Author: Danielle Flood

A Tip of the Hat to the Tippy Tap

“We’re all in the same boat.” I’ve been hearing this phrase a lot lately. It’s meant to be encouraging, a reminder that the coronavirus is requiring all of us to navigate unchartered waters.

But the reality is that we are definitely NOT all in the same kind of boat!

Washing our hands has been a key defense against the spread of COVID-19. But what about places in the world with no running water?

Sharing creative solutions like the Tippy Tap, a simple, hands-free handwashing station, ECHO is helping families find practical, innovative ways to overcome the challenges they face – that is hope worth spreading!

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ECHO provides sustainable options to world hunger through agricultural training, innovative options, and networking with community leaders and missionaries in 180 countries and online through ECHOcommunity.org. ECHO seeks to find agricultural solutions for families growing food under difficult conditions. ECHO’s international headquarters is located in Fort Myers, FL. Visit echonet.org

Cooking Three Meals A Day On Clean Biogas

Like most rural women in East Africa, Juliana cooked over an open fire. These fires can produce about 400 cigarettes’ worth of smoke in an hour. Prolonged exposure is linked to respiratory infections, eye damage, and lung cancer. On top of that, households in East Africa may spend up to 40% of their income on cooking fuel.

Juliana Stephano had a tubular biogas system installed on her farm. She now feeds the biogas digester from her six cows. The gas that is produced is enough to cook all three meals every day – and is much healthier than cooking over an open fire or charcoal burner!

Learn more about tubular biogas systems at ECHOcommunity.org!

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ECHO provides sustainable options to world hunger through agricultural training, innovative options, and networking with community leaders and missionaries in 180 countries and online through ECHOcommunity.org. ECHO seeks to find agricultural solutions for families growing food under difficult conditions. ECHO’s international headquarters is located in Fort Myers, FL. Visit echonet.org

 

Celebrating Earth Day! Helping Lee County Students Grow Fresh Vegetables at Home!

ECHO partnered with the Lee County Schools Nutrition Program and Naples Botanical Gardens to provide vegetable and fruit plants to students receiving free lunch in Lee County. Each family received 2-3 plants to take home.

This partnership is part of ECHO’s Community Garden Initiative that educates our neighbors about nutritious fruits and vegetables and how to grow them at schools, churches, and nonprofits.

 

BONUS: Can you name the plants in our video below?

Improving His Livelihood, Blessing Others With New Knowledge.

Emile Nana is a pastor in Rayongo, a suburb of Ouagadougou. Emile is married and the father of two children. His church has about fifty members and is made up mostly of vulnerable people. Like many rural pastors in Burkina, his church cannot fully support him financially. As a result, he has been investing in various activities to provide for the needs of his family.

Right before the rainy season, in May 2019, ECHO was able to hold a training for Pastor Emile and 11 other members of his church. Before this training, the pastor had already been investing in raising pigs, which he found to be quite challenging. After the three days of training, Emile’s life began to change significantly.

Pastor Emile was very impressed with the teaching of the Foundations for Farming where the principles of having everything done on time, without waste, to a high standard, and with joy were taught. 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 very well with the use of liquid fertilizer – which cost him nothing. As a result, his family has improved their nutritional intake but he was also able to make 200,000 FCFA (+/- $380) from the sale of some of the garden produce.

Regarding the pig raising, the pastor states that the training has enabled him to improve his production to the point of already being able to sell around forty pigs at the rate of 75,000 FCFA (+/- $145) per head for a total of around 3,000,000 FCA (+/- $5,700). 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 and this completely solved this problem.

Pastor Emile created a concept that he calls “the garden of God.” According to the principles that he has established, everything must be reused to minimize production costs and increase revenues. In this system, the water from the pigsty fertilizes his garden, the garden produces abundantly thanks to liquid fertilizer, and the residues from the garden return to the pigsty to feed the pigs – creating a cycle. Emile told the ECHO team that this model of garden was so successful that he received an outside training contract for close to 5,000,000 FCFA. (nearly $ 9000)

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

  • He has trained around forty members of his church
  • He has become a highly sought-after itinerate trainer. 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 engaged in the sale of neem seeds and the manufacture of salt licks. One disabled women named Moumanata, has made the production and sale of salt licks an income generating activity for herself.
  • Another highlight in the life of Pastor Emile is that, thanks to the improvement of his own quality of life and personal living conditions, he has invested in the care of 15 children (mostly orphans and children from impoverished families). Because of his increased income from higher crop yield and pig raising, he is able to care for the food and the education needs of these fifteen children.

