+Rainbow Farms

The Generosity of Late Summer

By Mallika Singh ∙ Photos by Stephanie Cameron

It is a rainy, cloudy day in the North Valley of Albuquerque as I drive into the Agri-Nature Center to visit Joshuaa Allison-Burbank at +Rainbow Farms. I’ve spent the morning harvesting greens just down the road where I also farm. Allison-Burbank meets me in the parking lot, and we walk together to his fields, where he tells me a group from Acoma Pueblo Ancestral Lands Conservation Corps (ALCC) is also visiting today. The crew tells me they are young farmers growing and saving seeds with cultural ties to their communities. They made the trip to visit +Rainbow Farms and exchange seed, passing a jar of Hopi golden beans down to Allison-Burbank as we introduce ourselves at the entrance.

Situated right across the road from Los Poblanos, the four acres Allison-Burbank grows in is a repurposed alfalfa field that is now full of corn, melons, beans, cucumbers, and squash. A huge wall of sunflowers divides the melons from the tomatoes, slowing down the flow of water from the acequia and directing spillover toward the winter squash. While the visitors from Acoma explore the fields and harvest melons, Allison-Burbank takes me on a tour. This is the farm’s first year growing here—previously they had a partnership with Lorenzo Candelaria in the South Valley. I wonder how it has been to farm in a relatively white and wealthy area of Albuquerque, and Allison-Burbank expresses that part of his goal is to “bring more urban Native families to the Agri-Nature Center and to this area, again, to fight back against gentrification . . . this is all unceded Tiwa land, literally Tiwa land. Villages were here, farms were here, and we dig up stuff all the time on this field, pottery pieces and arrowheads.”

Walking through the field, I can see evidence that kids have been playing here—next to the cucumbers, I spot a rubber crawfish bait Allison-Burbank tells me his daughter found in the ditch. At the edge of the field, there is a small blue-and-pink slide she uses to play in the water and mud. He says he brings his two kids, seven-year-old Kateri and thirteen-year-old Kaleb, to the farm as much as possible. Kaleb already wants to be a farmer and Kateri “has a little germination spot at the house. She’s our little seed keeper.” They both love to come help out, run through the corn fields, and take fresh vegetables to school to share with their classmates.

I wonder if Allison-Burbank was raised in a similar way, and he tells me he grew up on Navajo Nation, where his mother’s side are dryland farmers. His father’s side is Acoma Pueblo and uses the acequia irrigation system. He uses both irrigation traditions at +Rainbow Farms and is working on adapting the seeds to the heat, water shortage, and bugs. He is adapting the Navajo white corn, for example, to a two-week watering schedule. Almost half of the plot is Navajo white corn, half of which has already been harvested at the time of my visit. It’s Allison-Burbank’s first time growing this variety in Albuquerque, and the plants struggled with this summer’s heat wave; some of it burned or simply fell over. Despite those challenges, they’ve still had a decent harvest. The night before my visit, his children harvested about two bushels of white corn and put it into the farm’s onsite horno, letting it steam overnight. They also harvested about two and a half truckloads the previous weekend to give out at the Navajo Nation fair.

Allison-Burbank’s commitment to community wellness is clear in the work that he does and in the way he communicates that work to me. His day job is as a full-time child development researcher at Johns Hopkins Center for Indigenous Health, studying the effects of trauma and stress on young children, primarily on Navajo Nation. Allison-Burbank’s different vocations feed one another. He conducts research in a way that is “culturally grounded and truly community based,” as opposed to white researchers who often enter Native communities without context or relationship. Allison-Burbank also thanks farming for giving him the ability to make deeper connections while conducting research. “It’s all connected. I’ve learned that, through farming, and knowing the food system, you know what families are interested in, you know what’s meaningful and important to them, you know their routines and how to make the connection—‘I’m a farmer too, what are you growin’?’ And they light up. They perk up.”

Allison-Burbank has many dreams for this land. One of his goals is to eventually purchase it from the Village of Los Ranchos, and he is thinking about partnering with “UNM or even an Indigenous firm to do the archeaological surveying in here—to see what can be found.” He also wants to build an outdoor kitchen with more hornos, which sounds like a way to make the farm more of a gathering space that can host meals, parties, and dances. He wants to host teens from the Native American Community Academy at the farm as part of the school’s STEM program. This would be a way to document and measure youth resilience and flourishing, encouraging in them hope and connection—rather than always assessing risk. He chuckles and tells me one of his dreams is to commission a Native artist to do an “art piece that says ‘Land Back,’ like a big piece, and light it up . . . I’ve thought about having it be a piece that can be broken down, so if there are complaints, we can just move it to another Native-owned farm.”

We all drift back together to the front of the field, where the youth from ALCC cut open melons and cucumbers to share. The melon is likely a Navajo yellow that got crossed with cantaloupe this season, and the cucumbers are Armenian cucumbers, which Allison-Burbank tells me are popular in the Four Corners region and well adapted to this heat. Everyone is chatting, sharing recipes, stories from the season, and their techniques for growing, seed saving, and dehydration. Multiple goodbyes later, we gather again in the parking lot, where the crew pulls out a bag of sugarcane. It’s the first time I’ve had fresh sugarcane outside of India or Thailand, and it’s delightful. We discuss climate and exchange, how there are plants we would never expect to grow here but that are thriving. 

The other visitors head out, and Allison-Burbank takes me to see the last bit of the farm, including the hand-built adobe horno with a brick foundation. It smells sweet and smoky as he removes the cover, still full of steamed corn from the night before. As I enjoy the doughy sweetness of the kernels, he tells me more about the name he chose for this space, +Rainbow Farms, or +Nááts’íilid Farms. “The rainbow path in Navajo culture is about living in harmony and balance with everything,” a worldview that I can feel in the way he talks about wellness, education, gathering, family, and community. With cucumbers, melon, sugarcane, a steamed ear of corn, and an oxblood-colored Anasazi bean pod to plant next season, I’m coming away arms full and fed.