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ECHO farm trains missionaries to grow throughout the world

By CELESTE BAUMGARTNER
Ohio Correspondent

FT. MYERS, Fla. — The Educational Concerns for Hunger Organization (ECHO) is dedicated to reducing hunger and improving lives through agriculture. ECHO’s demonstration farm is a living classroom dedicated to helping poor farmers overseas become more productive.

More than 9,000 visitors tour the farm every year. ECHO is a Christian organization; it is nonprofit and interdenominational.
“On our demonstration farm we experiment with ways to improve the yields or the quality of the food; ways to diminish water and soil runoff; ways that farming could produce more to improve the livelihood of the people living there,” said Danielle Flood, ECHO communications manager.

About 15 of the 50-acre farm is an intensive global farm. It is divided into six regions representing environmental or challenging regions of the world: the hot humid lowlands, highlands, a monsoon region, a semi-arid region, a rainforest clearing and an urban garden.

“Each year interns (there were 10 in 2009) come to ECHO for a year and they train, and they are the farmer of one of the regions of the farm,” Flood said. “They get to experiment daily with their plants. They get to try to grow something, experiment with a certain technique.”

After their year at ECHO many of the interns go overseas with another organization or on their own to finish their education. Some stay at ECHO. Many are doing agricultural projects, some do micro-finance, water projects, well drilling or ministries, Flood said.
“We have interns working in hundreds of countries,” she said. “Even in Haiti they are helping with disaster relief because they’re based in Haiti and that’s their world.”

Because so many ECHO network members are in Haiti the organization is working to supply them with resources specifically targeted for that environment, such as seeds of quick-producing plants, cuttings of other plants that could provide iron in a green leaf and water filters.

“We’re going to be sending this down to Haiti, having a local presence, to train people how to use water filters, how to create better cookstoves, how to start a garden,” Flood said. “If somebody is moving from Port-au-Prince into the countryside they have no way to sustain themselves.”

The seeds may come from ECHO’s seed bank, which has close to 350 varieties of useful seeds that are hard to find – maybe not even accessible in most countries of the world.

“They’re edible, nutritious food plants and we want people to gain access to them,” Flood said. “We offer our network members 10 free packets of seeds per year. They can take that small packet and plant it. If it grows and produces well, they can share the fruit or the leaf with their neighbor and see if it is acceptable in the community.”

ECHO uses many organic practices because they fit the need. “We don’t use genetically modified seeds because then the farmer would have to purchase them year after year,” Flood said. “If they can get a seed packet, start their own plants, save their own seeds, then it is sustainable.

“The problem with chemical fertilizers is that they are expensive.” Instead ECHO encourages composting – kitchen scraps, plant matter. It also encourages the use of manure instead of fertilizers.
“We use natural insecticides. The neem tree (a fast-growing tree in the mahogany family) creates an oil that comes from the leaves, the seeds and just under the bark – it has anti-microbial properties,” Flood said.

ECHO shares their information “with the world,” Flood said. It is published in ECHO Development Notes, a highly regarded technical bulletin sent quarterly to about 3,000 missionaries, agricultural development workers, teachers and scientists overseas.
Each fall ECHO holds an agricultural conference for delegates from all over the world to learn new techniques and share agricultural solutions. The organization has also begun holding conferences in other parts of the world. ECHO receives no government funds and is supported by donations and grants.

“We do it because God has given us a passion to serve the poor and we want to do that to the best of our ability, which is meeting basic needs and then providing avenues to share the gospel,” Flood said.

For information visit www.echonet.org or phone toll free 850-4888-2221.

3/3/2010