Entry 19, ECHO Farm

    

      I visited ECHO about 1.5 years ago, after a dreadful, cold, rainy winter.  Many of the plants at ECHO were unfortunately dead or had no green leaves.  My recent experience at ECHO was much different.  The plants were blooming beautifully.  The tour guide for our tour was Andy Deaville.  He was knowledgeable and taught our group many things.  Our group first watched a video that talked about the ECHO organization and their goals and accomplishments in finding affordable agricultural solutions.  After the video, we walked across the street to see all the plants and ECHO's unique growing methods.  The tour guide showed us bamboo, which I learned some can grow up to 12 inches in one day.  I also saw a neem tree that can be used as skin cream.  It was interesting to see the duck/tilapia system.  They had about twenty ducks there.  The ducks' waste helps produce phytoplankton and algae for the tilapia.  ECHO interns harvest the fish once a year.  The tour continued to worm beds, where worms use wastes, such as the food scraps of ECHO's interns, to compost and create a resource to improve soil.  I have a compost pile at my house.  I do not use worm beds, but it is turning out good anyway.   

        The tour guide also took us through different sections of their property that represented different parts of the world.  There was the hot humid lowlands, tropical highlands, tropical monsoon, semi-arid tropics, tropical rainforest, and urban agriculture.  Each area had unique ways of growing agriculture to produced the highest yield.  For example, in the hot humid lowlands, there is 80 to 120 inches of rain a year, so they have raised bed gardens to the large amounts of rain do not soak and rot the roots. 

        In the urban agricultural area, they keep the plants in tires off the ground so chickens cannot eat them.  The tour guide also allowed our group to eat a few of the plants, such as the moringa leaves (which had a bad after taste but are very nutritious) and cranberry hibiscus (they were sour).  I feel like I would be successful in growing agriculture with my past experience and all of the valuable information I learned from my tour at ECHO.

~Max G.