On June 23, 2026, Prince Lobel obtained a jury verdict on all counts for pro bono client Agriculture Implementation, Research and Education (AIRE), a non-profit based in Taos, New Mexico, against another non-profit, Taos County Economic Development Corporation (TCEDC). The jury awarded AIRE more than $800,000, and post-trial motions for costs and fees are underway. Steve Daniels led the Prince Lobel team with assistance from Marlisa Payne and Linda Emerson.
AIRE‘s director, Ms. Micah Roseberry, came to Taos nearly forty years ago with a passion for preserving heirloom seed stocks and encouraging new farmers to plant and harvest crops from those seeds to feed the people of the region. In 2013, Ms. Roseberry founded the Farmhouse Café and Bakery, a successful farm-to-table restaurant that was intended to create a market that would encourage and reward the local agriculture that Ms. Roseberry moved to Taos to support.
Once the Farmhouse Café was established, a forward-thinking administrator at the Day School at the Taos campus of the University of New Mexico asked Ms. Roseberry to apply her expertise to providing healthy, organic, scratch-cooked meals to the children at the Day School. Ms. Roseberry immediately understood that providing healthy meals for children could create a market for locally sourced meat and produce and encourage organic practices. The farmers and ranchers of northern New Mexico would have a ready market for their organically produced produce and meats, and the children of Taos would receive clean, nutritious meals closely tied to the roots of their community.
Building on that concept, Ms. Roseberry moved the “Farmhouse school lunch program” into the AIRE nonprofit as one of its projects. She also created programs to educate children in farming practices, nutrition, cooking and baking, to help local ranchers aggregate their products to appeal to larger purchasers, and to encourage the cultivation of indigenous crops and the preservation of centuries-old water rights in Northern New Mexico.
In 2022, the Governor of New Mexico established food security initiatives, including grants to support programs to address hunger, that could have a demonstrable impact in a community within a single year. Ms. Roseberry saw this grant as an opportunity to expand her program to include an afternoon meal for all of the children in a home where at least one of them qualifies for free meals at school. She approached the Taos County Economic Development Center (TCEDC)—a much larger non-profit—and asked it to apply jointly for the grant. Under the grant proposal, grant funds would be spent on equipment and infrastructure that AIRE needed to expand its meal offerings, and TCEDC would receive a larger amount of funding to help it upgrade its capability to process and aggregate meat from local ranchers, who typically had to drive for hours in order to sell their animals.
As part of the joint proposal, AIRE would move its operations out of Farmhouse Café & Bakery and into the large commissary kitchen at TCEDC, which TCEDC represented to be safe, functional, and ready to accept the new equipment provided for in the grant.
In the summer of 2022, the AIRE-TCEDC team was awarded nearly $1.5 million—one of the largest grants ever received in Northern New Mexico. But within a month of the announcement, TCEDC had already committed to spend more than $1.1 million of the grant money on two slaughter units from Washington state. Building the foundations for these units would require more than what was left of the grant money, so there was nothing left to benefit AIRE. The two units now sit on isolated property by the Taos airport, and TCEDC estimates it will require an additional $10 million and at least five years before they will be operational. The grant ultimately had no impact on food insecurity within the first year—or even the first five years—after the award.
AIRE did not learn that TCEDC had squandered the entire grant until the spring 2023, when it was informed there was no money to help it expand its meal offerings. In the meantime, the TCEDC kitchen was not as promised. The refrigeration and freezer units failed to hold temperature, the ovens failed repeatedly, a dangerous gas leak closed the kitchen for ten days and sickened an AIRE staff member, and two AIRE staff got locked in the walk-in freezer during off hours—a situation that could easily have been fatal.
In the meantime, once TCEDC had taken all of the grant money for itself and used AIRE’s metrics regarding meals served and the amounts of local food purchased by the school meal program to create the false impression that some of the grant money had actually been used to address hunger. TCEDC also began to demand that AIRE pay exorbitant rent to continue using the kitchen space—far in excess of what a meal program that relied on USDA reimbursements and sought to use the highest possible content of local, organic ingredients, could afford.
While AIRE was attempting to negotiate a realistic rent, and simultaneously exploring other options for kitchen space, TCEDC suddenly placed locks on all of the places where AIRE’s food was stored—locking up nearly $70,000 in food and equipment. In order to ensure that the children it served did not miss a meal, AIRE was forced to move very quickly and to get permission from the schools to provide cold meals for a few days during the transition.
The food that was locked up included more than a ton of heirloom Taos blue corn, grown and harvested by AIRE and two members of Taos Pueblo, which has a central place in the diet and the ceremonial rituals of the residents of the Pueblo. TCEDC finally released the corn, after it was completely riddled with toxic mold. The rest of the food and equipment remains at TCEDC now—nearly three years later.
Based on these facts, the six-member jury in Taos County’s Eighth Judicial District Court found in AIRE’s favor on counts of conversion, negligence, negligent misrepresentation, breach of contract, and violation of the New Mexico Unfair Practices Act, and awarded AIRE more than $800,000 in damages.