This Legendary Florida Farm Has Changed The Way We Grow Food

[Music] alright guys so top of the morning to you I have a really epic feature for you here this morning I'm with Matt what's ripening we just came from his farm and I'm in Fort Myers and it's about 7:00 a.m. and I am at just an epic demonstration site and this place was kind of like a catalyst for me when I took my PDC in 2011 we came here I actually took my PDC down in Naples Florida that we came here with the entire class and you know this place kind of like opened my mind to you know what you can do with permaculture this is a demonstration site you can really see all the different appropriate technologies all the different plants all the different fruits I mean like I've been back here probably 10 times since and every single time I have a great time you know visiting the farm visiting the property so I highly suggest if you come down to Florida like echo heart like these are our two top you know open to the public demonstration sites that you can come and see this place is pretty epic they got lots of good stuff going on getting a special tour here this morning and hope you guys are ready for this whole tight [Music] good morning my name is stacy schwartz and we're here in North Fort Myers at echo global farm we are an international organization we work in with resourcing and training farmers in the tropics most of whom are subsistence farmers or take a little bit of their produce to market and so we're going to give you guys a tour of the farm today or at least a really quick one and show you some of the systems we have in place some of the crops that we're working with and give you a little bit of highlight of echo so welcome [Music] we have perennials and annuals mixed in everywhere and you'll see that we have a lot of different demonstrations of agricultural systems on the farm and we use those in multiple ways in part therefore training for our students that are here living on the farm through our interns but then we also bring in students during the year after week-long courses where we teach as well and then of course we do a lot of our own tinkering and experimentation so we can learn along the way so all of these systems you guys are going to see today are work in progress none of them are stagnant they don't stay the same as they all change as we learn and we adapt to what works best for us in this certain time frame so behind us we have our row of carambola or star fruit so we work a lot with tropical fruit species that will help provide a lot of nutrition especially for young children and nursing mothers and in general for people it fruit adds a great part of their nutritional diet so you'll see a lot of fruits mattered around everywhere this is a small dwarf mango orchard where we're experimenting with how and which varieties dwarf well so we've gotten this information from Fairchild down in Homestead and so we're experimenting with which varieties to work well in our context here [Music] this is our duck in tilapia system so in order to reduce costs for feeding some livestock which can be a struggle for some farmers to find income for we have ducks and sloppier working together in this system in a way that the Ducks our water system which will cause algal blooms which then feed the fish we also do sometimes feed these duck duck lead which is really high nutritious source of protein for them and we do harvest the eggs from these ducks and we also end the night time will collect all of their manure and we'll wash it back into the water so we add some more fertilizer as well so this is one of my loves I love pigs and I was the pig the first pig intern here at echovox and I was an intern in 2014 but in Thailand and in other areas in East Asia instead of having pigs on straight on concrete which was really common now farmers are switching over to what's called a deep litter system where they dig a hole in the ground and they add the components of compost and then put the pigs on top of that and the compost actually absorbs a lot of the odor and smells that caused the piggeries to be really stinky and uncomfortable to work in and so we've replicated that here but because we're in Florida we can't dig them into the ground or they'd be swimming in a pool so instead we built it up and we can see that our pigs are in here we have two of our younger pigs right now but these are American guinea hogs they're a little bit slower to grow out and they can handle a more fodder based diet as well so these guys get mostly fed forage off the farm instead of which is the other common way of feeding and growing out pigs these guys only get a cup of grain every day so it's a lot more economical for our farmers to grow out livestock varieties and breeds such as these pigs here and so what we'll do is over time they get fed forage and they will put a little bit of sawdust in there as our Browns for our composting and of course they're mixing it with their nose and they're adding their manure and their urine creating a nice rich compost so actually take out these flats once a year and we will remove the compost and all of that compost stays in this demonstration area or this garden which is the lowland garden which is also appropriate because most Lillian areas have pigs so we try to have these sustainable systems in which we're recycling those inputs just like we want our farmers to do as well recycle the inputs that you have we have also intentional forage banks that we plan to near all of our livestock so that as we are foraging and feeding them that we actually have a resource close to them so we're not carrying things long ways and also so that we have already made nutritious source of food for them and that we're intentionally growing so that make sure that they're healthy so here we have some k-tec we have some mulberry and we have Napier all around the back of that dwarf mango orchard as well which are the three main ingredients in our pig foraging which one is their favorite they love mulberry pretty much every animal loves mobile they liked Napier a lot especially the the bottom stem