On the agricultural level, Pastor Emile was very encouraged by the fact that, despite the drought of the past year, he was able to harvest 3 tons/hectare. For the upcoming year (2020), he told the West Africa team that he had already started digging the FFF planting stations/holes for 4 hectares. He asked us the team to return in a few months to observe up close, the fruits of his labor.

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ECHO provides sustainable options to world hunger through agricultural training, innovative options, and networking with community leaders and missionaries in 180 countries and online through ECHOcommunity.org. ECHO seeks to find agricultural solutions for families growing food under difficult conditions. ECHO’s international headquarters is located in Fort Myers, FL. Visit echonet.org

ECHO Interns Train Laotian Pastors

ECHO Interns Dani and Elizabeth visited ECHO’s Asia Impact Center to participate in a training hosted at the Village of Hope orphanage in Thailand. They taught over 100 children about farming and helped the center establish a garden that will provide the kids with more nutritious fruits and vegetables. During a 3-day training workshop, they led sessions for Laotian pastors covering topics such as soil health, seed saving and livestock management. Pastors in Laos face persecution every day for their faith. They are also bi-vocational which means they are farmers, as well as pastors to provide for their families.

As the trainees shared their thanks, one story made a lasting impression:

One man explained that, as was the custom in his village, he had married young at the age of 14 and started a family. This had left him little time to learn about farming, and he was struggling to make ends meet. With such joy, he said, “After this ECHO training, I can go home and now have hope that I can grow enough food to provide for my family.”

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ECHO provides sustainable options to world hunger through agricultural training, innovative options, and networking with community leaders and missionaries in 180 countries and online through ECHOcommunity.org. ECHO seeks to find agricultural solutions for families growing food under difficult conditions. ECHO’s international headquarters is located in Fort Myers, FL. Visit echonet.org

 

ECHO’s Guide to Summertime Garden Vegetables in SW Florida

If you visit ECHO during the summer you will find food plants growing everywhere.  But you will not find many of the “temperate” vegetables that are staples of most northern gardens.  Many of them you may not even recognize.

SW Florida’s hot, humid summers have a lot in common with rainforest conditions.  So it is not surprising that some of the standard vegetables in ECHO’s summer gardens originated in tropical rainforests and hot, humid lowlands.  Other important vegetables have originated in countries where there are perhaps six months without rain and six months that are like our summers.

Annual vs. Perennial Vegetables

This page features some of our favorite vegetables.  We often refer to them by the length of time they will grow before declining or dying. Some vegetables are grown every year from seed or cuttings (e.g. sweet potato).  These are referred to as annual vegetables.  But first let us tell you about a few great perennial vegetables.  These are vegetables that will grow for several years after they are planted. Some perennial vegetables are the best adapted to SW Florida summers.  They come from places such as western Central America where there are very long dry seasons followed by hot, humid summers.  They can easily survive both our dry springs and our wet summers. 

Some, but fewer, come from rainforests.  During the coldest days of our winters perennial vegetables from the tropics may be harmed or suspend growth for a few months.  Take advantage of that time to grow the temperate vegetables that you enjoy.

You have likely eaten two perennial vegetables from “up north”—rhubarb and asparagus.  There are many more perennial vegetables that thrive in SW Florida.

Many of the vegetables listed here have the potential to be perennials in SW Florida as long as the climatic conditions, solar intensity, changes in day length and pests etc. do not kill them off.  How far your garden is from the coast can make a big difference too.  People can grow fruit trees on Pine Island (30 miles west of ECHO) that we can only grow with our frost protection system that we can run on a freeze night.  People that live another 30 or so miles farther east of ECHO cannot grow some perennials that will survive at ECHO.

Advantages of Perennial Vegetables

Perennial vegetables have a number of advantages to the home gardener:

  • They don’t have to be planted each season.
  • Perennials usually withstand harsh climates and weather better than annuals.
  • They tend to be higher in nutrition than most vegetables.
  • They often offer more than a single product for the table.  For example, sweet potato provides us with delicious roots, but also offers a nutritious green vegetable.

