Agricultural Experience

Date: 07/09/2010
Agricultural Experience
For my agricultural experience I decided to visit ECHO in North Fort Myers. When I first arrived I though ECHO was just some small nursery like any other. I was surprised after we watched the video to learn how ECHO has had such a great impact worldwide to many poor and third world countries. I thought it was even more intriguing that the headquarters of ECHO where here in Fort Myers.
When we watched the video I learned probably most of the purpose of ECHO. I learned that they teach people in need how to grow their own crops. And since they have an outreach worldwide they have been trained in all the different areas of the world in techniques in agriculture. With all these effort that I saw during the video, one saying stood out the most when they were talking about some proverb that said something along the lines of: “Give a man a fish and feed him for one day, teach a man how to fish and feed him for a lifetime.” I thought that that was exactly what the whole purpose of ECHO was. I find this organization really interesting because you’re not just simply helping others but your are teaching them ways in which they can put their own efforts and have beneficial results that without this organization could never happen.
When we were touring the gardens it was really amazed at how they had different areas that represented different parts of the world from the tropics, tundra, and the rain forest. One of the ones that caught my attention the most was the section that taught people how to build gardens on the roof tops as for busy city climates. They used things like soda cans, tires, packaging sponges, and other materials to resemble what regular dirt would do for the plants and allow them to grow on the roof.
I was also really interested on how they used things such as chickens to naturally weed the sugar cane fields, ducks to feed the tilapia in the pond, and worms to make soil for plants from the old plants. Also many of the different gas and irrigation machines that they showed us were all very innovative and smart ways of keeping the farms alive and feeding the people.