Feeding the Borderlands and Beyond: A Q&A with Yoli Soto, Founder of Borderlands Produce Rescue

Feeding the Borderlands and Beyond: A Q&A with Yoli Soto, Founder of Borderlands Produce Rescue

Last Tuesday morning, just as President Trump’s tariffs on Mexico went into effect, I visited a produce warehouse in Nogales, Arizona. There, I found Yolanda “Yoli” Soto sitting in her colorful, painting-filled office overlooking the warehouse crowded with boxes of fruits and vegetables. Founder and CEO of the nonprofit Borderlands Produce Rescue, Soto said the tariffs would undoubtedly harm growers and distributors. “People will go bankrupt,” she said.

Soto, who started Borderlands in 1996, grew up on both sides of the border. Ambos Nogales, as the two sister cities of Nogales are often called, is the center of the North American winter produce trade. In the winter, at least 60 percent of fruits and vegetables grown in Mexico travel through Nogales, Arizona, for distribution across the United States and Canada. Because of this, there are hundreds of distribution warehouses in Nogales that contract with farms in Mexico and grocery stores in El Norte. The distributors now have to pay Trump’s 25 percent tariff on Mexican produce, whether it sells or not. And those higher prices will most likely be passed on to consumers, Soto said. (Trump reversed course on the tariffs after three days but said they will be reinstated on April 2.)

Distributors already spend big money on landfill fees. Every year, millions of pounds of fresh produce—about 250 million pounds last year, according to Soto—is dumped in the Nogales landfill, because of supply chain problems, blemishes on the produce, and other issues. To counter this, Soto’s small nonprofit, with six employees, tries to rescue as much of that fresh produce as possible. Her organization distributes fruits and vegetables locally and across Arizona. It also provides produce for animal feed and compost to surrounding farms and ranches. Last year, Soto says, her organization rescued nearly 20 million pounds of food, which also helps the environment, she says, estimating that, by diverting the food from the landfill, they prevented at least 2 million pounds of methane from entering the atmosphere.

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