WALSH — Everyone in Walsh wants in on the lettuce.
It’s so pretty, they say to one another on the street. Way better than that iceberg stuff. And it keeps so well, they all agree.
The lettuces arrive with the roots still attached. Romaine, red leaf and some silky looking butterhead, delivered the same day they’re harvested from The Summers House in La Junta. That the town has lettuce on its main drag at all has been the subject of great amazement since 2006, after a harsh year when the grocery store shuttered, and two subsequent blizzards blocked all roads to everywhere, leaving the town of 650 people stranded without a grocer.
Five residents got together that fall to brainstorm ways to bring the store back. They settled on a co-op model, giving everyone in town a chance to be part-owner, and reached out to a food distributor in Amarillo, Texas, about 180 miles south of Walsh.
“The folks at Affiliated Foods had a pool going about how long we’d last,” said Rick Mills, one of the original brainstormers and board members. “Didn’t think we’d last 10 weeks.”
Walking down North Colorado Street on Saturday, during an annual town gathering called Walsh Days, Mills ran into Jamie Hume, one of the founding five, and a former board member himself.
“I was just talking about the bet,” Mills told Hume.
“They didn’t think we’d last six months,” Hume finished.
Whether it was 10 weeks or six months, whether there was a betting pool at all, doesn’t really matter much. What matters is that they felt the odds stacked against them and made a gamble of their own, selling $50 shares and buying the Walsh Community Grocery Store back from the bank.
But that story has been told: to the Denver Post, to the Pueblo Chieftain, to a PBS program called “America’s Heartland,” even to People magazine. Now 17 years in business, Walsh Community Grocery Store is entering what manager Meta Jo Riseling is hoping will be its next chapter, one where shelves are stocked with fresh food from Colorado farmers and ranchers. And she’s starting with lettuce.
The road to Walsh
One of the biggest challenges of getting food to Walsh are the roads. Or, rather, the road. U.S. 160, which runs east from Trinidad and into Kansas, passing through Walsh on its way, isn’t on any local farmers’ distribution routes.
So while Riseling has long had ambitions to bring Colorado agriculture into the fold, it’s taken her years to persuade anyone to make it happen.
That changed in January 2024, when Riseling was invited to a LoProCO meeting, a program run by food advocacy group Nourish Colorado, which connects Colorado producers with businesses, schools and meal programs for older adults.
The meeting was in Springfield, only 20 minutes west of Walsh, “so I thought, eh, I’ll go see what this is about,” Riseling said. “By the time I left I was bouncing, I was so excited. The next month I had a shareholder meeting, I was dancing all around. I made a slideshow, but the slideshow couldn’t keep up with me, I was just so excited.”
What she saw at LoProCO was the opportunity to connect with Colorado farmers, to bring potatoes, peppers, meats, cheeses and leafy greens from their fields to her shelves, at a reasonable price.
So far, Riseling has been able to score lettuce from The Summers House and ground beef from Bamber Ranch, a cattle ranch in neighboring Prowers County.
Jaclyn Bamber-Birkelund, a fifth generation rancher, goes out of her way to deliver the ground beef from her family’s ranch to the Walsh store.
They have their beef processed at Blue Ribbon in Fowler, east of Pueblo. Though the rest of her customers are along the Front Range, Bamber-Birkelund spends an extra day in the southeastern part of the state picking up beef from Fowler, driving it directly to Walsh, then crashing at her parents’ ranch in Prowers County, before heading back to Fowler for another batch, and running that to customers from Colorado Springs up to Thornton.
“This is not normally a place that I come to very often, but it’s been really great,” Bamber-Birkelund said. “I love to hear from people that enjoy our product, and it’s a huge sense of pride for myself and my family.”
Bamber-Birkelund is already on the hook to bring melons down from Rocky Ford when those are ready too, Riseling said. And if that doesn’t work, Riseling said she’s “talked to some folks to see if I can borrow their trucks.”
The town benefits, and so do its neighbors
Riseling started working for the store 13 years ago and worked her way into management in 2017, once she quit her job running the school lunch room. She keeps the store closely tied to the Walsh School District, which serves around 200 kids.
When the lunchrooms in Vilas or Campo, nearby districts that serve around 50 students each, can’t get their hands on something, they also call her up.
