For Some Locals, Self-Sufficiency Starts in the Backyard

By R. Gabriel Villalobos

There was a time not long ago when a 26-year-old worrying about the taste of store-bought meat and the trustworthiness of government supply chains would have sounded like a fringe sentiment. But here in the dusty plains of southeastern New Mexico, Samantha Cooper represents something quieter, and perhaps more significant: a generational pivot back to the land.

“The meat started tasting worse in stores and started making my husband and me sick,” Cooper explained, standing on the patch of earth she shares with 15 chickens, a dozen ducks, two sheep, and a rotating cast of pigs and cattle.

“My husband and I wanted to live off the land more and stop depending so much on our government.”

That decision, born of frustration and a growling stomach, has since blossomed into a full-blown homesteading operation spanning two adjacent acres. What began with a few hens has expanded to include goats, cows, and the cyclical appearance of pig breeds such as American Pinks and Drocks. Four pigs go into the freezer each year just for her family’s basic needs. One cow? That feeds four people, herself, her husband, her mother, and her grandmother for an entire year.

Cooper is hardly alone in this pursuit. Across Carlsbad and into neighboring Artesia, Roswell, Hobbs, and even parts of Texas, she has cultivated a word-of-mouth network of roughly 50 people who raise, trade, and slaughter animals that they are using to feed their families. Cash is almost an afterthought.

“Almost everything’s bartered,” she said. “Hardly any actual cash goes through the community.”

There is a local vet who checks their livestock—the woman in town who raises the best-tasting sheep Cooper has ever eaten with no gamey flavor, just careful husbandry from a vet tech who “loves on her animals.” And then there are the slaughter lessons. Cooper’s husband has become an unlikely educator, inviting friends and coworkers to learn the hard work of harvesting what they raise.

“We’ll give our friends some meat to take home to try,” Cooper says. “We do teach in that sense.”

Not everyone takes to it. One friend, their “lamb lady,” refuses to slaughter her own sheep because she grows too attached to them. But the broader enthusiasm, Cooper said, is coming from her own generation. People she works with—people her age—are hungry, not just for food, but for competence.

“This new generation, most of the time, doesn’t know how to do stuff for themselves,” she said flatly. “I really enjoy that for us, that we know how to do everything ourselves. We don’t have to depend on anyone.”

The ultimate goal is not merely a hobby farm, but a life unplugged entirely. Cooper dreams of selling her current properties and moving “out into the middle of nowhere,” no electricity, no outside systems, just a family compound where three or four families can sustain one another. On that future land, she also wants to raise emus. “They taste like beef, but they’re birds… They’re a lot easier to raise than cows, too,” more goats, and yes, alligators.

“I really do want some gators,” she says with a laugh.

Cooper is accustomed to raising eyebrows when she brings up her interest in raising alligators, but she insists that the meat tastes great and that they would round out her new farm nicely.

For now, the work continues on two acres in Carlsbad. The community grows by word of mouth, not Facebook. “People in the group think it’s cruel,” she said of past online attempts. “The animals we raise live a good life. They even have snacks right before they die.”

When asked whether there are any kids who help her with the farming, Cooper mentions her niece. “She’s 17, and she likes petting the animals but not the slaughtering.”

That’s fine. Cooper isn’t worried.

For some young adults in Carlsbad, hedging bets against failures to deliver quality, healthy food also offers a lifestyle appealing to at least some segment of Gen Z unsatisfied with how things are currently being done.