Around ten in the morning on a weekday in late September, the smell reaches the parking lot before anything else does. It’s smoke and sweetness and something almost savory — the unmistakable perfume of green chiles turning in a propane-fired drum. Inside the low adobe-style building along Highway 28 south of Las Cruces, Ramon Estrada is doing what he’s done most of his adult life: watching the rotation, listening to the pop and hiss, adjusting the angle of the drum with the practiced indifference of someone who no longer needs to think about it.
Stahmann Farms occupies a long, shaded stretch of the Mesilla Valley between Las Cruces and Anthony. The pecan orchards on either side of the highway — planted in the 1930s by W.J. Stahmann — run in such precise rows that driving past them feels almost hypnotic. The farm itself is one of the largest pecan operations in the United States, though most people outside the valley don’t know that. The country store at the farm’s edge is where the public comes in.
The store is not fancy. Shelves of locally produced pecans in every form: raw, roasted, chocolate-dipped, seasoned with chile and lime, pressed into brittle and pecan logs and old-fashioned divinity. Glass jars of locally made jams and salsas line the back wall. There are bins where you can buy pecans by the pound, and the prices hold steady in a way that feels deliberately out of step with what you’d pay at any airport gift shop or specialty grocer. A bag of fresh-cracked pecan halves runs somewhere around eight dollars, depending on the season and the harvest.
During chile season — roughly August through October — the roaster out front becomes the main event. Estrada works it with a long-handled tool that he taps against the drum more out of habit than necessity. He doesn’t say much to the clusters of people who stop to watch, but if someone asks how long they need to roast a batch at home, he’ll answer precisely, without flourish. The chiles sold here are grown in the valley, primarily the NuMex varieties developed through New Mexico State University’s chile breeding program just up the road. A thirty-pound bag goes for somewhere around twenty-five dollars roasted, and most people who buy one are regulars who’ve been coming back every fall for decades.
Inside, an older woman named Gloria runs the register most mornings. She knows many of the customers by name and can usually tell from what’s in someone’s basket whether they’re local or passing through. Locals buy pecans in bulk and skip the flavored varieties. Visitors tend to pick up the chocolate-covered ones and a jar of red chile. She doesn’t judge either way.
The store keeps reasonable hours — generally nine to five, though it’s worth calling ahead during off-peak months, when hours can shorten. In December, when the pecan harvest wraps and the farm ships nationally, the store gets a second wave of traffic from people who’ve discovered the mail-order catalog and want to see the source. But September is the time to go if you want both experiences at once: fresh-roasted chiles from Estrada’s drum and still-warm pecans from the fall harvest, standing in the shade of an irrigation ditch, watching hawks circle over the orchard rows.
It’s the kind of place that doesn’t need to announce itself. The highway sign is small, the building is understated, and the people who work there have been doing this long enough that the whole operation runs on muscle memory and quiet pride. That’s usually a reliable sign that the thing itself is worth your time.
