Author: Danielle Flood

Growth in ECHO’s Internship Program

Teamwork is at the heart of what ECHO does. Our mission is Hope Against Hunger, and in order to achieve this we work alongside people who are also passionate about using sustainable farming methods to fight against hunger around the globe. Through the years, interns have formed a vital part of the work that is done at the ECHO Global Farm. This year, eight new interns arrived at ECHO Florida as a cohort in June. Read about how the recent changes to the internship program add new learning opportunities for interns including a graduate certificate.

“Cohort.” A new word keeps popping up around ECHO Florida. For the first time in ECHO’s history, eight new interns arrived at the same time. This “cohort-style” internship means that the interns will be able to experience the newness of ECHO Florida and tropical agriculture in a group. “I love that I have others with me also experiencing everything for the first time,” says Grace Brinsfield. It also means that foundational knowledge can be shared early and built upon as the year progresses.

New to the intern program this year is an exciting partnership with Dallas International University (DIU) which will allow interns to earn a Graduate Certificate in Tropical Agriculture Development after their 12 months at ECHO.

Interns will participate in eight graduate-level courses focusing on applying knowledge within communities through cross-cultural training, multicultural teamwork, community development, tropical crops, and agricultural experimentation. Five of the courses are taught by ECHO staff members and complemented by experiences gained through ECHO’s internship program, and three courses will be taught by DIU staff.

Another new feature is a more rotational system in which the interns will gain experience in each of the animals on the farm, instead of specializing in one animal. This will provide a more rounded experience with goats, pigs, chickens, and the forage bank —  after all, knowing what crops to grow to feed the animals is important as well.

Though the structure has changed, the purpose of the internship remains the same. Equipping interns for international service is core to ECHO’s mission. Interns are still immersed in hands-on experiences in the various tropical gardens, enjoying the bounty of crops that grow well and learning hard-earned lessons when a crop doesn’t pan out.

When I met up with new interns Sarah Harding and Robert Beaty, they were cutting and tying bunches of lablab and mucuna vines and hanging them up to dry. Sarah and Robert were hot but smiling.  Working together as intern buddies on the project, they expressed how much they appreciate the teamwork, collaboration, and learning opportunities of the internship tasks. They shared that they’ve already learned about how the dried cover crops can be a rich fertilizer when mulched around future millet plants in a nearby garden plot.

We look forward to sharing updates with you in the next months and years as we see ECHO’s mission take root in the lives and futures of these passionate young people.

“We are always amazed at what God has done. We started small and worked with what we had and took each step as it came. We would never have dreamed that ECHO would become what it is today,” shared Martin Price, Founding CEO. Dr. Martin and Bonnie Price arrived at ECHO’s Fort Myers property on June 18, 1981. The internship program started later that same year with the arrival of Elise Hansen.

“ECHO’s property was flooded when I arrived, so my first official task was to assist Martin in digging drainage ditches by hand. He joked that I probably never imagined my college degree would prepare me for that job!” Elise recounts. “I became very close to Martin and Bonnie that year, as we initiated many of ECHO’s core missions, including the Seed Bank and ECHO Development Notes. I am very thankful and proud that I was part of ECHO during its first year under Martin’s leadership.”

This June, ECHO welcomed its 277th intern! After retiring as CEO in 2006, Martin and Bonnie have remained active volunteers helping with ECHO workshops and special events. One of their great joys is reconnecting with ECHO partners from years past.

“We are thrilled to see interns take what they have learned and use it in their futures to help others in so many different ways,” shares Bonnie Price. “The interns have been a special joy in our lives!”

ECHO provides Hope Against Hunger through agricultural training, innovative options, and networking with community leaders and missionaries in 190+ countries. ECHO seeks to find agricultural solutions for families growing food under difficult conditions. ECHO’s international headquarters is located in Fort Myers, FL. To learn more, donate, or volunteer, visit www.echonet.org 

Homemade Bio-pesticide Repels Pests and Earns Income

For many people around the world, growing their own food allows them to sustain themselves and their families. Pest diseases, however, are a common obstacle to the growth of their food. Today we share the story of Karim, a man in West Africa who created his own bio-pesticide and helped solve this issue for not only himself but his community.

In many regions of the world, insects spread plant diseases that cause leaf wilt, spotting, or stunting of fruit growth. Younger plants may wilt and die. Some older plants may bear discolored fruit that doesn’t ripen. Preventing insects from spreading diseases is the best way to protect farmers’ crops because treatments are often expensive (time and resources), or don’t yet exist.