“(They’ll) call and say ‘Hey, I need this by this day,’ and I just say, ‘I got you,’” Riseling said.
Riseling’s “got” a lot of people in town. When the nearest pharmacy stopped delivering to the nursing home because of COVID, the grocery store filled that role, bringing in medications from Kansas. “It just kind of stuck,” Riseling said. They set up an account with Western Union so locals can send money to family members in Mexico. They have delivery drivers bring groceries to elderly folks every Wednesday.
“They know they can call on more than Wednesday, especially if the roads are icy,” Riseling said. She has personal numbers for most of them. If they miss a few days, she’ll call them to check in.
Arguably the most important role that Riseling serves is as an unofficial matriarch in town. Beside her own three kids — the youngest worked at the store through high school — Riseling speaks cheerily about her “bonus kids,” those who have had a rough go one way or another and ended up in the Riseling living room. All three bonus kids worked at the store, too.
Then there are the grocery store kids, mostly local high schoolers looking to make a summer buck and sharpen their business skills, like Elizabeth Garcia, a 16-year-old bagger.
“I’ve learned so much, like how to manage money,” Garcia said. When asked what she does with her earnings, she said she’s saving it for college, a car and a house.
Working has also helped her become better with people, “I’m less antisocial,” she said, nervously tugging at an armful of Mardi Gras beads she was handing out to customers.
The student employees have to be decent workers, but more importantly to Riseling, they’ve got to keep good grades and listen to their parents. Anything below a C and she takes them off the schedule so they can focus on schoolwork. Riseling took her own daughter off the schedule once.
“She had a D and wasn’t trying to get it brought up, so I took her off the schedule,” Riseling said, laughing.
Riseling also turned to Nourish last year to set up the store with Double Up Food Bucks, a federal program that matches purchases made through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program dollar-for-dollar, to be spent on fresh fruits and vegetables, dried beans or seeds. If a SNAP recipient spends $10 on groceries, for instance, they automatically receive $10 to spend on produce.
Before, the closest grocery store offering Double Up was in La Junta, two hours away.
Shortly after introducing the program, one local woman approached Riseling crying in front of the store. “I was freaked out, of course,” Riseling said. The woman just wanted to express her gratitude that she could finally afford produce for herself and her disabled son.
“Mimi, I got gapes! Mimi, I got nanas!” Riseling said, mimicking a young customer on another occasion, whose mother was able to buy her grapes and bananas.
“Those kind of things are the reason I wanted to do that, I wanted to stretch SNAP for them,” Riseling said.
“Those kind of things are the reason I wanted to do that, I wanted to stretch SNAP for them,” Riseling said.
SNAP is one of the programs in President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” slated to see huge slashes in funding — the version in the Senate would punt the cost of SNAP benefits entirely to states. Though a version with major SNAP cuts was approved by the House, senators — many representing Republican states with large numbers of SNAP users — are sounding the alarm.
Nourish was one of 19 organizations and politicians who sent a letter to Congress on June 13, expressing concern about the SNAP cuts, that included signatures from the Colorado Department of Agriculture, Colorado Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association and Gov. Jared Polis. More than 600,000 Coloradans receive SNAP benefits each month.
Change over time
In February, Rick Mills gave up his board seat, the last of the original five board members to do so. The meetings aren’t as packed as they once were, Mills said, and many of the board members stayed on for years because it was hard to find replacements.
“But, you know, things in a small town, they change over time,” he said.
For the first time in about 50 years, Mills isn’t on any town boards, a fact he mentions proudly and repeatedly. But he stays busy, with cattle at the commercial feed lot, with small business ventures, and with world travel.
As much as he lights up talking about Machu Picchu — “that place was magic” — or Santiago, Chile, where he was detained by security for accidentally smuggling in a Slim Jim, he’s just as lit up talking about his single story home 4 miles outside of town, where he spends evenings soaking in the hot tub and watching the night sky.
“It’s just real comforting to know that something like this worked, and that it keeps so many people at home,” Mills said. “When you go to another grocery store, you’re not going to save any money. You’re going to see so much more than what we carry here that you’re going to spend a lot more money. So it’s going to cost you more in the long run to go to a bigger town. We have everything we need here.”
This story was originally published by The Colorado Sun.
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