We have chosen vegetables for this document that we believe have a reasonably good chance of producing in the summer, but sometimes they still disappoint you.  If you are willing and have the time to invest in the garden and watch carefully for the first signs of trouble and know what to do to handle those problems, you might be able to grow an expanded selection of vegetables or have better success with the ones you do grow.  Happy Gardening!

Read about Edible Leaves and Shoots

Educate a woman, Educate a Nation

There is an African proverb which says when you educate a woman, you educate a nation.

Magreth Omari makes batiks, stools, embroidery and soap. She participated in an ECHO training program called “Creative Capacity Building” three years ago. She was challenged in her soap-making to cut straight, attractive bars. Her product was seen as low quality and the price reflected it. During the training, participants were tasked with developing solutions to the challenges they faced. Magreth’s group created a soap cutter.

She received a micro-grant to continue improving it. She recently wrote to us: “The attractiveness of my soap bars drastically changed, and I am seeing increased prices and sales.” She has a vision for the future, that her children will “attain entrepreneurship skills and do better than what I’m doing now. I have also a passion to help my fellow women, especially those abandoned by their husbands and widows.”

Magreth has taken what she learned from ECHO, has developed her business, and is now training other women. Over the last year, ECHO trained 114% more women. Their enthusiasm – and the knowledge they’ve gained — is contagious!

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ECHO provides sustainable options to world hunger through agricultural training, innovative options, and networking with community leaders and missionaries in 180 countries and online through ECHOcommunity.org. ECHO seeks to find agricultural solutions for families growing food under difficult conditions. ECHO’s international headquarters is located in Fort Myers, FL. Visit echonet.org

Intermittent Shade Trial to Address Drought

A research trial led by ECHO’s Agriculture Technical and Research Director Dr. Tim Motis and Research and Publications Associate Stacy Swartz.

This research addresses drought and is directed primarily to parts of West Africa. High temperatures and intense sun leads to loss of soil moisture as water evaporates from the soil. Widely-spaced trees provide a little bit of shade, keeping the ground cooler, while prunings and leaves that fall reduce water loss by helping to keep the soil covered. Too much shade, though, lowers crop yields. In our experiment, we are growing a mix of maize and cowpea underneath gliricidia, shade cloth, and no shade. Gliricidia shades the ground intermittently, depending on the width of the tree canopy and the angle of the sun. Shade cloth is being used to compare intermittent shade to constant shade.

Intercropping with gliricidia also helps farmers maintain the fertility of their soils. Traditionally, farmers have often practiced fallowing, in which a portion of crop land is allowed to rest. Rising  populations, however, puts more and more pressure on farmers to produce food on the same ground year after year. Unless nutrients are returned to the soil, minerals withdrawn by continuous cropping leads to nutrient-poor soils and declining crop yields. With limited cash for purchasing fertilizer, and often not enough manure or mulch to make a difference, farmers struggle to maintain their soils.

This is the reasoning for intercropping grain crops like maize with legumes like cowpea. Legumes can actually put nitrogen back into the soil, converting nitrogen in the atmosphere to forms that plants can use. In this trial, gliricidia is added to the mixture of crops. Gliricidia is a leguminous tree that, like cowpea, adds nitrogen to the soil. Gliricidia has been described by Roland Bunch as an excellent “fertilizer tree.” As its branches are pruned, the sticks provide a source of fuel for cooking while the leaves add organic matter to the soil.

This research also relates to climate change. Trees lock up carbon, reducing the amount in the atmosphere. We are starting our second year of this multi-year trial. In year one, we found that maize yield was just as high with gliricidia as it was with no shade, indicating that it is possible to include gliricidia without hurting maize production. This year, we will be able to see if that trend continues with more established trees.

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ECHO provides sustainable options to world hunger through agricultural training, innovative options, and networking with community leaders and missionaries in 180 countries and online through ECHOcommunity.org. ECHO seeks to find agricultural solutions for families growing food under difficult conditions. ECHO’s international headquarters is located in Fort Myers, FL. Visit echonet.org

Pastor Barnabas of Poundou

Barnabas serves as a pastor, as well as a teacher at a Bible school located in the West African village of Poundou, about 5 hours from Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.  Like his colleagues, Barnabas does not receive a salary. He and his family live on the agricultural production of the two hectares they cultivate.

