"Green is not the colorone expects to see in the cactus-and-yucca-dotted Chihuahuan Desert of southern New Mexico. But for more than a hundred miles along the I-25 corridor, between Truth or Consequences and the Texas border, a rich vein of greenery runs through the endless sea of beige. It's a cultivated woodland made up almost entirely of a single species - Carya illinoinensis, the pecan."
"Below the dam, the river is hemmed into a narrow channel between levees, and nearly all of its flow is shunted into a vast network of irrigation canals. The transformation has been staggering: In 2018, just over a hundred years after the completion of the Rio Grande Project, New Mexico surpassed Georgia as the nation's leading pecan producer, a title it has retained off and on to the present day."
A cultivated band of pecan trees stretches for more than a hundred miles along I-25 in southern New Mexico, creating unexpected greenery in the Chihuahuan Desert. The pecan, Carya illinoinensis, was introduced to the Mesilla Valley in the early 1900s but required reliable irrigation to thrive. Completion of Elephant Butte Dam and the Rio Grande Project after 1916 channeled river water into levees and an extensive canal network, enabling large-scale pecan cultivation. By 2018 New Mexico surpassed Georgia as the nation's leading pecan producer. The Stahmann family farms 3,200 acres of pecans, with growers like Rafael Rovirosa active since 1932.
Read at High Country News
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