When Joel and Carole Goldstein stepped into Josue Matutes’s demonstration farm, they immediately saw the fruit of sustainable farming. Matutes, a professor of agroecology and rural development at a local Agricultural University, showed the Goldsteins how to maintain healthy soil and propagate seeds. They saw the same practices at the ECHO North American Impact Center, where they have toured twice.
Since 2014, the Goldsteins have served in missions to help fund students needing educational scholarships in El Triunfo, Honduras. El Triunfo is also known as the dry corridor; the area receives little rain and has high temperatures, stunting crop yields for farmers. The climate and unsustainable agriculture practices, such as burning crops and using synthetic fertilizers, increased poverty and lack of food security in El Triunfo. The Goldsteins wanted to find a way to help the people they had fostered relationships with after years of serving in the area.
After the Goldsteins’ second tour at ECHO North America, ECHO reached out to connect them with Matutes, a professor of rural development, agronomy, and agroecology at the Universidad Nacional de Agricultura (UNAG) in Honduras, who also worked with ECHO, training farmers in Latin America since 2016. The Goldsteins received a personal invitation from Matutes to visit UNAG.
After receiving a warm welcome, the Goldsteins shared their experiences in El Triunfo and the help that the area is seeking. UNAG set up a needs assessment for El Triunfo to see the level of interest people in the area had in sustainable agriculture education.
The Goldsteins returned to El Triunfo in February of 2023, during soil and seed preparation season, when the UNAG needs assessment and sustainability workshop was to take place.
“We didn’t really know how extensive the need was,” Joel Goldstein said. “Through help from people we work with there [we] got the word out.”
Joel and Carole Goldstein visit the El Triunfo community nine months after soil and seed preparation season, finding major shifts in agricultural practices after connecting El Triunfo with a local agricultural university.
80 people attended the first training workshop. From the swell of interest in learning sustainable farming, UNAG set up four additional trainings in rural communities of El Triunfo throughout 2023.
In November 2023 the Goldsteins traveled to El Triunfo for a follow-up of how far the program had come, and witnessed the final training from UNAG. They saw a major shift in the community’s agricultural practices. They were no longer burning crops, but enhancing the soil. They tended their crops by creating organic fertilizer with common resources like Chaya. Most notably, the new farming practices had become a community effort that included women. Small gardens became not so small due to women collaborating and sharing seeds, which has led to an immense collective pride in the people of El Triunfo for their sustainability and agriculture.
ECHO provides hope against hunger around the globe through agricultural training and resources. As a Christian technical networking and resourcing organization, ECHO builds a diverse, global network and serves that network by sharing validated contextualized agricultural options with technical excellence. ECHO’s goal is to serve and empower its network members to advance food security and sustainable livelihoods. ECHO’s North American Regional Impact Center is located in Fort Myers, Florida with a global presence through four Regional Impact Centers in the USA, Thailand, Tanzania, and Burkina Faso. For more information about ECHO call 239-543-3246 or visit echonet.org or ECHOcommunity.org
