There are 12,000 agave plants on the Saniz farm 40,000 if you count hijuelos, baby magueys.

On every side of us are rows of agaves, also called maguey, their languid leaves arching gently toward the sky until their weight pulls them downward. The morning rain has finally let up and the sun glints off the surrounding countryside that can be seen for miles from the farm’s hilltop position. The sky is a clear, cool blue on the Saniz farm in the far northwestern tip of Mexico’s Tlaxcala state, where Montiel and her husband Alejandro Sánchez Acosta grow wheat, corn, and barley alongside their primary crop, agave, which they mostly use to produce pulque, made from fermented sap. Careful not to cut or damage the worms, she drops them one by one in a cone fashioned from a tender agave leaf. “They feed on the magueys and they attack the weakest and smallest,” Montiel explains, gingerly pulling the worms from their burrows with the needle-like tip of a maguey leaf. Like kids in a schoolyard, we wait as cherry-red chinicuil worms, the larvae of the Comadia redtenbacheri moth, are pulled from their hiding places. “Oh, look, this one is hiding,” Isela Islas Montiel says as she digs into the tiny tunnels at the bottom of a rotting agave leaf.

Heart of the wild farming classic