that has all the sugar so here we are about to plant rice which is really exciting and we modeled two different systems next to each other so that we can show the difference between one system and the other this has been an ongoing experiment and research for the lowlands in turn the the internet takes care of this area of the farm for almost ten years now but here we can see the rice of seedlings right now and we have two different seedling beds again for those two systems the larger seedling bed right here is our traditional rice seedling bed and then we have a small modified mat system which is the system of rice intensification seedling bed and so these will go out onto their respective paddies and we'll get to watch how the rice links grow and those differ aspects that's word I the word I coined the phrase affrights language least rice seedling Riesling so that's all right modified mat bracelet I like that one too and these are in traditional and these guys are a week old in one day this is a week old in one day yes if you come back in a 3 or 4 weeks we'll have both of these plants about and this is a system the system of rice intensification has undergone a lot of research in Madagascar and in West Africa and also now in Asia a lot too it doesn't work for every farmer and echo is really about that we don't have one silver bullet that's gonna work for everybody but we do want to present a lot of options for farming systems that may work in your context or you may need to adjust so we want farmers to be creative and experiment and try different things and see what options might work best for their systems we also have a lot of bananas on the farm we use the leaves a lot for foraging of course purposes but then we also just really love banana production who doesn't love the name this so on the farm historically we have had almost all of the fee of varieties I believe we've had 22 or 24 was our max collection I don't know a lot about the different individual species except that area individual varieties except that sweetheart is my favorite so but every row in the lowlands here is a different variety a variety and so including sweetheart is in this area of the farm as well so we have a lot of bananas there great resource for farmers not only do they have a great nutrition profile as a ripe fruit but as a green fruit you can use it as a starch and that's really common especially in East Africa and in Asia as well so this is one of my favorite parts of the farm when I was interned I really loved planting out this area this is our Thai kitchen garden and so this is basically a small microclimate of different canopy levels that you would want right by your home that you can go and pick herbs or go and pick a leafy green really quickly and get things so this has both annuals and perennials in this kitchen garden we have a peanut butter fruit so we had lots of hot peppers and flowers and we have some Lagos spinach which is an edible we have the lime leaf we have all sorts of fun things and even one of those dwarf mangoes so it's a nice little ecosystem of different perennials and annuals and leafy greens and other things so that we can have something close to our kitchen that can give us some nutrition and be ready made for us okay so this is the mountain so we've now left the lowland demonstration area of the farm and we've entered the mountain and the mountain is one of the really important areas of the firm because most of our small farmers who are income scarce or income limited are pushed from the lowlands which is nice rich soil up into the highlands and the reason the lowlands has rich soils because it's all fallen from soil erosion off the highlands and so here we have two demonstrations one terracing with rocks or any physical barrier that you can create or that you have in your area versus sloping agricultural land technology and what that simply is is using plants to do the same thing so you'll have one row of a grass species which has nice fibrous roots this one here is napier paired with a forage species so this row here is Lucena with this napier and so we have those different terraces going up the mountainside and again we plant this intentionally for our foraging for our animals mountain areas are also well known for their greens so this is where we'll grow a lot of our greens including amaranth switches at the end of its season but here we have vetiver and desmo diem up soon and then of this one we have had Guinea grass but it got overtaken and we have Blair Cydia and that's ranked beautiful bananas [Music] so this is a great place where you can see a lot of the farm I love going on the mountain than just getting a break you can see the beauty especially in the middle of summer where there's just green everywhere we also saw some leeches you guys are welcome to have so if you can reach them you notice they're completely bare - like reaching night everybody what's ripening tall over here bigger oh man I just told my dad the truck [Music] it's nice these nice Netanya and this is a spineless variety that our propagation manager found you say that again from camera it's a spineless nut on here and it makes a really good juice it's delicious it's a little bit sour um we have one of our staff members is from the Dominican Republic and he grew up with it so he has like a really great juice mixture where it gets it sweeter so these are peanuts for those of you who have your own peanuts before they're a major crowd especially in West Africa you can see the little tiny flowers and the peanut does actually flower and fruit above ground and then it as the weight of the flower increases will actually go and then it will become subterranean after that which is pretty cool our Hyland demonstration is also important for the areas of the tropics that have high elevation you can actually have a temperate climate in the tropics slowly because of your elevation adjust to [Music] this is our zero grace so we do advocate in some areas for your grades or we encourage farmers if it's appropriate for them to zero graze their animals what this does it gets them off