By late afternoon, the masa at Molino Chido in the Denver suburb of Aurora is warm and pliable. To make it, corn is soaked overnight, milled, and rested—a 15-hour process performed daily. Cooks press disks of deep-blue dough until flat, then lay them on the comal where they blister and puff, releasing a nutty aroma. On busy nights, the kitchen makes more than 1,200 tortillas and sends out nearly 700 tacos: bison tongue, braised lamb, squash bright with chili.
“The tortillas you’re eating here are coming from corn grown in Colorado,” says chef Michael Diaz de Leon, rubbing a pinch of masa between his fingers. Seeking a corn distributor aligned with his commitment to responsible sourcing led him to Bow & Arrow. “I knew as soon as I tasted their corn, it was what I was looking for,” he says. The blue corn is sweet and earthy, with a depth that lingers, more rounded than yellow, almost floral.
That corn begins nearly 300 miles southwest of the restaurant at the base of Sleeping Ute Mountain, near the Four Corners region where Colorado meets Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. There, the pivot sprinklers turn slowly, sweeping wide green arcs through an otherwise tawny stretch of high desert on the reservation of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe. In late summer, the corn rises shoulder-high, stalks rasping in the wind.
The Ute Mountain Ute Tribe’s Farm & Ranch Enterprise is based in Towaoc, in Colorado’s southwest corner.
Photo by Cavan Images/Alamy
This is the home of the tribe’s Farm & Ranch Enterprise and its Bow & Arrow brand, established in 1991. To create its coveted flour and meal, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe has dedicated roughly 7,500 irrigated acres of the 24,500-acre agricultural operation to rows of non-GMO yellow, blue, and white corn, which ripple across land that, not long ago, was considered too dry to sustain this kind of growth.
That scale of farming is a modern development layered onto a more complex history. Corn has long been a culturally significant food across Southwestern Indigenous communities, including the Ute Mountain Ute, among whom it was traditionally processed into flour and used in everyday cooking. But large-scale agriculture was not historically central to their lifeways—and became even less viable after the tribe was forcibly relocated, in the late 19th century, to land with limited water and poor soil. For much of the 20th century, water scarcity defined daily life in this part of Colorado; elders recall hauling it in by truck from the nearby town of Cortez, rationing each load carefully, watching the land bake under a relentless sun.
“If we don’t have the water, it’s hard for us to grow row crops like corn,” says Simon Martinez, chair of the Colorado Department of Agriculture and general manager of the Farm & Ranch Enterprise. “There’s no such thing as dryland farming anymore”—climate change and industrialization have made it hard to sustain. But the 1988 Colorado Ute Indian Water Rights Settlement Act—and the subsequent Dolores Project, which began delivering water to the reservation in 1994—marked a turning point, making household water access and irrigated agriculture possible. The Ute Mountain Ute corn now grows alongside fields of alfalfa and small grains and a working cattle operation. Jobs at the farm and mill employ Indigenous workers and reinvest revenue back into the community.
Chef Josh Niernberg uses Bow & Arrow corn across his menu at Grand Junction’s Bin 707 Foodbar.
Photo by Adam Evarts/Bin 707
“I’ve watched [Bow & Arrow] grow from the ground floor to what it is now, and the real power isn’t the money,” says Eric Whyte, hay manager at Farm & Ranch and a Ute Mountain Ute Tribal member. “It’s the livelihood. It’s putting kids through college, building a new high school, seeing your grandkids walk through doors you helped open. That’s what happens when you take care of what you’ve been given.”
After the harvest in October, the corn is milled on site for use in tortillas, grits, and ceremonial foods. Some grain is packaged and distributed to grocery stores, mercantiles, and wholesalers; some remains within the tribe. And since the pandemic, when supply chains showed fragility and local sourcing became paramount, Bow & Arrow has become the cornmeal of choice for chefs across Colorado—and in the journey from field to finished dish, is helping shape the state’s culinary identity.
You’ll see Bow & Arrow corn made into dishes that lean traditional, like flautas filled with curried potatoes and slathered in a mole manchamantel—another favorite at Molino Chido. But it also shows up in all kinds of formats, like the sunchoke hush puppies (served with whipped cotija cheese) and albondigas (which go onto pizzas) at Bin 707 Foodbar in Grand Junction. At Denver’s Ball Arena, basketball fans crunch Bolder tortilla chips made from Bow & Arrow yellow corn; Raquelitas, one of Denver’s oldest wholesale tortilla companies, also works with its yellow corn, and Snitching Lady Distillery uses Bow & Arrow blue corn for its Button’s Blue Corn Whiskey.
At Tacoparty, Niernberg uses Bow & Arrow corn tortillas produced by a local Grand Junction tortilleria.
Photos by Adam Evarts/Tacoparty
Brother Luck, a Top Chef alum and chef-owner of the restaurant Four in Colorado Springs, relies on Bow & Arrow for his signature blue cornbread: “I was introduced to their product through a local collaboration highlighting Colorado ingredients,” he says, and “was so blown away by the quality.” Now, the cornbread is served to every guest who comes in. Ingredients like this, Luck says, “represent the people of our region.”
Chef Josh Niernberg agrees. He and his team at Bin 707 nixtamalize Bow & Arrow’s blue corn in-house, simmering kernels in an alkaline bath before grinding them into masa. He also contracts with La Milpa Tortilla Factory to make tortillas for Tacoparty from Bow & Arrow corn. The process is slow and elemental—heat, water, time—unlocking flavor and nourishment, turning hard grain supple.
“It’s about looking at where we are in the world and asking what’s appropriate for this place,” Niernberg says, “what techniques make sense, what ingredients speak clearly from here.”
Increasing interest in Ute Mountain Ute–grown corn is part of a broader groundswell around regional grains in Colorado. Across the state, distillers are producing whiskey from Colorado-grown grain, breweries are experimenting with local malt, and restaurants are incorporating heirloom varieties once overlooked. Bow & Arrow is a member of the Colorado Grain Chain, a network connecting farmers, millers, and chefs working to rebuild local grain economies. Sarah Jones, a member, farmer, and advocate, describes the work as matchmaking: linking buyers directly with producers so the system can support everyone. “It’s growing slowly,” she says. “But slowness can be strength. Sustainable change rarely happens overnight.”
At Molino Chido, Bow & Arrow enthusiast Michael Diaz de Leon describes his role as Director of Masa Operations.
Photo by Jeff Fierberg
For Bow & Arrow, this momentum creates not just new markets but also a way to keep agricultural knowledge, production, and profit close to home, rooted in place rather than commodity systems.
That work, however, is inseparable from the realities of water in the Southwest. Allocations remain uncertain, and at Bow & Arrow, each season begins with a question mark. Managers plan plantings without knowing how much irrigation will arrive; in dry years like 2024 and 2025, some fields sit idle, waiting for the next drop, cutting irrigable acres by two-thirds in 2026. Production shifts toward crops like sunflower seed that can endure leaner conditions, alongside ongoing efforts to use water more efficiently—from advanced irrigation systems guided by telemetry to automated waterers for the cattle to eliminate evaporation and seepage. “It’s adaptation,” says Martinez. “We do what we can.”
Still, Bow & Arrow remains hopeful. At the reservation, water sprays from sprinklers onto soil where corn will grow, sunlight glinting off droplets as they fall into the earth. At Molino Chido, its blue corn becomes nicuatole. A diner slips a spoon through the silky custard; it tastes of corn, but also, even if they don’t realize it, of place.
Whyte, of Bow & Arrow, describes it simply: “We grow the corn. Look what they’re able to do with it.”