In West Africa, the ECHO training team shares how to make bio-pesticides to keep insects away from the garden. One trainee, Karim, learned to make his own pesticide by combining onion, peppers, and neem leaves.

He applied it on his tomatoes and eggplants and was convinced by the lack of disease and the high quality of his crop. After that, he sold his bio-pesticide in liter bottles to any neighbors who didn’t have time to make their own. His profit this year was $182. Karim is thrilled to be able to earn money alongside his other gardening projects and protect his plants from pests.

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ECHO provides Hope Against Hunger through agricultural training, innovative options, and networking with community leaders and missionaries in 190+ countries. ECHO seeks to find agricultural solutions for families growing food under difficult conditions. ECHO’s international headquarters is located in Fort Myers, FL. To learn more, donate, or volunteer, visit www.echonet.org

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Community Gardens Provide Food and Hope

School children and community gardens across Lee and Collier counties are learning about and growing their own fresh and healthy food thanks in part to support by Publix Super Markets Charities!

In response to Covid-19, ECHO partnered with the Lee County Schools and the Naples Garden Club to provide 1,000 seedlings to families of students who receive free lunch. Each family received 2-3 seedlings and information about growing these vegetables.

Food donations
On average, ECHO provides more than one ton of fresh produce to food pantries per year. In response to the pandemic and increased food insecurity, ECHO intentionally increased production and more than doubled that last year. Last year, more than 4 tons was donated to help the needy throughout Southwest Florida, and hundreds of pounds of produce were provided to furloughed workers. Cultivate Abundance, which serves food insecure clients in Immokalee, shared with us that the food ECHO donated provided a weekly, nutritious meal for 400 people over nearly 3 months.

“We are so grateful for this produce and partnership. And we’re always grateful for you and your team.”

Community consultations
Several organizations reach out to ECHO each month. St. Vincent De Paul church has a thriving food pantry. They want to start a garden to supplement their pantry. ECHO’s Community Garden (CG) intern did an on-site consultation, supplying them with resources for design, budgets, and recommended vegetables. They will visit ECHO to see the community garden demonstration area. A retirement community recently contacted ECHO because they want to build raised bed gardens for their residents. The activities director visited ECHO, then the CG intern visited the retirement community; they have been discussing resources, design, and activities for the residents as they begin to integrate gardening into their programming.

School Visits
School visits to ECHO have resumed. In February, the 4th-grade science class from Discovery Day Academy visited ECHO. The CG intern, Lauren, was excited to “give them a 2-hour tour around the farm, focusing on how farmers use water-saving techniques to help feed their families. This specific subject area tied in with their current unit on Sustainability. It was a blast to let them touch, taste, and smell all around the farm!”

“Our students had such a fun and inspiring field trip to the ECHO Farm! This field work and hands on experience inspired these students to plant using our tower gardens back at school. Thank you for having us, ECHO!” Discovery Day Academy Teacher

Why We’re Inspired on International Women’s Day

For International Women’s Day, we celebrate the amazing determination and hard work of women around the world.

Madame Traoré, a pastor’s wife in Toussiana, learned about above-ground gardening and is helping her family and neighbors improve their nutrition. In Dédougou, trainings in market gardening inspired women to work together to earn extra income by producing and selling tomato paste.

For the many ways women are paving the way forward to better futures for their families and their communities, we celebrate today and all year long!

More Inspiring Stories:

 

EQUIPPING COMMUNITY LEADERS

Like many rural pastors in Burkina Faso, Pastor Emile’s church cannot fully support him financially. For years he has been trying various gardening practices to provide for his family. A year after ECHO trained members of his village, Emile shared the life-changing impact of this training — both for his family and many others.

As a leader in his community, Pastor Emile has a great opportunity to share his new-found knowledge. He is training and equipping groups from his congregation to produce liquid fertilizer and salt licks to improve their own income.

After the training, he started a garden, produced liquid fertilizer, and substantially improved his practice of raising pigs… and the results are already very impressive. Emile’s garden produces well with the use of liquid fertilizer — which only costs him a few hours of work. As a result, his family’s nutritional intake has improved, and they are able to generate extra income from the sale of some of the garden produce. He has found that one of the challenges of raising pigs is parasitic diseases. Thanks to the ECHO training, he learned that neem oil is an excellent deworming agent for pigs.

