By Leah Romero

November 20, 2021, in Valencia County was just another crisp, clear autumn day on the farm for Tiffany Sánchez. As usual, she prepared herself for a full day of working with and training horses at Adelino Legacy Farms, her family’s op-eration. The Sánchez family grows hay on the farm, but Tiffany’s passion is raising and training barrel horses for herself and clients.

“That’s really my baby, is the horse thing,” she said.

Sánchez is originally from Arizona, while her husband’s family is from the Adelino area of New Mexico, a cen-sus-designated community between Belén and Los Lunas. Sánchez grew up on horses and has always had them in her life. She received a college rodeo scholarship for barrel racing while studying at Western New Mexico University in Silver City.

Between college, marriage, and jobs, Sánchez and her family have bounced between Arizona and New Mexico. They finally settled in the central part of the state about five years ago after inheriting her husband’s family farm.

Adelino Legacy Farms was established in the early 1900s by Adelino Sánchez, three generations before Tiffany’s hus-band took over the operation. Adelino also lent his name to the community he lived in. Now, Tiffany’s husband and their son manage the horses and hay. 

A cousin down the road raises several hundred head of cattle.

That autumn day in 2021, Sánchez hadn’t anticipated ending up in the hospital with a spinal cord injury that would change the trajectory of her life.

The Accident

Sánchez had been working with a breakaway horse (used for breakaway roping in rodeo events) outside of her farm, de-spite trying to send him home several times. She often worked with outside horses, and although the horse was not “mean,” he was one she wouldn’t promote to others. “I thought I was doing them a favor,” she said of the owner, who was trying to sell the animal.

“It was just kind of a bad deal,” Sánchez said. “I was in the parking lot, and I didn’t even have my right leg totally over him yet, and he started bucking.”

The horse bucked hard, higher than the top of Sánchez’s truck. She held on for a while but eventually let go and fell in the dirt parking lot.

Sánchez broke her back, sustained a spinal cord injury, punctured her left lung, and broke the left side of her pelvis. Her son, who was fourteen, saw the entire thing and had to step up and help while his father was out of town. Paramedics transported Sánchez to the University of New Mexico Hospital, where she underwent surgery the next day to insert rods into her back.

“I wasn’t even really awake from surgery yet, and a resident … told me that I would never walk again,” she said. Sánchez is paralyzed from the belly button down and deals with nerve pain every day. Her spinal injury is a T9 level, meaning her paraplegia begins in her mid- to lower back. Sánchez said she was told she would never sit up on her own, but she was able to do so after waking up from surgery.

“I feel like basically I’m dipped in lava from my belly button down at all times,î she said. ìI try not to think about it.”

In addition to the loss of movement in arms or legs, spinal cord injuries can change the way people perceive touch and temperature. The nerve damage can leave people with different levels of constant pain or even stinging.

While still in the ICU and assessing her condition, Sánchez received calls from people interested in buying her prized mare—not to ask how her recovery was going. “I almost did it,” she said, but credited fate or divine intervention that the sale never happened. “I was still really on the fence about just selling everything, just getting rid of my horses.” After her initial hospital stay in New Mexico, Sánchez spent three months in Denver at the Craig Hospital Neurorehabilitation Center, where medical teams specialize in treating spinal cord and traumatic brain injuries. She was treated and pushed to regain as much mobility as possible. “It was really hard,” she said. “But I was not the first, and I won’t be the last in a horse accident.”

The program incorporated a model horse for patients to simulate mounting and sitting. Sánchez had to be talked into this exercise because, after a lifetime of riding and working professionally with horses, she was worried she would not look or feel normal. It was her sister-in-law who convinced Sánchez to give the fake horse a try. “It actually kind of changed my whole perspective,” she said. “As soon as I got on the fake horse, it felt like home. I felt completely and absolutely normal … I mean, don’t get me wrong, I can’t feel, but it’s amazing to me that my body still has muscle memory.”

The familiar sensation of sitting on a horse gave Sánchez a sense of normalcy amid sudden major changes to her basic day-to-day life. Her rehabilitation continued at Craig Hospital, where specialists helped her as an inpatient; and then, later, as an outpatient. The support helped orient her to home life before she returned to New Mexico.

The first thing Sánchez did when she returned home in the windy spring of 2022 was visit her horses. She was particularly excited to see her colt, Boots. “We raised him from a baby, and he was just my pride and joy,” she said. “When I got home, I mean, they rolled me out there and he just put his head right in my lap.”

