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Meet George and Marianne Schweers, owners and operators of Heart of the Desert in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Along Highway 54, you’ll find signs leading to their operation where they grow, process, and market farm-grown pistachios, along with wine, oil, confections, gift baskets, and more.
Source: US Department of Agriculture
By Jennifer Strickland, USDA
Photos: Courtesy
Meet George and Marianne Schweers, owners and operators of Heart of the Desert in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Along Highway 54, you’ll find signs leading to their operation where they grow, process, and market farm-grown pistachios, along with wine, oil, confections, gift baskets, and more. While the two celebrated 50 years in business last July, their story began seven decades ago in a small town in rural Nebraska.
Taking a Detour
One day, high school sophomore George went on his very first date with freshman Marianne. At the time, George wasn’t the smoothest of suitors. “She went home and told her dad, ‘I’m never going out with that guy again’,” George laughs.
“I wasn’t sure I wanted to get married, or that I’d found the right person,” Marianne continues. Needless to say, young George won Marianne’s heart, and standing beside their parents at the courthouse a few years later, the two were wed.
Having grown up on a farm, George had no doubt he would become a farmer. “George has a passion for farming,” Marianne says admiringly. “I always thought he was just going to get out of high school and go on the family farm.”
After graduating high school, George earned a mechanical engineering degree that led him on an adventure, detouring from farming into a rewarding 20-year career with the Air Force. He served as a navigator, ferrying the biggest, heaviest shipments America needed on his C-124 cargo plane. Once, he delivered an entire fire truck to Jackson Hole for President Kennedy.
The Air Force took the Schweers around the country, to Texas, Utah, Hawaii, and eventually George went overseas to Vietnam. After that, George was assigned to Alamogordo, the place they now call home. “We learned to love the desert and decided we weren’t going back to the Midwest to farm,” Marianne says. “We just liked growing things. We wanted to do that here and looked for a crop.”
The Heart of Entrepreneurship
Just because a crop grows in the Midwest doesn’t mean it will grow in the desert. After extensive research and sifting through encyclopedias, pistachios came to the top of the list. With pistachios having been grown for centuries under similar conditions overseas, the Schweers decided to “give it a try.”
The Schweers started by planting 400 trees on their 20 acres and expanded as more land around them became available. This sense of entrepreneurship is at the heart of Heart of the Desert.
Among the many entrepreneurial choices the Schweers have made, one was to purchase Pistachio Crop Insurance coverage, a crop insurance program overseen by USDA’s Risk Management Agency (RMA).
RMA serves America’s agricultural producers through effective, market-based risk management tools to strengthen the economic stability of agricultural producers and rural communities. Approved Insurance Providers sell and service Federal crop insurance policies in every state and in Puerto Rico through a public-private partnership with RMA.
As a kid, George witnessed how Mother Nature could shape farms for better or worse. “We always had the possibility of the storms in the spring, like you see in the paper and in the news,” says George. “Every year we’d see tornadoes in our area, or hail, which can wipe out your crop. I’ve seen many fields just leveled.”
Now with his pistachio trees, George needs Mother Nature to grant him the right amount of cold at the right time for successful pollination.
“Farm and weather are inseparable, so [crop insurance] gives us protection from any event,” Marianne explains. “You really have to plan strategically how you spend your money. If you’re dependent on a crop, whatever it is you’re growing, then you need to hedge your bets, and for what you get from having crop insurance, even if you don’t cover your losses, it gives you the start to be able to keep going.” And keep going is exactly what they’ve done, with the help of friends, family, neighbors, and the Alamogordo community along the way.
With over 70 years married and 50 years in business, one might wonder what advice the Schweers have for co-owning and operating a business while married to your business partner? “Designated areas of authority,” according to Marianne. While George has the final say on how they’ll farm, she has the last word on business decisions. “At the end of the day, we sit down at the kitchen table. We either have a beer or a glass of wine and we say, ‘how is your day? What happened in your world?’ That’s where the warmth is, when you have a soulmate. You can say anything, you can talk about it. It’s good.”
More Information
Visit local farms, ranches, forests, and resource areas through our Fridays on the Farm stories. Meet farmers, producers, and landowners who are working to improve their operations with USDA programs.
Don’t know much about Federal crop insurance, but want to learn more? Get started with RMA’s Basics for Beginners.
USDA offers a variety of risk management, disaster assistance, loan, and conservation programs to help producers weather ups and downs in the market and recover from natural disasters as well as invest in improvements to their operations. Learn about additional programs.
For more information about USDA programs and services, contact your local USDA service center.
Jennifer Strickland is the Social Media Strategist with the Farm Production and Conservation Business Center.
