In Carlsbad and Ruidoso, food banks are seeing a rise in demand amid SNAP cuts and other canceled federal food assistance programs rippling through the state.
As funding cuts to federal food programs trickle down to New Mexico communities, volunteers are seeing the strain. Outside the senior center in Ruidoso Downs, Site Manager Sergio Guerrero counts cars as they come. He used to see about 80, but lately, it’s closer to 120.
“People, they got to eat,” Guerrero said. “This program helps provide a lot of food for our community, for Ruidoso Downs, and also for Mescalero. It’s available to anybody.”
Connie Hernandez is a client who receives food from the senior center. Her husband is 71 and has Parkinson’s disease and diabetes. She comes to the food bank because it’s the only way the rest of her budget survives.
“By the time I pay all the bills, I can’t afford bills by myself,” Hernandez said. “We have to decide sometimes. Are we going to get cheese, or just milk? Are we going to get eggs, or are we going to get bread?”
She and her husband have started foregoing health care because of their financial situation, having to choose between Parkinson’s and diabetes treatments. And yet, she doesn’t qualify for food assistance.
“The trick with SNAP, not everybody qualifies,” Hernandez said. “You can be maybe $2 or $3 dollars over the poverty limit, and you don’t qualify.”
And Hernandez’s situation isn’t unique. Nationally, nearly half of the people who experienced food insecurity in 2024, about 25 million people, had incomes too high to qualify for SNAP, according to Feeding America’s latest Map the Meal Gap report. Food insecurity in 2024 sat at its highest level since 2014.
The strain falls hardest in small communities. More than 8 in 10 of the counties with the worst food insecurity in the country are considered rural, according to the report.
About 150 miles southeast in Carlsbad, the stories are familiar. Rising cost of living leads to budgets being constrained, and the demand for food assistance rises for community members, like Michael Bromka. He lives on a fixed income provided by Social Security, $1000 a month. If further cuts hit the state, he said he would make due, but wasn’t so sure about the community as a whole.
“I wander over, load up with what they give me, and bring it home,” he said. “Would the entire populace of the city or the state or the country be okay? A lot less okay, that’s for sure. God help the families who are on that weird margin where you don’t even have any help for health care.”
At Abundant Harvest Food Pantry in Carlsbad, Director Angel Martinez watches his average of 130 families climb toward 150 whenever federal benefits tighten.
“Anytime there’s a shortage on the SNAP benefits, we do get a lot of people coming in,” he said.
The forces pushing people toward the pantry line are stacking on top of one another. Grocery prices are climbing, with food costing about 27% more in 2025 than in 2020, according to federal Consumer Price Index data. Gas prices also remain volatile amid the Iran war, and a wave of federal changes to food assistance is still working its way down from Washington to the folding tables where volunteers hand out boxes.
New Mexico has cushioned the blow better than its neighbors, according to Katie Anderson, vice president of strategy, partnerships, and advocacy at Roadrunner Food Bank.
“Particularly Arizona, that state decided to go in hard and fast with implementing all of the SNAP changes. And there have been estimations of 40%, 50% of the people that were on SNAP in Arizona have been kicked off,” Anderson said.
Anderson said that in many cases, household budgets collapse from the bottom up.
“Your food budget is the one that gets squished and squished and squished until, for some folks, it’s literally gone,” she said. “[They have to] rely on their local food pantries or other food distribution opportunities, because they legitimately have nothing left in their budget for food.”
Anderson added that the pressure is measurable in Roadrunner’s own data.
“We're seeing anywhere between 40% to 60% increase in the number of people seeking assistance year over year. That’s been pretty consistent. We saw a high of 79% this past January year over year number of people. So that was pretty mind blowing.”
In July 2025, Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which shifts SNAP costs onto states andcuts nearly $200 billion from the program, the largest cut in its history. Anderson said that since January, roughly 10,000 children have fallen off SNAP in New Mexico, though she cautioned the state’s data is hard to pull cleanly and said she was still working to confirm the figure. For those who remain on SNAP, the benefit is thin to begin with.
“The average number amount that people get on SNAP each day is $6, and the number in New Mexico is actually even lower than that,” Anderson said. “Imagine trying to live on $6 a day for food.”
At ground level, that turbulence is clear. Janie Bingham, a longtime Abundant Harvest volunteer, sees it in what Roadrunner can send.
“Our protein from Roadrunner has changed from frozen meats at times to just lentils and beans. Which is great, but in our thinking, we’d really like to be able to give that,” she said. “At times, we’ve had to supplement. Through funding, through grants, through funding [from] our home church here. We try to fill up the gaps.”
When the trucks come up short, the gap doesn’t vanish. It moves onto the church’s books, or into a client’s smaller box.
The paradox is sharpest in the southeast, where Carlsbad sits atop the Permian Basin,one of the most productive oil fields in the world. By the numbers, Eddy County looks prosperous: low unemployment, oil money moving through town, a state budget that leans on the wealth pulled from the ground in the basin.
Angel Martinez has watched the money flow past his community for years.
“This part of the state is not being taken care of by the resources [which] are being pulled out from this part of the state, and it’s being used somewhere else. We definitely could use a lot more resources,” he said.
His message to decision makers in Santa Fe and beyond was simple.
“Come down, visit us. Drive our roads. Don’t leave us alone.”
When the food runs short, Martinez said the cost is immediate.
“We have to scramble,” he said. “Sometimes we’ve got to give less to our clients. And that’s kind of sad, to see somebody in need not receiving what we were able to give them normally.”
But the tools to even see the problem are eroding. In 2025, the U.S. Department of Agriculture canceled the survey that produces official national and state food-security data.
Katie Anderson said that Roadrunner is working on an internal project to measure need in New Mexico more quickly than federal data allows, since Map the Meal Gap runs about two years behind even in normal circumstances.
