The Farm and Ranch Heritage Museum

The New Mexico Farm and Ranch Heritage Museum in Las Cruces opened in nineteen ninety-eight on forty-seven acres on the southeastern edge of Las Cruces, and it does something most agricultural museums don't: it keeps the animals alive and the equipment running. The museum maintains working herds of cattle, horses, sheep, and goats, and it demonstrates blacksmithing, dairy milking, and traditional farming on a daily basis. The collection covers three thousand years of farming in New Mexico, from the irrigated fields of Native farmers to Spanish colonial ranching to the cotton and chile agriculture of the Rio Grande valley today. The acequia, the gravity-fed irrigation canal, is still used to water fields in the Rio Grande valley today.