Darren Gillis is a fourth-generation chile farmer on his family’s farm, Gillis Farms, in Hatch, NM, known as the Chile Capital of the World.
“I actually started with my great grandma,” he said. “They started growing chile, I want to say, in the 60s. And then I went through my grandma and my dad, and now it's on me. And then my son’s actually taking a liking to it. He's 8 years old and he seems like he's wanting to follow in the footsteps, so we'll see how that goes.”
His grandfather started working on mechanical harvesting of red chile in the 1980’s. Around the same time the market for red chile moved to Mexico, where he says the hand picking of chile was cheaper than they could do with the machine on their farm, which stopped mechanical harvesting for red chile. This spurred additional work over the years to improve the machines.
“We started developing this header to pick it because in 2000, the COVID years, we got to where we couldn't harvest it. We lost a third of our crop just because we weren't able to get it harvested. So we really started trying to figure out a way to get this thing pushed through and work on it, and that's kind of where we're at now.”
Gillis talked about the need for mechanical harvesting of chile.
“So one machine will take the place of what basically 60 people, it takes for 60 people to do in a day. So we're not really trying to eliminate jobs. We're just trying to fill jobs for people that aren't there anymore. And cost-wise, we can do it for probably half price of what it takes to do it by hand.”
Today, more than 80% of acreage of red chile in New Mexico is machine harvested. It’s typically harvested late in the season when fruit are partially dry, and since the processed product is usually ground, some damage to the fruit during harvest does not significantly affect quality. It’s different with green chile, where mechanical harvesting has proven to be particularly challenging. Dr. Isreal Joukhadar, a senior research scientist at New Mexico State University, explains why.
“You want the fruit to be whole, unblemished and intact; and in a mechanical harvest process for a plant like chile, that can be very difficult to achieve without the right cultivar, without the right mechanical harvester. So that is why it's been a lot harder to mechanize green chile, because of its end product.”
But great strides have been made over the last ten years on mechanically harvesting green chile, based on research and developments made at New Mexico State University. Researchers saw that certain plant attributes were better for mechanical harvests, such as having an upright plant with a single stem, with fruit high up on the plant. After years of comparing cultivars to one another, they began breeding and selecting a lot of green chile that had those attributes, which led to the discovery of the NuMex Odyssey green chile.
“It's a tall, upright plant with the fruit set high on the plant, and it has to be set high on the plant because of the way the harvesters work: they go underneath,” she explains. “So if the fruit is too low, the machine will just smash all of the fruit. So the fruit is set up high. And the really nice thing about NuMex Odyssey, it also has an easier detachment force from the plant. So the fruit, they don't take as much force to pull the fruit off and come into the harvester. So NuMex Odyssey is the first mechanical harvest green chile line that has been released on the market thus far.”
A presentation of mechanical harvesting was given at this year’s New Mexico Chile Conference in Las Cruces, where we caught up with Travis Day, executive director of the New Mexico Chile Association, who said the technology can help address labor shortages in the industry.
“What it is, it's filling a niche that's not being able to be filled right now with hand labor and physical labor, and one that we...we just see mechanized harvest as a big industry game changer for us,” he said. “Again, it's not going to fully replace the hand picking of chile, but it's going to help subsidize some of those farmers that really need that help to get their crop out of the field, that maybe the H2A program doesn't work within their business. You know, they're still not able to find American workers to pick their chile. It's another opportunity for them to get their crops out of the field.”
Darren Gillis agrees that the NuMex Odyssey chile has made a difference in the mechanical harvesting of green chile on his farm.
“It's made a huge difference,” he says. “So the last two years we've had New Mexico Odyssey that we've been able to pick with it. And it is by far the most advanced variety for mechanical harvest.”
Besides labor shortages, Gillis said he is concerned about industry regulations proposed by lawmakers.
“We got a lot of food safety they're pushing, for one,” he says. “And then on our chemicals and stuff, they've been really back pushing on some of it, trying to eliminate some of our chemicals that we use, and that's been tough on us too. We need a lot of these chemicals. We're real safe with them and everything. But those chemicals, we really need to fight weeds and stuff to keep that pressure down, insect pressure and stuff like that.”
With stiff competition coming from Mexico, Gillis feels that mechanical harvesting may be the only way the industry survives in a state historically known for chile.
