Schuster, too, keeps chickens and sells the extra eggs to his neighbors, who leave 20 dollar bills on his porch periodically when they pick up their eggs. He also grows flowers that he sells at local shops and he allows a beekeeper to maintain a hive on his property from which he gets some of the honey.

But not everyone in Albuquerque is as optimistic as Schuster and LaBadie about local food production.

Water is a constant concern in this southwestern city, which has about 600 miles of irrigation and drainage ditches called acequias crisscrossing its neighborhoods near the river.

A lot of growers despair that small farms often are being subdivided into tiny lots — the water rights to the parcels lost.

Agriculture is “under incredibly heavy pressure from developers,” said John Shipley, vice president of the Rio Grande Agricultural Land Trust. “Why can’t they leave the farmland alone on the valley floor? The loss of agricultural water and farmland is a major threat to the continuation of farming.”

As things stand now, Albuquerque produces only about 3 percent of the food that the city eats, Shipley said.

Michael Reed, president of the New Mexico Farmer’s Marketing Association, owns a farm south of Albuquerque where he grows heirloom crops that thrive in the region’s dry climate and where he demonstrates that a lot of food can be grown in a small area.

“If we could encourage one city block to have each neighbor plant a fruit tree, in a few years they would have more fruit than they would know what to do with,” he said. “This isn’t about subsistence farming, it’s about creating healthy communities.”