ECHO GLOBAL FARM

CREATING HOPE, FIGHTING HUNGER

Written by: Bill LaPlante

*10,000-plus free seed packets of underutilized food plants. *Many countries each month access the website— echocommunity.org—for resources to improve agricultural development and gospel education.

*680 new issues of 20 diverse agricultural resources added to website annually.

These and other facts are tragically unnerving and true. But what can I do, you ask yourself?

Several hundred of your Florida neighbors and caring people around America, including college students and recent graduates turned volunteer interns, are working with family farmers in East and West Africa and Thailand to create hope against hunger. Sounds nice, but what does it mean? How does it help people striving to feed their families?

For nearly 35 years a faith-based nonprofit in North Fort Myers, Florida, had worked with modest scale farmers to provide them training, information and seeds to boost crop yields and reduce hunger. With an estimated 1 in 9 people chronically hungry, nearly 70% depend on small-scale farming to sustain themselves.

Specifically, ECHO, or Educational Concerns for Haiti Organization, and its volunteers in 2022 worked worldwide to deliver:

*8,000-plus people in Florida, West and East Africa and Asia trained this year in sustainable agricultural methods and biblical themes.

*9,000 people visited ECHO Florida to learn, be inspired and share with their community.

Intern Karuna Taylor was one of them, saying that: “The ECHO internship is a great example of empowerment as it trains us as agriculture professionals while building us up as Christians.”

Two 90-minute tours packed with information about ECHO and its worldwide efforts even have tips on your own Florida garden. One is a guided walking trip through Asian, African and Latin American style farm homesteads learning innovative technologies to feed the family.

The ECHO perspective is genuinely innovative, given that 70% of small farmers have sloping topography that is tough to plant — erosion is a never-ending battle.

ECHO designers crafted one of the highest elevations in Lee County, at just under 50 feet, to develop erosion con-