What’s on Doppler’s Radar?: The chile harvest

DEMING, New Mexico -- The chile harvest in the Mesilla Valley is coming to an end.

You can probably smell that green chile roasting around town.

Doppler Dave Speelman helped pick the green crop out in Deming and talked to one of the big chile farmers in that area. Doppler found out that labor has been hard to come by this year, so the federal government has allowed U-S farmers to use migrants out of Mexico for a few months to get the crop harvested.

New Mexico is the largest exporter of Chile in the United States. If labor costs, fertilizer and water becomes more of a concern next year, a shortage of chile could be a problem.