Pastor Emile has also been actively blessing others with his new knowledge.

  • He has become a highly sought-after trainer for other groups. He informed ECHO that he has already trained more than 500 people, including a significant number of fellow pastors
  • Currently about fifteen women from his church now manufacture liquid fertilizer to generate income for their families. They are also selling neem seeds. Others have made the production and sale of salt licks an income generating activity for their families.
  • Thanks to the improvement of his family’s quality of life and personal living conditions, Pastor Emile and his wife have invested in the care of 15 children (mostly orphans and children from impoverished families). Because of his increased income from higher crop yields and pig raising, he is able to help provide for the food and educational needs of these children.

Pastor Emile is loving his neighbors in a very tangible way, spreading the love of God in word and seed.

Conference Reimagined

Craig Bielema attended the Appropriate Technology Virtual fair from Burundi. Carolina Cardona participated from Guatemala. Bryant Vaughn attended from Columbus, Georgia, and Hermansyah Chen joined in from Indonesia. Though these four individuals had never met, ECHO’s Virtual event brought them — and hundreds more — together to share, grow, and find practical solutions for the communities that they serve.

The ECHO Appropriate Technology Fair, first implemented in East Africa, was held in person in 2019 as part of ECHO Florida’s annual conference. Development workers had the opportunity to experience multiple technologies in one place and ask specific questions. Missionaries were inspired with ways to impact the communities around them. The in-person experience was a great model, but in a COVID-19 landscape we expanded our equipping work by going virtual.

Appropriate Technology, or AT, is a subset of agricultural development work that helps reduce some of the manual labor that agriculturalists bear. It could be a planter or thresher, a pedalpowered grinding wheel, or a water filter. Most often, AT consists of simple machines, but it can be any implement that helps people use what they have to make what they need.

“The shared knowledge and skills were of much help to my area of work.”

With COVID-19 travel restrictions still a reality for so many, this virtual format allowed 333 missionaries, development workers, and community leaders from 43 countries to be inspired, connect with others, and stay up-to-date on what they need to know. Plenary sessions, lightning talks, and interactive live sessions allowed attendees to learn from presenters and ask their own questions as well. “The shared knowledge and skills were of much help to my area of work,” one attendee commented. “I will join any of your meetings because they are very resourceful to me,” said another.

Building on the rich history of ECHO conferences and this virtual event, the upcoming ECHO International Agriculture Conference is poised to both continue offering high-quality experiences and implement a virtual format that will bring together practitioners from around the globe.

Participants will learn from renown experts in global agricultural development. We invite you to join us  for an exciting International Agriculture Conference.

Visit conference.ECHOcommunity.org to register for this year’s conference.

 

Equipped For a Food Secure Future

Lembris Mollel is an East African farmer with five children. They live on five acres of land and farm corn, beans, sunflowers, vegetables and bananas. Because of an ECHO training on conservation agriculture, Lembris has been connected to ECHO’s resources for four years and shares what he learns with a local farmer cooperative.

Conservation agriculture equipment helps farmers adopt practices to repair degraded soils and boost crop production. But access to affordable and easy-to-maintain farming equipment is a challenge in many places. Adapted from an Ethiopian plow, ECHO East Africa has been developing, testing and adjusting the no-till Maresha planter to arrive at a practical design that can be affordably built from local materials.

“Planting beans on this farm takes my family two days of hard work, but now look! It has taken only three hours! This has inspired me.”

Testing out one of the recent protoypes, Mollel exclaimed, “Planting beans on this farm takes my family two days of hard work, but now look! It has taken only three hours! This has inspired me.”

He continued to describe the local challenges, “We struggle with too many pests and sometimes they become difficult to manage. As a result, we are incurring a lot of costs for pesticides which affects our household economy. Another problem is lack of affordable equipment to reduce the hard work. I am so encouraged and interested with the progress of the Maresha direct seeder planter.“

Because of his ECHO training, Lembris plans to use simple and manageable farm implements to improve his farming business. He is also planning to add value to his produce. Instead of selling the maize grain, he wants to purchase a milling machine so that he can mill and package maize flour to sell it for a higher income. He continued, “I thank you for ECHO’s work and thank God for keeping us food secure. Currently, I only need to buy salt to sustain my family.”

Left: Lembris Mollel and his son learn the benefits of the Maresha direct seed planter during an ECHO training.

