We all know most of what we eat initially comes from a farm. Did you you ever wonder what the farms would look like in the lowlands of China, or hillside farming in Honduras? Maybe you want to see the Amazon rainforest, but you don't want to travel all the way around the world. You don't have to, because you can see them all in North Fort Myers. Today my photojournalist Jason Sill and I are checking out the ECHO Global Farm.

The farm is broken up into six regions to demonstrate farming practices under varying land and weather conditions. Farm manager Danny Blank tells us "Every farmer in the world deals with the weather and we do to." Blank and his team of interns run the global farm as a research and training facility.

ECHO is a non-profit Christian group established to fight world hunger. "If someone in Honduras has solved a water problem and we can share that with someone in central Africa, that's fulfilling our mission of getting the information to the people who need it," says an ECHO manager Danielle Flood.

Take a tour and you'll see rooftop gardens where they are using spare tires as pots for plants. You'll also see water techniques used in the monsoon region. This is perhaps the easiest region to simulate here in Southwest Florida. "Florida is basically kind of a monsoon climate. You have that deluge where we get 2/3 of our rainfall in a 3 to 4 month window," says Blank.

But in other regions on the Global Farm, the simulation is not so easy. Jason Weigner is one of the eight interns working the global farm and he works in the rainforest region. "It's tricky, like the rainforest. We don't get rain everyday like a rainforest does so we have to simulate every evening. We have the overheads that we spray water every evening to simulate rain."

The farming practices at ECHO go beyond what they are growing in the ground. They've also instituted some new practices with the farm animals as well. You'll see a goat stable which is elevated about 3 feet off the ground. According to Blank, this makes life better for the goats and better for the plants as well.

The tours only take about 90 minutes and in that time you'll take an agricultural journey around the world.

TOUR SCHEDULE
January - March: Tuesday - Friday at 10:00am and 2:00pm, and Saturday at 10:00am
April - December: Tuesday, Friday, and Saturday at 10:00am

Groups of 8 or larger, should make a reservation.
Give ECHO a call at (239) 543-3246.