Mora growers’ cooperative fills grocery store void
Los de Mora offers respite from pandemic-era supermarkets
CLEVELAND — Six days a week, a steady stream of grateful grocery shoppers park on a dirt road beside N.M. 518 and climb the wooden steps to the Los de Mora Local Growers’ Cooperative.
“We hear over and over, ‘Thank God you’re here,’ ” said Darlene Gallegos, the small store’s only full-time employee. “One day last week, we had a line, and people were standing there six feet apart and talking to each other, saying, ‘Well, if it weren’t for this place …’”
“Capacity 5,” reads a sign on the door that opens to two quiet, well-stocked rooms that offer a respite from the angst of pandemic-era supermarkets. Inside, hand-labeled bags of such homeopathic herbs as horehound and comfrey nestle in a wicker basket with local garbanzo beans from Trujillo Farms. A freezer opens to packaged lamb racks, beef sirloin and short ribs from Los Vallecitos, a 335-acre operation in Mora. A folding table features spinach and radishes grown by regional producers including Gallegos, who wears a mask as she rings up items at the register.
In the thick of COVID-19, when the phrase “supply chain” triggers anxieties both general and specific, one need look only to the grazing steers and verdant fields of Mora County to see community-supported local agriculture in action. The success of the twoyear-old Los de Mora Local Growers’ Cooperative stems from an increasingly commonplace irony in northern New Mexico: a community of growers and livestock producers who found themselves without a grocery store.
In the early 1980s, Mora residents organized protests against the construction of an Allsup’s Convenience Store. They worried that a 24-hour chain store would squeeze out the mom-and-pop groceries of the region, though both Allsup’s and Family Dollar eventually set up shop in town. In 2017, a decadeslong fear came to pass when Russell’s Discount Foods closed on Mora’s Main Street. The lush river valley — once home to the bounteous wheat fields and flour mills that gave Mora County the pre-World War II nickname “the breadbasket of New Mexico” — was facing true food insecurity.
After Russell’s closed, a weekly farmers’ market still sold small quantities of locally grown produce. To Your Health, a Mora cooperative run by Seventh-Day Adventist volunteers, had long offered a trove of natural food items to supplement plant-based diets. The Mora Valley Ranch Supply