Famed Pecos cantaloupe faces extinction
Labor-intensive crop is losing land to oil and gas industry
COYANOSA — Beto Mandujano jabbed his kitchen knife through the rough, yellow rind of the Pecos cantaloupe he had scooped from the ground. The melon’s dense flesh glistened with juice, its color a deep orange.
Many Texans swear these cantaloupes are the best anyone can find. But today, Pecos cantaloupes are on the verge of extinction. Mandujano and his two brothers are the last farmers selling them on a large scale.
A number of factors explain this decline. The most recent, obvious culprit is oil.
Pecos, a city of roughly 10,000 on the eastern edge of the Chihuahuan Desert, feels like a middle-of-nowhere boomtown. People see unfamiliar faces in Walmart. They steer cautiously among big trucks barreling down their small country roads.
Industry is redefining this place, as it has many Texas towns before it. Oil and gas equipment stands on hot, dusty, empty fields. Farming and ranching once central to the Pecos region now seem to have faded into the background.
Texas farmers harvested nearly 10,000 acres of cantaloupe in 2000, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That fell to 1,300 acres in 2017.
Around Pecos, harvested acreage plummeted from more than 2,000 in 1969 to roughly a tenth of that amount in 2017. The Mandujanos this year planted 260 acres of the crop, along with other produce.
For a century, farmers planted cantaloupes around Pecos. Like Fredericksburg peaches, or East Texas tomatoes, their reputation was linked to the land.
“It’s a part of Pecos,” 86-yearold resident Carolyn McNeil said. “Pecos cantaloupes.”
But it got harder to hire workers and pricier to irrigate. Farmer after farmer decided not to grow them anymore.
Then came fracking, and people made more money than ever.
Robert Gamboa, 78, owns a crowded grocery mart near the Mandujanos’ farm.
He used to work the cantaloupe fields, too, he said. On a recent day, every spare inch of his store was packed with beer, which sells quickly, as do the homemade breakfast burritos.
Gamboa stocked Arizona cantaloupes.
“One farmer planting cantaloupe,” he said. “That’s all that’s left.”
A family effort
The Mandujanos moved from Mexico to the desert region so their dad, Alvaro, could farm cotton. The three boys and eight other siblings helped.
Holidays as kids meant work days, said Mandujano’s sister, Rafaela Diaz, 50. They spent their summers chopping weeds.
Growing up, Beto Mandujano sold cantaloupes from the family garden. He liked watching what he planted grow and knowing that his customers got good melons.
The sons called their company Mandujano Brothers — and it succeeds with help from everyone.
Their dad opens their restaurant and convenience store, their mom works in the adjoining produce market, and nieces and nephews assist in the summers.
Mandujano, 42, and his family live among the planted plots, where he is teaching his oldest daughter, 13, to drive a tractor.
His phone rings constantly, and he suspected that stress caused a recent stomachache.
“It’s a lot of work,” he said, wearing a Mandujano Brothers Produce shirt. “Everybody does a lot of work.”
Critical to the operation are about 100 migrants who come each year on temporary work visas from Mexico. They pick, pack and label the cantaloupes with stickers that say “Pecos Fresh.”
On a recent morning, as the sun rose, 17 men harvested a cantaloupe field below a cotton-candycolored sky.
They crossed the green plot slowly, side-by-side, bending to grasp the golden, ripe melons and place them on a rumbling conveyor belt.
Another machine in the packing warehouse would brush off the dirt and sort them by size. There is also an apparatus to fold boxes.
A natural gas flare burned bright in the distance. In some places, one could smell chemicals.
Here, the scent of musky, sweet cantaloupe filled the still-cool air.
Faded into history
Madison L. Todd gets credit for popularizing the Pecos cantaloupe.
Todd joined others planting cantaloupe near the city of Pecos in the 1910s. He rose to fame selling them to the dining car of the Texas and Pacific Railway, his grandson says.
Travelers hooked by the sweet flavor contacted Todd, who shipped out orders. A business flourished — as did the area’s reputation.
Helen Keller, Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Baines Johnson were counted among the Pecos cantaloupe’s fans.
Other farmers built on its influence. Growers spread from near the city of Pecos, which is in Reeves County, into neighboring Pecos County, where the Mandujano Brothers operate.
The cantaloupe’s significance today, though, feels relegated to history.
Todd’s company went next to his daughter, but the family foresaw increasing difficulty in pumping water. They eventually sold the land, keeping the mineral rights, grandson Ray Mack Thompson said.
