The Santa Fe Community College greenhouse is vast and spotless, humming with fans. Greenhouse technician and professor Pedro Casas is introducing me to the basil.
"It's just shiny, green. Perfect, smell is amazing," he says, caressing a leaf.
This is the hub of the college's Controlled Agriculture Program, which, put simply, means growing food indoors, where you can protect against extremes of weather.
New Mexico faces a water dilemma as drought dries out the Southwest. Agriculture uses about 80% of the state's fresh water. But farming is traditional here and a relatively big employer. So, some farmers and researchers are trying ways to keep growing but more sustainably.
The key to one method slowly gaining in popularity lies in big blue drums in the community college greenhouse.
"These fish tanks are full of tilapia," says Casas, peering in. "If you get close, you might be able to see them sometimes showing their faces."
The tilapia are at the heart of a system called aquaponics, which uses about 5% of the water of traditional arable farming. It combines fish farming with plant growing.
"These four tanks of fish are the ones who are producing the nutrients for all my plants over there," says Casas. "And then my plants become the filter to take all those nutrients, and we can pump water here to my fish."
Charlie Shultz, the academic director of the controlled environment agriculture program, says the starting point is a technology called hydroponics - growing plants inside a closed-loop water system - without soil.