About Buena Vida Farm
The heart
MaryLou and Stephen Smith are the heart behind Buena Vida Farm. MaryLou likes to weed, Stephen likes to irrigate and both of them like to watch plants grow green. They get lots of help from Colorado State University students, low-income single moms, and Spanish speaking friends from Mexico, Bolivia, and Ecuador (which gives MaryLou the additional benefit of practicing her Spanish learned growing up in New Mexico. )
The homestead
In fact, New Mexico is at the root of this farm. Both Stephen and MaryLou are proud to be fifth generation New Mexicans—progeny of great grandmothers who homesteaded as widows in eastern New Mexico in the early 1900’s. Each of them widows with children, each migrating from Texas, Lora Hutcherson Miller and Josephine Lattimore Haynes worked their homesteads 20 years apart and 60 miles apart.
Stephen and MaryLou, with teenagers Matthew and Laurel, lived in the Buena Vida Farm barn for nine months in 1995 while their house was being born, uh, built. The house and barn were designed with help from Santa Fe design/builder Ron Smith, inspired by the rural New Mexico territorial houses MaryLou and Stephen grew up admiring, and featured in the book American Adobes: Rural Houses of Northern New Mexico by Beverley Spears. Anglos migrating to New Mexico about the time the railroad came to the west added pitched metal roofs and french provincial windows to the flat-roofed adobe casas inhabited by Spanish land grant owners. These multi-cultural architectural roots complement MaryLou’s love of multi-cultural children’s books, including her own, Grandmother’s Adobe Dollhouse, published in 1984 by New Mexico Magazine, now having sold 35,000 copies. (Stephen’s mother is the grandmother, and the architect of the dollhouse upon which the book is based.)
The food
If you ever hear about a contest for making a scumptious meal out of leftovers, give MaryLou a call. She could win the blue ribbon, probably for taste, and definitely for presentation. But ask her to cook from scratch using the finest ingredients and she scratches her head, unsure where to begin. Suppers at Buena Vida Farm are mostly a melange of vegetables grown in the summer garden (blanched and frozen for winter) and game harvested in the fall by Stephen. The antelope, deer, elk, and occasional pheasant and turkey are “hunt-with- dignity" Stephen’s contribution to a healthy family diet. The cast-iron skillets stacked on the rangetop are required equipment.
The art
The big truck garden irrigated by impulse sprinklers on each corner, specified by irrigation engineer Stephen , is a work of art on its own. But its “Three Sisters" scarecrows attract rather than detract crows (more likely magpies—MaryLou’s favorite bird) and folk art lovers. Freshly dressed each year with bright new scraps of fabric, the three sisters represent the corn, squash and beans which are said to have long sustained native peoples of North America.
Inside the house, much of the art is from the hands of son Matthew—a website artist who lives in South Carolina with his food and fabric artist wife Amy and their young family — Brighton, Levi, and Lucy. Some of Matthew’s “found art" includes a dozen huge light bulbs hanging from the ceiling in MaryLou’s “writing atelier." Matthew salvaged them from the CSU intramural field the summer he worked for grounds maintenance. The twenty-five bucks a bulb MaryLou paid entrepreneurial Matthew helped finance his Habitat for Humanity trip to Kenya.
Daughter Laurel’s art also permeates the place, including the table top scarecrow with purple hair in the guest bathroom. Laurel is the illustrator and co-author of Beyond Inclusion, Beyond Empowerment—an indicator of where her mother’s emphasis on multi-cultural exploration took her.
The best art on the place, though, was captured on film around 2000—the year Matthew the artist, bored of mowing the native grasses between the house and gate, began to carve out a design in the grass reminiscent of crop circles. Unfortunately—or fortunately as it turned out—the mower broke down mid-mowing. MaryLou and Stephen did not notice the art until it was captured a week later by a free-lance photographer taking aerial photos of the area farms in hopes of getting the owners to purchase his photos. Matthew’s “crop circles" mowing did not earn him any art awards at CSU, but it has brought smiles to many faces. Notice the broken down mower on the trailer on the other side of the barn, ready to be taken for service.
The farm
What kind of enterprise is Buena Vida Farm? Is it a real farm? A “lifestyle" venture?
We like to call it a breakeven kind of place where those who work it breakout of any traditional mode. No, it doesn’t put bread and butter on the table, at least not in the short-run, but it does pay out plenty of green to the folks we hire to help us run the place. “See those weeds, Maria Virginia? Just think of them as dollars!" In fact, MaryLou’s friend, Maria Virginia picked enough of those weeds the summer of 2007 that she is paying for college back in Otavalo, Ecuador—something that was financially out of her reach before. (Her very young son Yanni cried one Easter when they came for dinner and it was too early in the season to go out and pull weeds. “Work, mommy, work!" he cried.)