AgrAbility

It was while she was still in Colorado that Sánchez and her husband found out about AgrAbility, a national program with offshoots in various states that helps connect people with disabilities to equipment that allows them to continue agricultural work. The national and state programs assist people with disabilities ranging from arthritis and hearing or visual impairments to amputations, cerebral palsy, and brain injuries. This includes spinal cord injuries and paralysis.

The national project was founded in 1990 through the Food, Agriculture, Conservation and Trade Act—often referred to as the Farm Bill. The first handful of state programs gained funding a year later. Sonja Koukel, a retired New Mexico State University professor and extension health specialist, was the first program director for New Mexico AgrAbility. She is no longer the program’s leader but continues to work with the team. An occupational therapist who was part of the AgrAbility program in Colorado contacted Koukel around 2014. The therapist was interested in bringing the program to New Mexico.

The programs are required to be in partnership with a land-grant university and one nonprofit disability organization so as to ensure the involvement of people with knowledge of disabilities in agricultural areas. Already positioned at NMSU as a professor and extension health specialist at the time, Koukel was the favorite choice for leading the project. New Mexico AgrAbility is also connected with Mandy’s Farm, an Albuquerque nonprofit devoted to helping people with intellectual and developmental disabilities; and with the University of New Mexico’s occupational therapy department. “We had people in place; all we had to do was kind of get together,” Koukel said.

New Mexico received money a couple of years after applying for the highly competitive national funding, but was hampered by government closures, changes within the national program, and COVID-19. The program is now in its second round of four-year funding. The AgrAbility program serves a middleman role, connecting people living with disabilities to specialists and programs that can  assist in their agricultural work. Koukel said the team is small, involving about  ten people. The number of people with disabilities they have assisted is small for now, she said, largely because of the small team and the distances required for travel-ing to clients. “Everything’s so rural, you know, so much of our money gets eaten up in travel,” she said. “It’s pretty much, at this point Albuquerque-centric because everything’s so much closer.”

Koukel said that as the program gains traction and grows its network of partners throughout the state, it will reach more clients. The New Mexico AgrAbility team is still working on expanding awareness of their program. It may take some time to reach the end goal, but New Mexico organizing partners invite people to contact them and join their list of potential clients.

When a person seeks assistance from the New Mexico AgrAbility program, an occupational therapist schedules an on-site assessment. Occasionally, graduate occupational therapy program students from UNM conduct the assessment, which generates recommendations for adaptive technology that would help the disabled client work. From there, the client can present the findings to the New Mexico Technical Assistance Program or the New Mexico Division of Vocational Rehabilitation, which partners with AgrAbility, and can then work to make the required equipment available.

Robert Hagevoort, the current New Mexico project program director, says there is technology available to people; they just are not aware of its capabilities in agricultural contexts. A drone, for example, can help farmers unable to physically check on or water their crops, and monitor animal pastures from a phone or computer. 3D printers can create gardening tools or other devices specifically adapted to a person’s disability.

In early 2023, Heather Reed, the former executive director of the New Mexico Farm & Ranch Heritage Museum in Las Cruces, contacted New Mexico project organizers about an exhibit highlighting their work. Sánchez’s story will be featured, along with members of the project team and other clients, in an AgrAbility exhibition that will open January 23, 2025 and will remain open to the public for several years.

Nathan Japel, the museum’s curator supervisor, said the exhibit includes photos, stories, and explanations of AgrAbility New Mexico’s partner organizations, some of its clients, and the business side of farming. Visitors can walk into a hoop house and interact with some of the adaptive changes that can be made for people with disabilities. Japel said a tractor simulator will allow people to experience what it is like to harvest crops.

“Not only are we helping the farmers and ranchers, food growers, but we’re also teaching people about disabilities and how everybody can have a good quality of life if we just kind of think outside the box and use what we already have,” Koukel said.

Returning to Farm Life

After returning home, Sánchez quickly realized she needed extra help. The basic task of getting around the farm with her wheelchair proved difficult because of the gravel, sand, and uneven ground. She had tried out a trackchair in Colorado and knew she needed to get one somehow. Connecting with the New Mexico AgrAbility Project led to an assessment of the kind of equipment Sánchez would need to start working on her farm again.

An occupational therapist conducted a physical assessment of Sánchez and took photographs around the farm of the horses, walkways, track, and farming equipment. Aside from the goal of providing Sánchez with a trackchair, the assessment highlighted the need for a lift for the back of her truck, something Sánchez said she had not even thought of. The lift would make getting on top of a horse easier and more comfortable. “In the meantime, though, my husband’s an engineer, so he engineered up like a makeshift [lift]. I look like a car engine getting lifted up on my horses with a chain deal,” she said.

