The Mesilla Valley Pecan and Cotton Economy

The Mesilla Valley floor is one of the most productive agricultural strips in the American Southwest, and the reason is simple: the Rio Grande. For ten thousand years this river has deposited fine sediment across the valley floor and provided water to a region that otherwise receives fewer than nine inches of rain per year. The valley is, in effect, a green thread stitched through the Chihuahuan Desert.

Cotton arrived in the valley in the early twentieth century, carried by Anglo settlers and powered by irrigation infrastructure built under the federal Reclamation Act of nineteen o two. The Elephant Butte Irrigation District, organized after Elephant Butte Dam was completed in nineteen sixteen upstream on the Rio Grande, brought regulated water to more than ninety thousand acres. Cotton suited the long hot summers and the flat alkaline soil. By the nineteen thirties and forties, cotton was the valley's dominant cash crop, and gin operations clustered along the rail lines through Las Cruces.

But the tree that now defines the valley's landscape is the pecan. New Mexico is among the top five pecan-producing states in the country, and most of those pecans come from Doña Ana County. The trees were first planted commercially here in the nineteen twenties, and the industry expanded dramatically after World War Two. Pecan orchards now cover tens of thousands of valley acres, their long symmetrical rows visible from Interstate Ten.

The world's largest pecan farm, Stahmann Farms, operates just south of Las Cruces near the town of San Miguel. Established by W. J. Stahmann in nineteen thirty-two, the farm eventually planted more than four thousand acres of pecan trees along four miles of the Rio Grande floodplain. At peak, Stahmann's produced roughly fifteen percent of the world's commercial pecan supply from a single operation.

Today the valley produces chile, onions, cotton, alfalfa, and pecans, irrigated by a water system whose allocations are tied to a nineteen o six international treaty between the United States and Mexico.