Q&A: Chile farmer Dr. Mike Bartolo and cofounder of Pueblo Chile & Frijoles Festival
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This article was updated October 4
ROCKY FORD, Colo. – Few crops are more firmly planted in Colorado history and culture than the chile pepper.
ROCKY FORD, Colo. – Few crops are more firmly planted in Colorado history and culture than the chile pepper.
The iconic fruits – that’s right, fruits, not vegetables – are perhaps best known today for sizzling, and sometimes scorching, heat and flavor.
However, chile peppers have played a central role in Colorado, American and world culture for millenia, starring in various oral and written histories, medicinal treatments and celebrations, like the now 30-year-old Pueblo Chile & Frijoles Festival in Pueblo, Colorado.
Mike Bartolo, a household name in the chile pepper community, played a role in first forming the now 150,000-person spectacle it is today.
Bartolo is the grandson of Italian-American immigrants who first came to Colorado to work in the burgeoning mining and steel industries of the 1900’s.
He grew up in the rural Pueblo County, where his family – including a pepper-growing uncle – worked in agriculture, inspiring Bartolo to pursue a bachelors in Bio-Agricultural Science and masters degree in Horticulture at Colorado State University, Fort Collins.
Rocky Mountain PBS spoke with Bartolo, the now retired CSU Fort Collins Vegetable Crops Specialist, who still cultivates a personal bed of peppers at his Rocky Ford home, to learn more about the impactful and poignant history of the pepper,
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
RMPBS: Why peppers? What is it about peppers, and chile peppers in particular, that inspired this career-long passion?
Bartolo: I was lucky to get a job at the [Arkansas Valley] Research Center, which was only 50 miles away from my home. So I was working with the same people I grew up with, which included chile growers.
Soon after I started working there, my uncle – his name was Harry Mosco – passed away. He was a chile grower right next door to where I grew up. And when my dad was cleaning out Uncle Harry’s garage, he found a bag of seeds of his that [my uncle] had been saving for generations called the Heirloom Mira Sol chile.
This was a chile that had been growing since the early 1900s, and so farmers in the area, like my Uncle Harry, had grown and saved that chile seed, and been saving it year after year after year. It was kind of what they referred to as the native soul or original Pueblo chile.
I wasn’t really intent on doing anything with [the seeds], but I had extra space in my test plots [with the university], so I started growing about four rows of the chile and began saving the seed.
And after about a year or two of growing the chiles, I saw one particular plant that was unique, that was a little bit bigger in size, a little bit meatier. I began selecting seed from that one plant and did that for multiple generations.
It took me about eight or nine years when I eventually released a new variety of chile pepper I called “Mosco,” which I named after my Uncle Harry, which has now become a kind of predominant form of chile.
And since that time, from those original seeds, I’ve probably made over five, almost 600 seed selections, and I’ve been doing that now for the past 30 plus years.
RMPBS: What are “selections,” and what characteristics are you looking for when making selections from different peppers?
Bartolo: There’s natural variations and mutations, sometimes through cross-pollination, that occur across generations of plants. Sometimes there might be five or six different variations of the same type of plant in one population: one that’s a little bigger, one that’s a little thicker…
I keep looking at those subtle differences and saving the seed from that one plant, and doing that for the next generation and the next. And I keep selecting until the plant remains true, which means that it is stable, that I can get the same type of pepper year after year from the seed.
That is the goal from a horticultural standpoint: to get a population that I really like that is very stable and then that I can share with other growers.
It’s kind of a slow, tedious process, but over these 30 years, I’ve had peppers that are short and round, ones that are big and long, ones that are green, ones that are yellow.
It’s the very thick and heavy pods that really make the peppers amenable to roasting. Those meaty parts, and the weight you can feel when holding it, is really what caught my eye originally.
And like I said, it’s a slow process, and people think I’m a little bit odd because I am constantly looking at peppers, just spending a lot of time crawling on my hands and looking at the chiles.
I think that process is neat. It helps you continue this relationship with your food and your plants, and helps us understand where they came from. And that’s why I think preppers in general are good for a relationship with food, because we have so many good memories with them.
But it’s got to taste good! So what if it looks good if it doesn’t taste good or it can’t be incorporated into these dishes that people love?
RMPBS: What does the process of growing the peppers look like? If the process is slow, why continue growing in this way?
Bartolo: With chiles, there’s a certain degree of what’s called self pollination. But maybe 10% – 15%, maybe less, will outcross. So maybe insects will come in and touch pollen from this plant to this plant, and they’ll kind of cross-pollinate.
It’s not something I really directed or intentioned. You can be very directional, but I’m kind of letting Mother Nature do it.
It could be a mutation or a natural variant, and I just keep selecting until I get to a point where I really like something. And I use that little bit of outcrossing to get this very unique outcrossing until I get to the point where it’s like, “yeah, this is what I want to make sure I get from that seed,” and I’ll isolate it and go from there.
