Local Hero: Innovator: Food Justice
An Interview with Nina Ladegaard, Founder and Director
Photos by Stephanie Cameron
Nina Ladegaard.
Squash Blossom works with dozens of small-scale family farms throughout New Mexico, distributing their fresh produce to restaurants in Santa Fe and directly to consumers. Signature retailed Blossom Bags contain the best of what’s in season year-round, and are available via home delivery or pickup at numerous workplaces, schools, and local businesses in and around Santa Fe. Blossom Bag subscriptions and wholesale sales to chefs are done on their website, which showcases their 100 percent local offerings. A social enterprise, Squash Blossom’s mission is to provide a dependable income stream for local farmers, bring healthier food to our community, and strengthen their local economy.
How have your experiences as a farmer in New Mexico shaped your work as a food distributor?
I started Squash Blossom as a bridge between farmers and chefs. There had to be a better way than selling restaurants “seconds” after a farmers market. Facilitating bulk sales and deliveries from our impeccable local farms to Santa Fe’s stellar restaurants wasn’t being done. Chefs appreciated the streamlined ordering, bookkeeping, wholesale prices, and reliable delivery and communication that we offered. Farmers appreciated getting orders in advance and only harvesting what was presold (eliminating food waste and extra time harvesting), moving their produce in bulk, and receiving payments biweekly (like a paycheck!). We were able to support dozens of farms. Our bulk-buying power encouraged the creation of new farms, and season extension for veteran farms. After a few years, we started offering this unparalleled produce retail via our local food subscription service in what we call our Blossom Bags. This grew exponentially during the pandemic, when restaurant sales halted and grocery store shelves were bare due to supply-chain interruptions. Our community turned to their local food system for security and sustenance. We were poised and ready to step up to the job of feeding more households. Now the retail side of things is bigger than our wholesale, but we continue to do both because a truly local food system requires both.
My husband and I have a farm in Nambé, Ground Stone Farm, that also supplies Squash Blossom, and is where we live and grow together. Having a home farm helps me stay connected in the most intimate way to the daily growing process, which I communicate to our customers through my weekly notes. I share trials, tribulations, weather patterns, successes, and recipes with our customers, so they get a deeper connection to the food.
Blossom Bag subscription offerings, photo courtesy of Squash Blossom Local Food.
Food Justice can be a far-ranging concept. What does it mean to you, and how have elements of food justice fit into the business model of Squash Blossom Local Food? What stands in the way of a more just foodscape in New Mexico?
Squash Blossom works toward an equitable and just food system by uplifting small-scale, regenerative farms and making healthy food accessible to our community, but we have a long way to go. Until every New Mexican is eating local, we are not there. Food justice, to me, means that all farmers and farmworkers make a living wage, that all eaters can afford healthy and culturally relevant food, and that our growing practices leave the land and soil better than we found it, in harmony with all the other creatures who live here too.
It takes policy change. It takes the web of local food businesses working together. It takes the continued commitment from edible readers to vote with their forks, every time they eat out or cook at home, to choose local and to know their farmers.
How has the scale and selection of local produce changed over the course of your career working with local food? Is there a vegetable you wish customers were more eager to experiment with?
I see the selection of local produce increase each year, especially in the off-season. We have more crops available year-round, and more crop diversity in every season. The fun part about offering our Blossom Bags is that we get to curate what goes in the bags each week. We accommodate food allergies, and customers can add on more items, but we choose the base produce in the bags depending on what’s really showing off in the fields each week of the year. This means that there are usually some things to nibble on fresh like carrots, radishes, fruit, cucumbers, lettuces; some things to cook like kale, potatoes, bok choy, broccoli, squash; and often something a bit more unusual that our customers may not have chosen on their own, like fennel, celeriac, kohlrabi, hakurei turnips, or sunchokes. Most often, customers will love new things if they know what to do with them. We offer recipes and easy preparation tips.
Martha Trujillo picks up her CSA share from Nina Ladegaard at Squash Blossom’s farmstand in Nambé.
