Daily operations

The quarrying operation produces sand and gravel for use in concrete, hot-mix asphalt, and as road base, among other things. “Right now, we’re making five different products,” Jason says. “I’m the foreman, but my grandpa and my dad are the big bosses. It’s a family business.”

At the Socorro location, quarrying is fairly simple. “We just scoop it up,” Jason says. “We have 200 acres here, and the deposit goes 170 feet down. There’s only 8 to 10 feet of overburden, which is just dirt, so we simply push that off. We don’t have to do any blasting.”

According to Jason’s grandfather, however, “It’s still a lot of hard work, that’s why I have Jason doing it now.”

“We have three sons [Paul, Steven, and Chris] and one daughter [Kathleen],” says Canda Aguilar. “Two sons and our grandson, Jason, work here at the quarry. Jason runs the whole processing plant.”

A second grandson, John, runs the ready-mix batch plant and handles estimates. Steven manages the business, and Paul hauls materials from the quarry to the ready-mix plant and makes deliveries, as does Norman, another of Pablo and Canda’s grandsons. Steven’s wife, Patty, and their daughter, Meghann, manage the office. The whole family does many different jobs to help keep the business going.

Other companies, like Lafarge, have come to A1 Quality looking for aggregate to use for freeway work in the area. “They work out of our pit, because we’re close to the freeway,” Canda says. “They know there’s rock here, so they lease part of the property. The rock is called rhyolite. It’s a very tough rock — very strong and hard to crush.”

The processing plant is pretty basic, nothing too fancy, but it’s all automated. “The employee in the control tower controls everything, from the conveyors to the speed of the VSI to the speed of the material being fed. We bought a new concrete batch plant about 12 years ago, and it’s all automated as well. It’s really nice.”

Depending on what jobs there are, the quarry produces anywhere from 85,000 to 125,000 tons of sand and gravel per year. “We use most of it ourselves,” Jason says, “but we get contracts through the county and state for base coarse and chips. We also sell to individuals. We get a lot of small customers daily, but mostly on the weekends.”

Scales are located at both the processing plant and the batch plant. “Thirty years ago, people would come in, and we’d sell it by the yard,” Jason says. “Now, everything is weighed.”

A skid-steer loader is constantly in motion at the processing plant. “We have material left over from some of our jobs that sits for a while,” Jason says, “so we put it back on the conveyor with the skid steer. We also use the skid steer for clean up around the plant.”

The amount of asphalt made at A1 Quality varies from job to job — cold mix can be anywhere from 5,000 to 15,000 tons per year and hot mix between 5,000 and 10,000 tons per year.