Blue corn and melons: meet the seed keepers reviving ancient, resilient crops

On a windy winter day in Acoma Pueblo in north-western New Mexico, Aaron Lowden knelt beside a field near the San Jose River, the tribe’s primary irrigator for centuries. “The soil has been building up,” said Lowden, an Indigenous seed keeper and farmer, pushing his hand into the soft, dark dirt at the base of a stalk of dried Acoma blue corn.