FORT MYERS, Fla. – This year, ECHO Global Farm sent out 8,000 trial packs of seed to subsistence farmers all over the world. ECHO’s impact centers in Thailand, West Africa, and East Africa sent out even more seeds. ECHO (Educational Concerns for Hunger Organization) was founded by Indiana businessman Richard Dugger.

For more than four decades, ECHO has been equipping and empowering hungry families with knowledge and the life-giving grace of God. They have impacted millions of lives by teaching small-scale, sustainable farming methods so families can provide for themselves and their communities.

“No one wants to just subsist,” said Danielle Flood, ECHO’s assistant director of advancement. “Health care, medicines, shoes, school fees, all of that is part of the thriving mentality of ECHO. God provides enough right now to feed every man, woman and child full nutrients every day. But it is not accurately distributed and so some of the poorest people of the world grow our food and don’t grow enough to feed themselves well. So, ECHO fits in that niche where we try to use research, experience, and knowledge to get it to where it is needed.”

In the early 1970s, Dugger led a group of high school students on a visit to Haiti and was moved by the plight of the people he met, according to ECHO’s website. He and others made personal commitments to share their time and resources. They prayed and dreamed of ways to help meet the needs they had seen. Other Christian layman and clergy from Indiana and Florida caught the dream and ECHO was born.

ECHO’s role in international agricultural development was more clearly defined with the arrival, from Ohio, of Dr. Martin Price, former executive director, in June 1981. Under his direction, ECHO has become an ever growing pipeline for sharing information, ideas, techniques, methods, plants, books, materials, solutions, whatever has the potential to ease world hunger.

Price started experimenting with a textbook that he had about underutilized plants of the tropics, Flood said.

“Plants that no one had made into commercial viable, large mono crops, but they still had great potential for nutrition,” she explained. “He realized that if he told people, ‘this plant is good for you,’ but they can’t find it, it doesn’t help them. But if he told them about the plant and offered free seeds, then they can try it, see if anybody likes it, see if it even grows there, and then they can multiply. So, we have always had a trial-sized-packet-of-seeds ministry since 1981 when we started here on 5 acres.”

The Fort Myers farm is a living classroom for training in North America, Flood said. Every November 200 people from around the world gather there for a week-long conference. ECHO offers 40 hours of intense training on the farm and in the classroom. Year round they also offer workshops and have interns come and stay for longer periods and then take that knowledge around the world.

Sidiki Ouedraogo lives in the small village if Boulwando, near Uganda, Flood said. He was struggling to find food for his family. He took part in ECHO training and learned techniques for composting, fertilizing, and livestock management with hands-on demonstrations on how to apply these farming principles. He saw a 100 percent increase in volume from his two fields.

“Since I started farming, I had never produced so well,” he told ECHO. “Today, my orchard has become a subject of fascination. Many inhabitants of the neighboring villages, who see the orchard as they are passing by, actively seek to find out the owner of the orchard in an effort to discover my ‘secret.’ As a result, I have had an opportunity to share and teach many of them.”

The Florida campus offers techniques for five different climate zones. In the tropical Asian lowlands, they get more than 200 inches of rain per year, Flood said. They commonly raise pigs either under the house or nearby. In Fort Myers, visitors walk past the pen of American Guinea Hogs without noticing them. They don’t have an odor.

“Through Asian natural farming we’ve learned some techniques that help you have a pig with no smell because of beneficial microorganisms,” Flood explained. “Effectively, it is good bacteria that eat the bad bacteria that would smell. You can ferment a recipe of things, make a spray by diluting it, and spray the pigs. It helps the pigs be healthier, they are not smelly.”

In the tropic highlands many of the commercial farming outfits farm the valleys. The peasant farmers must go into the hills to feed their families. The challenges are erosion control, and water and soil runoff. ECHO wants to equip those farmers to be able to maintain the topsoil and all the nutrients there and provide for their families. On the Florida campus, an integrated garden with terracing demonstrates how to do that.

“They call it SALT, Sloping Agricultural Land Technology,” Flood explained. “It is a set of practices where you plant hedge rows on every meter of elevation. So, the hedge row catches the soil runoff and settles it down a bit before it can erode; it catches the water and allows it to permeate before it can runoff the hill, and then the roots are really close together so you’re almost creating a natural flatland, like self-leveling cement, or similar to that.

“But then you have the resources between your alleys where you would plant annual corps,” she said. “In our alleys we have a cycle; typically we plant like a grain, and then a bean, and then a brassica or something else to alternate. We have four rows of SALT here on the farm. some of our partners globally are using contours, hedge rows, to maintain the farming land on Mount Nero in Arusha, and Mount Kilimanjaro. We are working with farmers there to help them maintain practices that will build soil health and not cause erosion.”

ECHO’s North American Impact Center has served the poor around the world but recently expanded its outreach to local areas. They are now training people who are serving in urban gardens, nonprofits, and urban schools within their community.

“The Fort Myers campus is going to partner and network with North America non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and nonprofits and churches who are meeting nutritional agricultural needs in our communities,” Flood said.

They are also expanding worldwide. They still have ties in Haiti but do not have a physical presence there. So, there are plans for an impact center there. Currently, the Asian Impact Center serves more than 2 billion people, mostly subsistence farmers. ECHO hopes to launch a new center in South Asia in 2024.

“We’re literally $50,000 away from saying ‘go,’” Flood said. “It is very exciting; we have been working on that for a number of years.”

For information, visit echonet.org.