Pastor Barnabas’s 2018 corn harvest

In January of 2017, Barnabas was invited to participate in an ECHO training where he learned techniques to improve his farming.  Upon his return, Barnabas involved his wife and four children in the implementation of these ECHO techniques. The resulting harvest was an incredible 28 bags per hectare, close to double his previous yield. The increase in production allows Barnabas to grow enough food to sustain his family with surplus to sell at market. By the end of a second year of applying ECHO training, Barnabas reported that with the proceeds he was able to build a new house, educate his four children without any outside assistance, and set aside some savings.

Pastor Barnabas is also actively passing on the agricultural skills and knowledge he has learned to pastors-in-training, who, in turn, take this knowledge throughout the country as they are sent out to their assigned villages. In just two years, Barnabas trained 94 pastoral students. Pastor Barnabas’s fields have also become an example to his community of how ECHO’s agricultural techniques can increase production.  He is always ready to explain how these techniques work to curious neighbors. Recently he began training nearby communities on these techniques, using agriculture as a conduit to share the gospel.

Pastor Barnabas is a success story — a remarkable testimony of what is possible when people put ECHO training into practice. His story inspires the ECHO West Africa team to continue organizing targeted trainings for pastors in the region with the goal of equipping them to become tools for physical and spiritual change in their communities.

echonet.org/impact-stories | www.ECHOcommunity.org

Investing in Partners, Impacting Farmers

Mr. Tuntun showing us the biochar he makes and uses to grow his fruit tree seedlings

By Patrick Trail

Getting out into the field and ‘walking the farm’ with a partner and friend is something I truly enjoy and is a highlight of my role at ECHO. There is something uniquely gratifying about watching a farmer show off the work of his/her hands, and there is something very humbling about the opportunity to glean wisdom discovered through years of sweat and tears. I always learn something new. I am also usually reminded to encourage the people that work so hard, and yet often go unappreciated, for the food they produce.

It is equally rewarding to see the joy of a farmer who may have learned of a new plant, practice, or technology through one of our trainings. On this particular day, as I walk the farm with Mr. Tuntun in rural Myanmar, I can’t help but smile as he proudly shows me the biochar he now makes and uses in his potting mix for his fruit tree seedlings. Instead of burning, he now turns his organic waste material from the farm into a valuable resource that can be used to produce more crops, instead of losing his carbon to the atmosphere through smoke. Nearly a year ago to date, Mr. Tuntun attended our Seed Saving Workshop down the road in Pyin Oo Lwin and learned how to make biochar during one of the hands-on sessions. He immediately returned home and tried it for himself, and has been very successful. Mr. Tuntun now even hosts a facebook page where he shares his farming techniques with other Burmese-speaking farmers, explaining practices like biochar, among others!

As exciting as all of this is, I am reminded that so much of what has happened here stems from our key partner in this region, Mr. Thaung Si. As a longtime friend and partner of ECHO Asia, Thaung Si has joined us for training events on numerous occasions and we have learned much from him as well. Three years ago, with the help and guidance of ECHO Asia staff, he established a Community Seed Bank at the Lisu Baptist Theological Seminary. Through his seed bank he teaches agriculture and gardening practices to students going out as bi-vocational pastors, and has had a major impact on many lives, sowing seeds of many different types. It was at this site just last year that we hosted the Seed Banking Workshop in partnership with Thaung Si. It was he who invited Mr. Tuntun and nearly 100 other local farmers and participants to join us, and it is he who follows up with them when we are gone. I know that not all will be as enthusiastic as Mr. Tuntun, who attended the training and returned to apply what he learned, but I find joy in thinking that at least a few more might.

ECHO has many partners as dedicated as Thaunag Si throughout the region, and those partners, when well equipped, are capable of equipping so many more. This is the multiplication effect of our work, and through these men and women goes the light of the gospel with the seeds they sow!

Thaung Si (left) and Tuntun (right) showing off sword bean seed that came from the ECHO Asia Seed Bank and is now being grown out to supply the seed bank there in Myanmar.

Biochar making demonstration at last year’s Seed Saving Workshop at the Lisu Baptist Theological Seminary in Pyin Oo Lwin, Myanmar.

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ECHO provides sustainable options to world hunger through agricultural training, innovative options, and networking with community leaders and missionaries in 180 countries and online through ECHOcommunity.org. ECHO seeks to find agricultural solutions for families growing food under difficult conditions. ECHO’s international headquarters is located in Fort Myers, FL. Visit echonet.org