico) will be creating for Las Cruces."

Lopez said cold storage was a vital service for economic growth in the region.

"When we brought in Stampede Meat, the facility that they purchased did not have near enough cold storage, so Valley Cold Storage down in Santa Teresa became a beneficiary of that because they were able to provide that service," Lopez said. "We see that as a need for the next food processing companies we'll be trying to bring into the area."

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Ogaz said the added storage services would "absolutely" allow agricultural producers like him to grow and boost their own workforces.

"I don't think Cruces is mom-and-pop anymore," Ogaz said. "I think we're growing at big enough clip that two or three cold storages can support everything that happens here."

Algernon D'Ammassa can be reached at 575-541-5451, [email protected] or @AlgernonWrites on Twitter.