How to Save an Ancient Farm
This family in Mexico City is figuring it out
“Careful, she’ll try to attack you.” Don Angel Galicia smiles at an eagle stalking a large enclosure at the entrance to his land.
“Sometimes when the dogs lie near the cage she tries to get them through the wire,” he said. A few old chicken bones sit at the eagle’s feet, and her raptor eyes view us with suspicion reserved for strangers. She’s a good watchdog, her caw enough to wake the dead, even though Don Angel’s massive German shepherds — Rocky and Frida — are more than enough security.
They’re part of the menagerie on Don Angel’s farm — the eagle, the dogs, 50 white rabbits, 400 chickens, and a pig. Plus, there’s Don Angel himself, his wife Aurora, and, sometimes, his 82-year-old father, Don Felipe. But don’t picture a rambling farmyard; the space is orderly and compact, with each row of vegetables and each tree planted specific in its purpose, surrounded by water.
Mexico City’s chinampa farms are some of the most ancient agriculture in the world.
Believed to have been developed by the Maya along the Valley of Mexico’s lakebed, a chinampa is lake mud and organic material piled in layers to form manmade islands that can be farmed. Water washing down from the surrounding hills made the sediment mineral-rich, and the endemic flora and fauna create a cycle of life, death, and decay that adds organic bounty to the mucky mixture.
When Don Angel and Aurora moved here nine years ago, it was at Aurora’s encouragement. She thought they should take advantage of having chinampa land — Don Angel’s family has owned islands for generations — and maybe raise some chickens. Their first house had no electricity and no running water, the only sound the crickets and frogs of the canals.
Most Mexico City visitors have been on the trajinera boats of Xochimilco, drinking cold Coronas and listening to floating marimba bands. The area is a popular spot for weekend day trips, particularly with teenagers looking to party unsupervised. The experience gives tourists a peek at the 5,473 acres of chinampas and canals that exist today, down from the 54,000 acres believed to have existed when the Aztecs built their empire in the 1400s. Centuries of urban sprawl and the quest for solid ground resulted in the lake slowly draining, and the chinampas disappeared one by one.
The proximity of the megalopolis (close to 28 million people) has meant that Don Angel and his son Ernesto, who run the farm together, have had to get creative. The Galicias are one of the few families that live on their chinampa. The area’s water and soil are highly contaminated by illegal graywater dumping, a water treatment plant in need of an upgrade (all the canal water is plant-treated now that the natural springs have been used up), and runoff from island farms managed with pesticides or untreated cow manure.
Most chinampas have small side canals called apantles that serve as irrigation ditches. This family’s apantle is a series of small pools broken up by sections of towering carrizo, a grass known for its filtering capabilities, growing in several layers of different-sized rock and gravel. It’s a natural water filter, built with the help of local bioengineer Refugio Rodríguez, who monitors its progress.
“When Dr. Refugio came to test the water, she said we no longer had E. coli or salmonella,” Ernesto tells me, referring to two common pathogens here. The filter also helps remove heavy metals and pesticides, and Ernesto is working on an addition that will oxygenate the water to further clean it of parasites.
“The thing is,” he says, “you can water plants with graywater and you will grow super plants. Why? Because you’re basically putting compost directly on them. But we want to have clean water because we don’t want our produce to have things like E. coli, and we don’t want to keep contaminating our soil.”
The soil in the chinampas has extremely high salinity and many of the same pathogens in the surrounding water. Rodríguez developed a method that uses orange rinds to reduce salinity, and the Galicia family is letting compost do the rest.
“If you put your hand in there, it’s burning, it gets up to 200 degrees Fahrenheit,” Ernesto says, motioning to several towering piles of composting plants. “If you make a good compost, you aren’t just killing the seeds of any weeds, but also all the pathogens.” He grabs a handful of soil and points out white dots of fungi. “If you cultivate healthy fungi in the soil and then do an analysis, you find that the soil is clean; they encapsulate and clean the soil of harmful bacteria.”