It took nine months for Sánchez to get her trackchair approved through insurance. It took a year to approve the truck lift. “We use it in so many different ways. So now, instead of being lifted up like a car lift, which kind of killed me—it just hurt to be squeezed in the sling and then put on my horse—but now we use that lift to where I can get on my horses,” she said. ìBut then we actually use it to put the trackchair on it if we need to go somewhere, and I need to be in my trackchair instead of just my regular wheelchair.”

Ten months after her accident, Sánchez rode a horse again. When she was healed and strong enough to try riding, her three horses were too young, sore, or had been sent elsewhere, so Sánchez had to travel to a nearby farm.

In September 2022, she went to Loving Thunder Therapeutic Riding in Corrales. The farm is set up to assist people with disabilities and has a wheelchair ramp and a high-tech lift. “I probably rode for like forty-five minutes. It was awesome,” she said.

Sánchez’s horse-training operation has come to a standstill since her accident. She said it has negatively impacted the family’s livelihood because she was in the process of receiving six more horses to train to run barrels at about $2,000 a horse per month.

Now, she might not get on a live horse for a month at a time. “ì”I can’t just go saddle horses when I want. I have to really depend on my husband or son to basically babysit me. It’s actually horrible. And we’re trying to get it to where we can make it a little bit easier, but I still can’t get on a horse by myself. So, I have to kind of go around everybody else’s schedule,” she said.

A typical day for Sánchez now involves physical therapy. She uses a functional electrical stimulation bike to keep her muscles primed for walking and riding again. She said she doesn’t want to become complacent. Sánchez rides the bike for about an hour and a half every weekday, which equates to about ten miles. She does arm exercises and stretches and then stands for an hour with her trackchair.

“I think it’s helpful for getting my neuro-plasticity and that sort of thing, you know, going again,” she said. “I’m just trying to do my due diligence of keeping moving as much as possible that I can to hopefully help my healing process … I want to be the person that says they told me I couldn’t walk but I’m walking.” In the afternoons, she takes her trackchair out to the stables and works with her horses, whether brushing them or leading her four-month-old filly by the reins. And she’ll often stand with them outside as well. “I lead her in my trackchair which, it doesn’t sound like a big deal, but that’s kind of a big deal,” Sánchez said.

Despite her disability, she was able to break the filly. None of her horses have ever reacted to her trackchair. If her husband or son is able to saddle one of the horses, she might ride for a little while.

“I definitely realized I’m human. And I guess I didn’t really pay attention to maybe how much risk I took on a daily basis, but I didn’t think of it. I mean, this is what I’ve always known, what I’ve always been around. But now I just have to be really careful,” she said.

Sánchez gets tired easily these days and has to be extra careful with her skin. Cuts or bruises can easily turn into ulcers. Extreme temperatures affect her more than they used to. And now, she only trains with her own horses because she knows how their training was started. She does, however, have people call her about red light and microcurrent therapies on their horses. These therapies can help loosen tight muscles, stimulate the healing of tendons and soft tissue, and reduce inflammation.

“My husband has to help me out with that too, but more times than not, I can get around them pretty good,” she said.

She also spent about a year after returning home helping to train a high school girl with her barrel racing technique, which she said she enjoyed. She gave directions from her trackchair or rode one of her horses, strapped into a special saddle.

The Future

At this point in her life, Sánchez takes one day at a time and says it’s hard to look to the future because every day is different. “It kind of gets discouraging, to be quite honest,” she said.

She still contemplates selling her horses and closing that part of her life, but said she isn’t there yet. “I would love to just have my miracle happen and get up and just go out and saddle my own horses and take care of everything like I did,” she said. “And that could still happen, but as of right now, how it looks is we’re just still kind of learning as we go.”

Sánchez’s next project is to get her four-year-old horse started on his barrel racing training. She also might try to help her cousins who have a nearby ranch. They raise cattle, and she said she might be able to ride one of her horses to check on the cows.

She is working on adding a seatbelt to her saddles, though the additions to her riding gear are costly. She said she is also looking into a treatment involving electrodes, which might assist in healing her nerve damage and propel her toward making more physical progress. Sánchez has her “moments” when the reality of her physical abilities weighs on her but she strives to maintain her positivity. “I was raised with horses, so I think I rode horses before I could walk,” she said. “They’re a wonderful animal … they’ll look into your soul and tell you who you are. And, I mean, I guess for me to just even be able to go out and brush them and do all that stuff, I still feel pretty blessed that I get to do it.”
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Leah Romero is a freelance journalist based in Las Cruces.