Sandoval County oral history project preserves farmers' living knowledge

Sandoval County’s Community Services Department launched the Oral History Project in 2018 under the theme “Honoring Heritage: Farming Then & Now.” It was built to capture knowledge that rarely fits into a search bar: when to read the weather, how to move water through acequia systems, which seeds hold up in a dry year, and how family land stays productive across generations. In a county where rural lands, tribal communities, and fast-growing suburbs sit side by side, preserving farming memory is also about food resilience, land retention, and cultural continuity.

What the county set out to preserve

The county partnered with Sound Seed Productions and recorded interviews with first- to fourth-generation farmers, focusing on farming and food practices, the challenges growers face, and their ideas for the future of small farming.

The most valuable farm knowledge is often the least documented. Oral histories can preserve the way older growers judge soil by feel, plan around irrigation turns, or adjust planting schedules when a season turns hot and dry. In Sandoval County, that kind of memory is a practical record of how local agriculture has survived on the edge of drought, development, and shifting labor patterns.

Why Corrales and the Rio Grande corridor matter

Corrales gives the project a clear local frame. The village sits in Sandoval County along the Rio Grande between Albuquerque and Rio Rancho, and it is closely associated with agriculture and irrigation. Farming there has always depended on water management, shared community routines, and a strong sense of place.

As land values rise and development pressure spreads across the metro edge, family farms can lose more than acreage. They can lose the informal expertise that makes small-scale agriculture work: who knows how to manage a ditch schedule, which crops fit a patch of ground, and how to keep farming viable when weather and water become less predictable.

Acequia culture gives the project its deeper context

The oral histories also fit into New Mexico’s larger acequia tradition. The New Mexico Acequia Association has worked since 1989 to protect acequias and agricultural water rights through education, organizing, and advocacy. Its mission also includes intergenerational mentoring, farmer training, and passing along songs, prayers, stories, and other community knowledge tied to acequia life.

Acequia culture depends on practice handed down person to person, often in families and in local community networks. When Sandoval County records farmers talking about food practices and the future of small farming, it is preserving the same kind of inherited knowledge that keeps irrigation systems, seasonal routines, and shared water agreements alive from one generation to the next.

Food access and health policy sit alongside the history

Sandoval County’s Community Services Department is not treating agriculture as a museum piece. It also runs Sprouting Sandoval, a set of health education and outreach initiatives that use experiential learning activities, art, lectures, food service contracts with local growers, and other outreach. The program could expand to other parts of Sandoval County if funding permits.

Food service contracts with local growers help connect county institutions to nearby producers, while experiential learning and outreach tie agriculture to household health and community education. Its Mobile Food Pantry services target rural, underserved populations, a reminder that food access remains a live issue even in a county with deep agricultural roots.

Preserving farming knowledge is part of maintaining a local food system that can still serve rural residents when supply chains, fuel prices, weather swings, or income gaps make store-bought food less reliable. Oral history does not replace those services, but it documents the skill set and values that support them.

The project fits a wider pattern of agricultural memory work

Sandoval County is not the only place using oral history to document farming change. The Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association ran its Growing Right project as a 2016-2017 oral history and public history effort about the organic farming movement in Ohio. The National Agricultural Library and the New Mexico Farm & Ranch Heritage Museum have also been part of agricultural oral history work, showing that recorded interviews are a recognized way to preserve how farming communities adapt over time.

Interviews can serve as evidence, not just sentiment. Oral history can capture how farmers respond to land pressure, how families divide labor, how knowledge changes when younger generations leave and later return, and how communities weigh tradition against survival. In Sandoval County, those same questions play out in a region where agriculture is still visible, but not guaranteed.

A 2020 New Mexico State University Cooperative Extension Service video transcript put the number at 101 Native Americans from the 18 Pueblos in New Mexico trained by the New Mexico Pueblo Beginning Farmer and Rancher program. Structured training can move agricultural knowledge across generations and communities, especially where farming is tied to identity as well as income.

What Sandoval County stands to lose if the knowledge stops moving

The county’s oral history project preserves a working archive of how people manage water, soil, seeds, weather, and family labor in a dry region where each season can change the odds. It also records the local vocabulary of agriculture, the routines around acequias, and the practical judgment that keeps small farms going when conditions are tight.