Without any formal training in sustainable farming, Ernesto and his dad have ensured all the elements of the farm work together for the benefit of the others — they can’t afford any waste. The corn is planted around the greenhouse to create a natural windbreak; the animal manure feeds the biodigester, which provides their cooking gas; the kale shades the beets; soil extracted for the irrigation ditch goes into the compost. Perhaps even more importantly, they are reappropriating traditional chinampa agriculture — using lirio weed for soil cover during seed germination, replanting the original ahuejote trees among the crops for natural shade.
“We’re just now learning to do plant rotation,” says Ernesto. “We have really only been producing like this for five or six years. Before that, we had cows, chickens, and corn, that was it. So it’s been a little difficult to learn all of this, as well as the old ways of chinampa agriculture that have been forgotten.”
None of their immediate neighbors are farming like they are, and they view the chinampas’ future as fragile. There’s been massive out-migration as today’s generation goes to college and moves off the farm for work, as well as pressure from the city on all sides.
“Everyone that used to farm the chinampas is dying,” says Don Angel, “and young people aren’t really interested in coming and working here. They don’t think that they can make any money.”
“The urban sprawl is growing,” says Ernesto. “There’s no plan that gives priority to recuperating the chinampas. There has been money, but it’s never gotten here. You’ll notice when you go into the tourist zone that it’s a little bit cleaner, a little bit nicer, it’s like officials are a little more interested in that part. But here the land is abandoned, islands are falling back into the water, and there is trash in the canals.”
There have been times when the local government seemed keener to help the chinamperos — providing them with machinery, modified seeds, or even extra field workers.
But new, “improved” GMO seeds, especially corn, generally refuse to grow in their particular microclimate, and most government promises — like the guaranteed purchase of their crops — turn out to be empty with the next election.
They have developed an instinctive distrust of authorities. In addition, there’s general apathy toward the chinampas, reflected in peoples’ pejorative view of farmers and the attitudes of many chinamperos, who are more interested in making a buck than healing the land.
“People say ‘I’ll just sell my land’ and let someone else come in and convert it into something different. They build a house, or grow ornamentals, but they see the chinampa as just another piece of land,” says Ernesto, confounded. “My neighbors say things like ‘I’ll put a piece of plastic down so that no weeds grow and I’ll put my ornamentals on top of that in their plastic bags.’ What happens in the long term? It creates intense salinity and the soil becomes sterile. It dies.”
The Galicias and people like them may yet play a role in the area’s salvation. Neighbors are starting to ask questions, and despite the reticence of other farmers to give away their “secrets,” Ernesto and Don Angel pride themselves on being open books.
“We have learned things we never would have imagined,” says Ernesto. “You become an electrician, a mechanic, an engineer, an agronomist, an inventor … ”
“A veterinarian,” Don Angel says.
“An architect, a builder, an administrator,” Ernesto laughs.
About two years ago, they joined up with Yolcan, a local organic CSA working in the chinampas that guarantees the purchase of their organic produce and often provides them with seeds for specialty items. Without it, Ernesto doesn’t know if they would survive. He works to coordinate monthly meetings between the Yolcan producers so they can talk shop. The farm is finally starting to make money.
“If you would have seen us eight years ago, we didn’t even have money for a hose to water the plants,” Ernesto says. “Eight years later, I can tell you that we are succeeding little by little.”
“I could have sold all of this long ago and gone to live somewhere else,” Don Angel says when I ask what keeps him going, “but I didn’t want to give up on this; I wanted to preserve it, even if it’s just a little tiny spot on the map. As long as I am alive, I want to keep working this land.”
“I always think,” Ernesto says, “this tree I planted, maybe I’ll get to see its fruit, even if it takes 10 years, or maybe I’m not here, but my daughter will be able to eat some of its fruit. Maybe I am burning under the sun, but maybe one day my daughter can sit under these trees with her children.
“All of those trees on the edge of the island I planted with my dad. We’ve done things that I am proud to have shared with my parents. Because it’s not just the doing, it’s a shared moment, the love of doing the same thing together, those are the memories I have with them.”
Lydia Carey is a Mexico City-based writer and author of Mexico City Streets: La Roma. You can find her most days on the street, hunting down stories and tacos. Follow her adventures on Instagram and see more of her published work online.
