Global Farming in North Fort Myers

Only three minutes from the roaring traffic and exhaust-tinged air of Interstate 75, the whining of insects lays a high-pitched track over a 52-acre swath of un-peopled land. A breeze carries the sweetness of plants across the open spaces and colors pop out of the dry landscape in a rich array of shades. Bright emerald rows of fruit trees stud the soil like dot candies on paper, and a grove of chalky gray-green bamboo stands as tall and straight as soldiers at attention. Further up the path, a Transylvanian Naked Neck chicken patrols a patch of sugar cane, tilling the ground with its fierce, red beak.

The Educational Concerns for Hunger Organization’s (ECHO) global farm in North Fort Myers is an unexpected find. Founded in 1981 by Dr. Martin Price, ECHO is non-profit, non-denominational Christian organization that works with missionary groups and those that help the international poor to develop and share sustainable, highly productive farming techniques. They are, in short, the teachers.

“Low input, high yield,” explains ECHO Public Relations coordinator Artis Henderson as we pause our rickety golf cart in front of a small pond on the edge of farm. It is a sort of mantra at the farm, the goal behind much of their work and the solution for impoverished nations trying to feed their people without relying on high-priced imports or donations.

Photo by SARAH FELDBERG

At the ECHO global farm in North Fort Myers visitors can admire low-tech solutions to agricultural issues in developing countries.

The unimpressive looking pond is a vital resource in itself, beneath its calm surface swim tilapia that feed off algae growing in the water. The algae, in turn, need fertilizer to survive, but rather than buying fertilizer to encourage the pond’s natural food chain, ECHO let a few ducks loose in the pond. The ducks’ waste provides plenty of fertilizer for the algae, which enable the fish to thrive with little to no human intervention: low input, high yield.

The rest of the farm employs equally ingenious and astonishingly simple methods for cultivating a range of products from pigeon peas to sugar cane to rice. It is called a global farm because it is divided into six “small scale agricultural settings.” Each setting is modeled after a particular environment and each is used to test technologies adapted to its climate’s own unique advantages and disadvantages.

In a tropical semi-arid region like much of Africa and the west coast of South America, little rainfall makes it hard to grow many water-thirsty crops.

The moringa tree, explains Henderson, plucking a few pale green leaves from the slender tree, can provide all the nutrients a child needs for a day in just a handful of leaves. She hands me a few leaves and I munch on them slowly, tasting citrus with a slight kick of horseradish. The moringa is a natural multivitamin, Henderson continues, “more vitamin A than carrots, more calcium than a glass of milk.”

Photo by SARAH FELDBERG

A drip irrigation set up on ECHO's global farm, perfect for semi-arid regions where water is scarce.

In many ways ECHO’s farm is a living laboratory. Manned by roughly 30 or so other staff members and an army of nearly 300 volunteers with ideas flowing in from missionaries all over the world, the farm is a constant source of innovation.

“Every two weeks I’ll come out on the farm and something will be completely different,” says Henderson of the trial and error process through which the organization hones the agricultural techniques.

But ECHO isn’t only dispensing information; the organization also makes donations to developing countries in the form of trial-sized seed packets, collected from plants on the farm or in their plant nursery. Although the packages only contain about 40 seeds, in some cases this can be enough to give a struggling farmer a much-needed boost.

A winged bean packet, for instance, holds 40 seeds, which should grow into 40 individual plants. Each plant then produces approximately 50 pods, and each pod contains ten seeds. In a single growing season the 40 original seeds can yield a remarkable 20,000 total seeds, or plenty of winged beans to eat, sell and store – low input, high yield in action.

More than anything though, ECHO’s farm is a place of all-natural hope. Thinking globally and acting locally isn’t just a principle on the farm, it’s a constant and ongoing practice. And sure enough, missionary by missionary, farmer by farmer, a small plot of land in North Fort Myers is making a worldwide difference.

Learn more and find tour schedules at www.echonet.org.

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