The pueblo today has about 1,600 inhabitants, and only remnants remain of San Gabriel. The cooperative is growing, drying and packaging a number of different fruits and vegetables, including tomatoes, corn, chile, squash, beans and melon. The fruits and vegetables are processed and packaged separately, as well as in prepared dishes. The cooperative already has had promising preliminary sales of its packaged green chile stew. The pueblo is using the solar oven to supplement traditional baking and cooking.
Bread routinely is baked in an horno, a free-standing adobe structure that is heated with wood.
The bread dough is placed in the heated oven after the wood coals have been removed. The solar oven will bake about 40 one-pound loaves of bread per hour, or it can cook large quantities of stews, soups or other foods. A typical horno can bake about 30 loaves of bread at one time. While the San Juan solar agricultural project is showing early signs of success, the true measure will be whether the project makes it economically feasible to bring back into production hundred of acres of farmland that have lain fallow for decades. The solar project is an outgrowth of the San Juan Agricultural Cooperative, a for-profit association that formed in late 1992 as a means of bringing pueblo lands back into production.