Feeding Others From Seed to Table: Sustainability-Themed Gift Ideas from ECHO Bookstore

ECHO Bookstore generates funds that support its mission to help provide global training and resources to small-scale farming families so they can achieve self-sustainable hunger solutions. In addition to providing seeds for you to start your own garden, the bookstore offers some great options if you are interested in sharing other sustainability-friendly items and ideas with others.

Books such as Roots, Shoots, Buckets and Boots by Sharon Lovejoy and The Edible Garden: How to Have Your Garden and Eat it Too, by Alys Fowler are perfect to get children and adults, respectively, starting their own gardening activities with their eye-catching, informative and easy-to-use design, layouts and ideas.

For those who prefer to cook, rather than garden, there are beautiful and bountiful books like Share: The Cookbook that Celebrates Our Common Humanity, compiled by Women for Women, International — an organization that helps marginalized women in eight countries affected by war and conflict. This book is filled with a myriad of recipes for healthy, everyday meals such as spinach and fennel risotto, piperade, orange-scented olive oil almond cake and cherry compote recipes, but boasts beautiful photographs and stories of the women and the cultures that create these delicious foods. This gorgeous book also makes a stunning coffee table book if you’d rather just enjoy the dishes vicariously.

 

Sustainability can start in the garden, but it can be carried through the kitchen and onto the dining table with handcrafted tableware. Colorful, hand woven tablecloths, unique serving dishes and utensils can add the finishing touch to your sustainability efforts.  

Whether or not you garden, you can support ECHO’s mission and sow the seeds towards sustainability for yourself and others with invaluable gifts that keep on giving.

Shop online at http://www.echobooks.net or in-person at ECHO Global Farm in North Fort Myers. 

Photos and post by Maya Fleischmann

Intern Spotlight Kayla Hatcher

Wildflowers fill my grandma’s garden — the origin of my curiosity for the world around us. I am a photographer, a designer, an English as a Second Language teacher, and a farmer. My diverse passions unite through the necessity of patience, listening, and observation. These are all skills that began in the garden when I was a child. My name is Kayla Hatcher, and I am the current Semi-Arid Intern at ECHO.

In 2012, I graduated from Milligan University with a BA in Fine Arts Photography. Before ECHO, I spent six years working with multiple organizations on four continents. During that time, I watched communities on the Burma border, in Palestinian refugee camps, in downtown St. Louis, and the mountains of Japan use regenerative systems to heal the land and unite divided communities. It was an alignment of my passions that I had only begun to imagine. ECHO’s internship provided me the opportunity to pivot my career towards agriculture development work.

Each day at ECHO offers discovery. New plants, new soil, new insects, new technologies, and new people. Working with international partners on design consultations has been a highlight of my time here. Their questions have guided my research; their experimentations have fueled my own. The relationships formed on the farm, over tea, and on video calls across the ocean accentuate the unique gift of this

diverse community, a glimpse into the infinite love of God for all people, all cultures, and the soil that unites them.

After ECHO, I will continue to pursue the passion that began in my grandma’s garden. From permaculture consultation to mobilization, I hope to partner with those living in post-conflict semi-arid regions. It is the entrepreneurial and cultural wisdom of smallholder farmers that will regenerate the land and unite communities through the observation and nurturing of a common ground.

 

Top: Volunteer Susan Lucia and Kayla pause for celebration after completing a large planting project in the semi-arid region of ECHO’s Global farm. Susan has mentored seven semi-arid interns.Bottom: Integrating animals into regenerative agricultural systems (and spending time with Moiyo the calf) has been a treasured part of Kayla’s internship.

Introducing the ECHOcommunity Mobile App

The ECHOcommunity mobile app was launched on November 19th at our ECHO International Agriculture Conference with 675 registrants from 70 countries.

Through the app you can:

  • Read Documents Offline
  • Watch Videos Offline
  • Share Resources Offline
  • Keep Detailed Crop Records
  • Use in Ultra-Low Bandwidth Mode
It is available today on the Apple app store and Google play store — completely free.
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Through ECHOcommunity you can discover ideas, research, and training on a wide variety of subject matter pertaining to agriculture and community development. ECHO’s resources focus on small-scale agriculture in the tropics and sub-tropics and come from ECHO staff, network members, and development partners around the globe. With the ECHOcommunity mobile app, you can take this knowledge with you wherever you go — with or without internet access.