Colorado Voices
Chile farmer and cofounder of the Pueblo Chile & Frijoles Festival Dr. Mike Bartolo
Clip | 3m 21sVideo has Closed Captions
The retired CSU Fort Collins researcher has spent decades developing new types of chile peppers
Dr. Mike Bartolo, a life-long Southern Colorado local and now retired CSU Fort Collins researcher, turned a sack of his late uncle's chile seeds into over five new types of chile peppers and the Pueblo Chile & Frijoles Festival
Colorado Voices
Chile farmer and cofounder of the Pueblo Chile & Frijoles Festival Dr. Mike Bartolo
Clip | 3m 21sVideo has Closed Captions
Dr. Mike Bartolo, a life-long Southern Colorado local and now retired CSU Fort Collins researcher, turned a sack of his late uncle's chile seeds into over five new types of chile peppers and the Pueblo Chile & Frijoles Festival
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorshipThe whole story of the Pueblo Chile is more than just growing chile.
It's about this whole process of bringing it to foods and tables in our own homes.
Everybody has a contribution to this incredible story about Pueblo Chile.
Whether it be a specific type of food or a connection to a family event, The chili pepper has been grown and cultivated in this hemisphere for thousands of years.
This food that we carefully tended to and cultivated has not only sustained us, but it's so important to our culture and many of the events that shaped our lives.
It's just hard to describe all the things that have contributed to the Pueblo Chile story.
Theres one over here that I really like.
And this, this is my, this is my goal.
Like this, this, this, this pepper right here is something that I hopefully have enough seed that I can distribute out to farmers.
Really this whole thing about pepper breeding, it was kind of a sideline.
It really wasn't my main course of action.
[dogs barking] Its kind of looks like a disheveled mess out there.
And to certain extent, it is.
Early in 1991, I began working with Colorado State University as the vegetable crop specialist here in the Arkansas Valley.
You can see the difference in the length from there in the original.
One day early in my career, my uncle Harry Mosco, he had passed away.
When they were cleaning out his garage, my dad found a very generic cloth bag filled with his line of Pueblo Mira Sol Chile.
It's going to make me sneeze.
[coughs] He just gave me a bag of his chile seeds.
And I really had no intention to doing anything with chile peppers.
But I had room in my test plots, that area to grow a little bit of that chile seed.
So I grew four rows.
Eventually, in that population, I saw one unique chile pepper that kind of stood out to me.
It was a little bit thicker, a little bit meatier.
And that's kind of what started me in this whole process.
It developed, I kept selecting that variety, over about seven or eight years, it eventually became to a point where I thought I had enough seed, and it was a good enough variety where I could give out samples to local growers, and eventually had a released variety which I named Mosco after my uncle Harry Mosco.
Im on my second or third book of these out of 30 years.
So, you know, each year I do about ten pages, so it takes me a while.
The reason Pueblo Chile is so important because it still maintains our connection to the land, to the heritage.
We need to maintain that and our connection to the food and to the land and to our culture.
And I think that's what I'm afraid of, as especially here in Colorado, as we continue to be inundated by urban sprawl and growth.
We are losing something that's so incredibly important to us as a state, as a community is that connection that we share in our food and our food sources and our farmers.
And if we don't understand that, I'm afraid it's going to be lost.
So I'm hoping that Pueblo Chile can stand as at least a guardian against that If that connection is strengthened, we will continue to value the land and the water and the food and the farmers we need to survive here in Colorado.
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