Today, gas wells sit on what he believes is the former Todd land.
A state marker in front of the quaint West of the Pecos Museum documents the Todd story. “The Pecos Cantaloupe,” it reads. “Nationally famed melon.”
Dorinda Millan, 58, the museum director and curator, consumed so much cantaloupe as a kid she could tell which region it came from, as if it were wine.
Her mom concocted cantaloupe empanadas. She salted or ate them with ice cream. Vendors hawked them along the main road in town, making the city smell like melon.
Now Millan keeps file folders on how the cantaloupe was once part of the Pecos culture.
The chamber hosts a Little Miss Cantaloupe pageant. The Lions Club has a cantaloupe breakfast, which once included people tossing the melons at targets from planes.
Other traditions became history: The cantaloupe festival and cantaloupe cooking contest are over. The Cantaloupe Delights cookbook sold out.
An empty Blue Bell “Cantaloupe ’n Cream” container at the museum is all that remains of the discontinued Pecos flavor.
“It was such a big deal back in the day,” said farmer Bruce Frasier, who farms cantaloupe in Carrizo Springs. “It’s faded.”
Upstairs at the museum, three handmade Pecos Cantaloupe Dolls sit on a top shelf behind glass.
‘All about oil’
Historically, cantaloupes were a big item for Texas, said Juan Anciso, a vegetable specialist with the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension Service.
But the amount of vegetables — cantaloupe included — grown here has declined. (While many regard it as a fruit, cantaloupe is classified as a vegetable.)
A listeria outbreak that raised nationwide food safety concerns and competition from other states contributed to the melon farmers’ difficulty, said Dante Galeazzi, president of the Texas International Produce Association.
An “overly burdensome” process for legally bringing workers from other countries also created problems for small farmers, he said.
“Cantaloupe growing and harvesting is very labor-intensive,” he said. “The problem is becoming exponentially more difficult.”
Oil and gas production boomed in the region, cutting into farming acreage.
Some West Texas farmers found they could make more selling water than growing cotton, said Jeff Floyd, of the Midland and Ector County extension offices.
“We don’t complain a lot about it out there because we all — one way or another — we’re dependent on the oil industry,” Floyd said.
Clay Taylor and his father grow cotton and alfalfa around Pecos. But they stopped cultivating their trademarked PecoSweet cantaloupes.
High natural gas prices made it expensive to get water to irrigate. Meeting extensive federal regulations for properly employing migrants got too difficult, Taylor said.
Local residents didn’t want the job.
“It’s all about oil and gas right now,” said Taylor, 46, wearing a cowboy hat. “It’s making a lot of people a lot of money.”
He added: “Things change. And the cantaloupe is one of them.”
Toni Kingston lives on the empty land that Thompson believed once belonged to Todd, the father of the cantaloupe.
“When my dad bought this place, you couldn’t see a house for miles,” she said one morning, standing out in the draining summer heat.
She pointed to where another former cantaloupe grower lived down the road.
This is harsh country. In the desolate, surrounding fields, dry brush filled empty concrete irrigation ditches.
Oil and water trucks rumbled past, disturbing the quiet.
Last whiff ?
People began asking the Mandujano Brothers in June when the cantaloupe would be ready.
Mandujano’s wife, Veronica, 42, responds to customers from all over the country begging her to send them some.
What they pick is shipped across Texas, or sold in their bustling market.
“It makes us known,” said Karan Heffelfinger, county extension agent in Pecos County, who tries to help the Mandujanos promote what they grow.
Heffelfinger turns the Mandujano cantaloupes into jams, cakes and breads to sell and share. She wants to see their produce trade succeed.
Because hail delayed the harvest this year, people were upset to find they could not get the melon for July Fourth, Heffelfinger said.
“In summertime you eat a lot of it,” she said. “My favorite way is fresh.”
Recently, shoppers pressed the melons to their noses, inhaling. One tested the flexibility of the area where the stem was detached.
Bobby DuBois, 60, a general foreman new to town to build a nearby gas plant, said he stops in every other day.
Thirty-eight-year-old Adrian Duran loaded his pickup bed with 1,500 pounds of the melon on orders from his boss in Albuquerque, N.M.
Duran at first thought his boss was joking when he asked him to drive 240 miles to get the cantaloupes after finishing a job in El Paso.
“He said these are the only cantaloupes he can eat,” Duran said, amused that he found this rural spot he’d never heard of before.
On the drive home, he ate three cantaloupes with a spoon.