It’s a little bit, I would say, a primitive way of doing it. I keep telling people that if I would’ve worked for a commercial seed company, I probably would’ve been fired 29 years ago.
It feels a lot more personal though. They’re like my kids almost! I know them.
I say, “I know where you came from! I saw you back 12 years ago!”
You just become so familiar with them, it’s almost like a familial relationship you have with them.
So I spend about two or three hours every morning, just crawling around and looking at everybody. It’s just like checking on your kids, making sure they’re doing OK.
And then I’ll harvest pretty soon and save the seed. I’ll do this starting around mid-September and all the way till mid-October, till it freezes pretty good.
It takes me a while to clean seed because I have to take out the seed and write my notes on it. I’m a complete nerd when it comes to looking at each seed. I can never get enough of that.
And I see the seed that I’m going to use next year, and it’s just… it’s just a blast.
[Bartolo has two human kids, a son and a daughter, as well as a niece currently working as the CSU Agricultural Extension agent for Pueblo County.]
RMPBS: How do you determine which peppers “taste good,” or will the peppers that you introduce into the community?
Bartolo: I always try to make sure that I vet [the peppers] with people that have that culinary background or have that experience with the chile, and so I’ve used a unique set of people in my life that I have known over the years. That makes it seem even more community focused that way.
Like, some people that I go to church with… I go to these wonderful Hispanic women that’ve been cooking chiles for their family for decades.
It’s not just scientists. It’s the community.
You could fill a stadium full of college students that would not have a fraction of the knowledge they have about the culinary aspects of chiles and how they incorporate it into food.
So I say to some of those people, “Hey, can you check out this chile variety and see what you think of it?”
And they tell me that it’s not hot enough, or they think it doesn’t roast very good. They know those little intimate details of that, and that’s really proof that it could be the most beautifully plant pepper in the world, but if it doesn’t have that culinary and cultural connection… what good is it?
I mean, so many of my memories, and many of my other family members’, have incorporated chile peppers. And that whole theme of having food, family and culture all woven into the farming. We grew the chile that we dried and incorporated into the food.
It’s this lifelong and generation-long relationship you develop with this plant, and if just happened to be chile peppers for me. Other cultures maybe have a different crop, but chile peppers certainly have been the flag for that relationship in [southern Colorado].
RMPBS: How did the Pueblo Chile & Frijoles Festival first come together, and what was the inspiration behind it?
Bartolo: I remember that there were a few community members that were talking about boosting agriculture, and we knew other places that had food festivals, so I think it was born out of that. And that was in the early 1990s.
And, of course, the chile was, at that time, and still is, very important to Pueblo. So we thought we should have some kind of food festival.
I think it wouldn’t have taken off if it wasn’t for Rod [Slyhoff]. He has since passed on, but he really took it as a champion. Regardless of the idea, he moved it forward.
I know the first [festival] was very modest. We hoped we’d get like one farmer to come and if there were anybody that was going to show up, and it was like 30 people, 40 people there. So it was very nerve wracking to see if it would get off the ground or not.
But it did eventually take off, and it did help bring more of a spotlight to the Pueblo chile and the farmers. And I think that’s what’s most important.
[Pueblo’s second-biggest tourism event of the year after the Colorado State Fair, this year’s 30th annual Pueblo Chile & Frijoles Festival included over 200 vendors and over 50 live performers.]
We’ve got such an incredible produce production here in Pueblo County or in the Arkansas Valley as a whole. You’ve got incredible farmers, you got this unique growing environment and we really wanted to highlight that.
That’s really the main achievement of the Pueblo Chile & Frijoles Festival, is really spotlighting what incredible resources we have here in Southern Colorado. Not only people resources, but environmental resources as well.
RMPBS: What is it like going back to the festival today?
Bartolo: It’s a bit overwhelming for me now, to see all the people. I much would prefer walking out here in my chile patch just looking at chiles.
But I’m glad [the community] is enjoying the chile. The crowds and the noise… that’s great, and it’s exciting to see all those people excited about [chiles].
But my own personal preference would be just me and my chiles having a nice afternoon, me observing them and taking a nice stroll through my chile patch.
RMPBS: If your uncle, Mosco, could see you and all that you have grown with his original pepper seeds, what would he think?
Bartolo: All of our relatives were very modest, hardworking folks, so I don’t think they would necessarily enjoy all of the notoriety.
But I think they would be proud that their hard work, and most importantly, that the generations that followed them maintained their connection to the land and maintained their connection to the family.
They understood what it was to face the triumphs and the trials of farming, and I think as long as future generations still have that connection to the food and the land… that’s what’s most important.
And I think as I look forward, that’s exactly what I hope for. I don’t care if anybody remembers any of these chiles as long as we maintain here in this state, here in this part of the country, this connection to our food and our land… how it sustains us and how it feeds us.
Instead of looking at all of this growth and development of cities, what’s most important is our connection to our natural resources, and that we can do so much with that.