Mexico/USA: Feeding the Borderlands and Beyond
Interview with Yoli Soto, Founder of Borderlands Produce Rescue
By Melissa del Bosque (Border Chronicle)
HAVANA TIMES – Last Tuesday morning, just as President Trump’s tariffs on Mexico went into effect, I visited a produce warehouse in Nogales, Arizona. There, I found Yolanda “Yoli” Soto sitting in her colorful, painting-filled office overlooking the warehouse crowded with boxes of fruits and vegetables. Founder and CEO of the nonprofit Borderlands Produce Rescue, Soto said the tariffs would undoubtedly harm growers and distributors. “People will go bankrupt,” she said.
Soto, who started Borderlands in 1996, grew up on both sides of the border. Ambos Nogales, as the two sister cities of Nogales are often called, is the center of the North American winter produce trade. In the winter, at least 60 percent of fruits and vegetables grown in Mexico travel through Nogales, Arizona, for distribution across the United States and Canada. Because of this, there are hundreds of distribution warehouses in Nogales that contract with farms in Mexico and grocery stores in El Norte. The distributors now have to pay Trump’s 25 percent tariff on Mexican produce, whether it sells or not. And those higher prices will most likely be passed on to consumers, Soto said. (Trump reversed course on the tariffs after three days but said they will be reinstated on April 2.)
Distributors already spend big money on landfill fees. Every year, millions of pounds of fresh produce—about 250 million pounds last year, according to Soto—is dumped in the Nogales landfill, because of supply chain problems, blemishes on the produce, and other issues. To counter this, Soto’s small nonprofit, with six employees, tries to rescue as much of that fresh produce as possible. Her organization distributes fruits and vegetables locally and across Arizona. It also provides produce for animal feed and compost to surrounding farms and ranches. Last year, Soto says, her organization rescued nearly 20 million pounds of food, which also helps the environment, she says, estimating that, by diverting the food from the landfill, they prevented at least 2 million pounds of methane from entering the atmosphere.
Touring Soto’s warehouse, I saw mangoes, spaghetti squash, tomatoes, and many of the same produce brands, organic and otherwise, that I see every week at my neighborhood grocery store in Tucson. I sat down with Soto in her office to learn more about her nonprofit, which provides fresh food at almost no cost to thousands of people every year.
How did you get the idea to start Borderlands?
We started as a food bank. But we didn’t like that we had to qualify people, asking them for their income and checking to see whether they were a U.S. citizen. We’re in a border community. The produce is grown in Mexico by Mexican farmworkers. You think I’m not going to share it with our sister city of Nogales, Sonora? That’d be crazy. So we thought, you know, we’re right in the center of the produce industry. Why don’t we just forget about the food bank idea. We saw that there was a lot of produce that was being dumped at our landfill, and we didn’t think that was very healthy for our environment, so we thought, hmm, let’s start something new. Let’s start rescuing this fresh produce by knocking on everybody’s door, one at a time, and educating them that instead of you going to the landfill and dumping what you can’t sell, how about if you call us, and we’ll pick it up and find homes for it. So that’s basically how it started.
Why does so much produce end up in the landfill?
The produce industry really does do a good job of trying to sell whatever they’re supposed to sell. But it’s a consumer-driven and Mother Nature–driven market, and you just never know if today the consumer wants eggplant, and tomorrow they don’t want eggplant, and so what are they going to do with that product? Or there’s a hurricane and fields are destroyed, and all of sudden there’s no tomatoes, and everyone wants tomatoes, so they’re going to pay more. Sometimes they’re not able to sell the produce for cosmetic reasons. It has rain stains, or it’s bruised or missing a stem. There’s just a variety of reasons. These rejections mostly happen at the warehouses, where quality checks are done for the grocery stores.
Every year, about 7 billion pounds of produce come through Nogales. An estimated 3 to 5 percent will go into the landfill. So we’re here to rescue the produce that is still good for consumers. We were rescuing “ugly produce” before it became fashionable [laughs]. We also divert some of the produce to our potpourri for animals and compost program. The distributors are happy for us to take the produce from their warehouse floor because more is coming in.
How many farmers in Mexico are sending produce to Nogales, and how many distributors are there?
Nogales has been a center for produce since the early 1900s, when the produce would arrive from Mexico by train, and we had an icehouse downtown. Currently in Nogales, there’s anywhere from 200 to 300 distributors, at least. And they all have some form of contract with farmers in Mexico, in many different states including Sonora, Michoacán, Guerrero. These are big multinational farms, many owned by U.S. companies, not mom-and-pop farms, by the way. I couldn’t tell you how many farms there are. About 60 percent of all the winter produce in North America comes through here from November to May. In June it shifts to the border at San Diego because the produce starts coming from that area of Mexico. McAllen, Texas, is another major entry point for produce.
Tell me about your programs to provide fresh fruits and vegetables. How can people receive the produce?
We rescue at least 42 different varieties of vegetables and fruit, from squash to dragon fruit. We have a local program called Veggies R Us, where from Tuesday to Friday, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., people can come to our warehouse and pick up hundreds of pounds of produce. We only ask for a contribution of $5.00. Mondays we designate for registered agencies and organizations only, that can come and pick up boxes of produce.
We have shopping carts that can be filled with 200 to 250 pounds of produce. There’s really not a limit, though. We don’t have a public transit system here in Nogales, and we’re located on the outskirts, so we really want people to pay it forward and take the produce and share it with their communities. We ask for the small contribution, because we have discovered over time that if you don’t put a value on the product, then people value it less.
Our other program is Produce on Wheels without Waste, or POWWOW. With this program we host weekly distribution events of boxes with 70 pounds of produce for $15. That’s 21 cents a pound. That’s a ganga [bargain]. We currently collaborate with more than 30 organizations across Arizona, including churches, schools, and community centers. We don’t go out and find these places. We wait for them to contact us, and then we decide if they make a feasible partner. We deliver the produce to them. For the host sites, we ask that they give us enough space and volunteers to help, because it really is a community-outreach initiative, and it works better when the host is spreading the word among its community. [Learn more about becoming a host site here.]
Besides redistributing food, you’re also doing a lot to recycle food. Can you talk more about these programs?
[Ismari Garcia, director of the Potpourri for Animals and Composting program]: The product that we can’t use for other programs because it’s perished, or part of it has perished, we distribute to ranchers. Some local ranchers will come with their trailers and pick up the produce, and it’s all free. If people feel it in their hearts to give us a donation for this, then we greatly appreciate that, because it lets us keep doing this. But we don’t charge anybody. We can also deliver with our dump truck, but we do have to cover the cost of the driver and the fuel. So we do charge for that. For composting we have a partner in Amado, called Critter Ranch, who can take a semi of perishable product a week and turn it into compost.
We want to keep as much out of the landfill as possible. We even found a home for jalapeños this year. We found out that pigs really like jalapeños.
Wow, I had no idea. Pigs like jalapeños?
Yes, and apparently chickens will eat habanero chiles. We have all types of animals eating the rescued produce, from goats to emus. We have a rancher who has exotic animals, and he has emus.
