You can do a lot of things to fight world hunger from Canada, but one thing it’s difficult to do is obtain hands-on food production strategies that fit some of the world’s hungriest southern climates. Given this reality, a number of socially conscious Canadians have flown south to Florida. There, between the balmy tourist beaches and the exotic wetlands lies ECHO, a 50-acre farm that trains international aid workers in effective, low-cost strategies for growing food and beefing up nutrition.

 

“In order for ECHO to be effective as a demonstration tool for missionaries and development workers going abroad, it must be set in a tropical climate, something Canada doesn’t have,” explains David Prins, a Lacombe, Alberta native who is spending the year as an intern at ECHO. “From an agriculturalist’s perspective, ECHO is a gold mine. There are literally hundreds of species of plants, and almost as many systems for cultivating those plants in to learn about.”

 

 

Founded in 1973 as a Christian nonprofit organization aimed at enhancing food production in Haiti, ECHO now networks with 3,000 organizations in 180 different countries by providing on-site training through conferences, internships, and short term studies, a 300-variety seed bank, and literature on agricultural best practices. Thanks to heavy funding from churches and philanthropists, ECHO is able to provide these services free of charge, and it will provide them to anyone regardless of religious affiliation. In fact, a 2008 grant to translate ECHO materials to Spanish and French caused hits on ECHO’s website to jump from 3,000 to 72,000 per month.

Still, ECHO’s Canadian collaborators say nothing beats getting down and dirty on the ECHO farm itself, and that’s not just because of the myriad of tools available for technical training, says ECHO Intern Terri Lynn Paulson of Saskatchewan.

 

“The interns (and visitors) come from all over the world, and so you get many perspectives on life from our different backgrounds, experiences, and upbringings. At the same time, we are all here at ECHO because we have similar passions that somehow relate to agriculture, development, and missions. It creates a venue for a lot of great discussions,” Paulson says.

 

Apart from the yearlong, stipended internship, interested parties may attend ECHO’s four-day training session at the Fort Myers headquarters in December or a similar conference at its satellite campus in Chang Mai, Thailand in September. ECHO is also willing to help students organize accredited university field studies that utilize both the farm and the online resources. 

 

Neither Paulson nor Prins know exactly where they’ll go after ECHO, but they say they’ll likely follow their predecessors by joining an international mission or relief organization.

 

In fact, that’s what last year’s intern Heidi Renkema is about to do. She’s currently fundraising throughout churches in southwestern Ontario for a two-year mission project in Cameroon. If she can raise the $40,000 required to do it, she’ll join the Christian development organization World Team to help the semi-nomadic Baka people develop a sustainable livelihood on the edge of a rainforest by turning an already existing orchard into a fruit tree business. Because of increased logging and urbanization, the Baka are being forced to abandon their wandering ways.

 

“They must adapt in some way or another,” explains Renkema. “The people are quite familiar with fruit and gathering in the jungle, so working with fruit provides a natural bridge to their traditional way of life.”

 

 

ECHO was instrumental in helping Renkema know what trees—fruit and other- can provide long-term nutrition. For example, the farm has experimented with planting various kinds of avocados, which grow during different seasons. Planted alongside each other, these trees can provide year-round vitamins and protein, not to mention profit. Meanwhile, pulp found in the pods of the tamarind tree are an excellent source of calcium, iron, and Vitamins C and B, and its crushed seeds can cure dysentery.

 

 

 

 

 

In fact, the farm puts its understudies in the mindset of adaptability by providing only those tools that would be readily available in poor communities. Spare tires and carpets serve as potting beds for rooftop gardens; old newspapers can be used as mulch over crops; tubes hooked up to a barrel full of cow manure can fuel a bio-gas cooking stove; and one bucket of water can quench the thirst of 50-foot rows of vegetables by placing it up on a tripod, attaching long perforated tubes through its bottom, and letting gravity do its own sprinkling. Finally, less means more with the system of rice intensification ECHO has modeled from other development studies. By planting rice seedlings in small clumps dispersed throughout a field, farmers can irrigate with minimal water rather than flood their fields. For farmers in Cambodia, the technique has resulted in 50 to 100 percent increases in yields.