By Greg Cunningham, candidate for New Mexico’s 2nd Congressional District
Two weeks ago, I sat down and had a roundtable with farmers and ranchers from southern New Mexico to hear their needs and concerns.
One of them told me something I have not stopped thinking about. He said farmers are hopeful people. They do not dwell on what happened last year. They get up, and they bet on this one.
Think about what that takes. You bet your livelihood on the rain, on the price of fuel and fertilizer, on water that is supposed to come down the river and too often does not. You do it again every spring. That kind of hope built this district, and it deserves a fighter in Congress.
New Mexico’s growers have gotten the same deal: higher costs, broken promises, and representation that says the right things back home while its record in Washington works against this district. I am running to change that. Here is where I stand.
Water is survival. I will hold Mexico to its treaty obligations and bring real pressure to bear instead of letting our farmers wait while the water owed to them sits south of the line. I will defend New Mexico’s full share under the Rio Grande Compact, invest in the storage and channel work that makes every acre-foot count, and back the brackish water desalination research so we create new water instead of only fighting over what is left. And I will never let anyone drain agricultural water to feed a data center.
The cost of doing business has a direct correlation to our energy sector. The diesel in the tractor and the fertilizer in the ground are made cheaper by New Mexico oil and gas. When that energy gets attacked, it raises the cost of growing food, and that cost lands on a family at the grocery store. I will defend New Mexico energy and the thousands of jobs that come with it, because that is how you bring input costs down.
Our farms need a legal workforce and a secure border. I spent my career in law enforcement, and I know you can secure the border and fix the legal guest worker programs at the same time.
We have to cut the red tape that strangles routine farm and ranch work, protect property rights from federal overreach, and get wolf management back into the hands of the people who live with the consequences instead of activists who never will. And we have to protect the next generation, the young and beginning and veteran farmers trying to break in, from a tax code that punishes a family for keeping the farm in the family.
I am a combat veteran and retired police officer. I know how to hold a line, and I do not quit when it gets hard. New Mexico’s farmers and ranchers feed this state, and they deserve a representative who fights for them in Washington the way they fight for their land every single day.
This is just the start. I will keep sitting down with the New Mexicans who feed our state, nation, and world, because that is how you actually represent them. I will put New Mexico farmers first.
