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.
"My God," he says, caressing a leaf. "It's just shiny, green. Perfect, smell is amazing."
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.
"Conventionally, the definition of commercial hydroponics would be to use synthetic nutrients, water soluble fertilizers," said Shultz.
Some people looked for a more sustainable system than one that used mined or factory-produced fertilizers and came up with aquaponics.
"Aquaponics uses hydroponic techniques, but we generate the nutrients from the fish waste," said Shultz.
They effectively create fertilizer with their feces.
"The fish provide the nutrients and the plants or the biofilter clean the water. We basically create a system where the fish take care of the plants and the plants take care of the fish."
The techniques have only been practiced the last few decades but so far they often work well to grow things like lettuce, and fish that like the same temperatures as those plants, like tilapia and catfish.
Shultz has been at the community college here seven years and seen student numbers rise during that time. He thinks people are getting more interested in food security, in growing locally.
And one of his students, Andrew Neighbour, has put what he learned there into practice. Neighbour runs Desert Verde farm in Santa Fe, the only commercial aquaponics farm in the state.
A former academic biologist, he shows me round the warehouse, and explains why he's put his savings into this instead of retiring.
"I think it has been important to demonstrate feasibility of a commercial farm that is dedicated to aquaponics," he said.
While the farm has not yet recouped all of his original investment, he has just struck an exclusive deal with the supermarket Albertsons here to sell basil.
And through a state-funded program called New Mexico Grown, he sells vegetables to schools. Selling fish is a bit more challenging - some restaurants will buy tilapia but many lack the staff with skills to filet the whole fish, and the farm cannot sell fileted fish because it is not licensed to process food.
Still, although the farm is a work in progress, Neighbour said that he has shown aquaponics can work.
"Can it be done in a way that's financially viable?" he said. "We've demonstrated that and we've got the numbers that we can share. We've also learned along the way how to do it better. We've made mistakes, we've spent a lot of money on things that you wouldn't want to do again."
For instance, he would look into renewable energy; he uses a lot of electricity. And this is a feature of controlled environment agriculture.
Economics professor Jingjing Wang at UNM says there are advantages and disadvantages to any system.
"There's always a trade off," she said. "The good thing is they use much less water but compared to traditional agriculture, they use a lot of more energy."
And aquaponic farms are unlikely to replace fields for New Mexico's commonest crop which is alfalfa, for animal feed.
"The current technology of the controlled environment agriculture is mostly focusing on leafy greens," said Wang. She said the start-up costs are quite high for growing a bulky, cheap crop like alfalfa.
Another issue is that aquaponic farming is, for now, labor intensive. It's not really mechanized.
"So if you think about agriculture in general, I think there's a long way to go the controlled environment agriculture or to replace the whole sector."
But in the huge puzzle of how to live in a warming world, it could be one piece.
