Growing Community, Culture, and Climate-Adapted Crops

There are multiple reasons why people don't feel good, and our industrial food system is probably number one, why people are not feeling good. So we are trying to do things differently, leveraging these old seeds.

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I'm Nana Meyer. I am the co-owner of Pueblo Seed and Food Company with my husband Dan Hobbs. We are a farm and food business in Cortes, Colorado. We have a farm in Mackelmore Canyon and grow a variety of heritage, grains, legumes, garlic, chili.

This is a idea that we've had in mind for, oh gosh, at least about 10 years. There's a really serious infrastructure gap for small and mid-scale organic growers of grain and legume crops. And so we've been thinking for a long time about how to, to solve that and offer services to farmers in the greater southwest, especially the four corners. But, but beyond

My sandbox, that's all I want to do. Play in the grain.

We really have to look back at the ancestral inheritance of what the indigenous farmers have done for us because many of these varieties, we've got all kinds of corn varieties here on the table. These are southwestern flower corns that were widely grown by the Puebloans, Zuni, Hopi people in the Rio Grande Valley. And they have some attributes that are incredible, deep rootedness, highly nutritious. And so there's an inheritance that came to us and we want to move it forward in, into the community. And we intend to donate our collection of approximately 130 varieties to the Onward Foundation for long-term stewardships.

We have the Seed to Kitchen program where we bring it into this bake house. We mill the grains fresh into flour, and every week we transform those flowers into a variety of products. I was a professor at the University of Colorado and we started grain school in 2016 and we couldn't find so much diverse grain. And we also, as a dietician, I knew well a lot of people are lacking dietary fiber and the microbiomes of young people. We studied on campus and it was horrendous what we found. And so with my colleagues, we focused on grain school, but from a nutritional perspective, using the local agriculture from Colorado and more and more we just got intrigued by how easy it is really to shift people's diets. Particularly with things like whole grain cookies.

These are called Swiss holiday and they come out in little heart shapes and they're very sweet.

It is really a collaboration between and amongst all of us from the production to the consumption. And the more a consumer is less, a consumer that is passive and more actively involved in the local food system, the more exciting it becomes. Whole grain food is not an easy challenge. That is why this is a living learning lab. So this is the place where you can come and ask questions and taste new things and, and just having an open mind and being ready to shifting your diet. To learn

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