the ground so they're not interacting with their feces at all and so it reduces the amount of worming that you have to do for your goats it also does help the goats from being as destructive in certain communities and goats are a really good break at brazzers they'll go around and they'll eat a little bit of everything a little bit of everything that can sometimes be destructive but also if you have a goat and put it on pasture they're very destructive for pastures they're not like a sheep or a cow that can manage the grass in a way that doesn't kill the grass they'll actually chomp below the growing point and so goats will kill grass and so in a lot of areas if instead of you can take them off pasture and put them into a zero grade system it'll help the health of your pastures which is really important for desert areas that are increasing here and these are two milking goats both of these girls are milking right now they had their babies see sweet potato and beans and bamboo these are good milkers and they're very sweet both of them were bottle-fed when you bottle feed goats they become a lot more people yummy yes yes you are you're very sweet going and here we also have our row of avocado we have had incidences of laurel welts we've had to take out some of our avocados but we do still have a large range of varieties for avocado when I was an intern back in 2014 we had enough to last us ten months out of the year of avocado production which was really awesome now this isn't the regular Pinot is this all perennial nice nice perennial peanut berm looks like they just sized it or we did it recently they kept me did we tip it all so that we can get new flushes of growth on there we also do a lot of work with neem which is flowering right now I really mean awesome so neem is an antifungal antibacterial it's also used as an insecticide and you can soak the leaves or you can get a higher concentration if you soak the seeds of the as a direct in property that is a really good natural insecticide for certain pests so it's used for that and when I lived in East Africa you one of the people group that I've lived with would just take a branch off and brush their teeth with it with the inside of the pith of the of the stem so that was really cool and because it has that antibacterial property so it can clean your teeth for you we do have a key as well is that what that is right here I thought okay check out our only other hockey I know it was up to sub team trees this is Aki you cannot eat it right now please do not even try it is a poisonous fruit at different stages of the life of the fruit but at one specific stage it is edible and it tastes kind of like a cashew it's very nice and nutty creamy texture to it but you have to wait until all of these open up and then you can't wait too long after they're open or else it becomes toxic again but it's a great fruit option especially an agroforestry or foods food forest system because again because it's toxic you don't to eat a whole lot of it just a little bit of this a little bit of that kind of like our goats we also do all three types of composting here on the farm we do cold composting we have hot composting and we also do worm composting so here are worm bins to my left where we house our worms we're currently trying to also create smaller systems for our worms so we can do it at a smaller scale as if someone's doing it in their home garden so right now most of our worms are actually in the urban garden so we redesigned this area of the farm we're now out of the Highlands and we're now entering the monsoon we redesigned this recently with Brad Ward and he very much wanted a permaculture focus so what we have on the outside of this area are perennials so our fruit trees are less labor-intensive perennials are all on the outside of this area so that we have less energy to go out and take care of them because they're perennials they need less maintenance and then we have all of our annuals that are much closer to our our home or our dwelling so you'll see that we have a lot of perennials on the outside here before we get to things we have our mangoes we have our banana circles things like that and then as we get closer to the homestead we have more of our annuals we have our chickens because we do want to make sure we take good care of our chickens and our more intensive labor-intensive vegetable production as well and we saw that all like a velvet bean yes that's almost peanut velvet bean Wow and we have sesame growing here as well we've been trying sesame to find the like perfect window for it here and Florida this is beautiful yeah it looks really great the downside is some of them you can see here our lodging right now so we're trying to find the right season for us here for Sesame so that we don't also get mold on the pods that's been another if she thought we've had to work through yeah could be is pretty awesome oil yes yeah and a good really nutritious oil for small-scale farmers too and then we have our homestead here with some landscaping plants is maybe those two key butterflies we need flowers we need bees [Music] and we have a lot of ground covers is what you'll see us starting to focus on three of our sweet potato plant things are going out now so we can cover the ground before the heat of the rainy season when we get a lot of weed pressure so over here yes we do so we try to and this is a pile of mulch we tried to put in areas where we have raised bed examples we'll put a vetiver really close by so that we can simply chop and drop that mulch instead of having to again go out to get a resource try and grow everything that you need within your system so this is her mulch row which she can chop and drop onto her raised beds as she needs mulch so we got we go through and cut our bed over at least twice a year sometimes more than that but usually when we rebuild the beds we'll chop and we're switching all of our livestock or as many as possible over to that litter system so these chickens also have sawdust underneath their coop so that over night and during the day if they're some in here laying eggs and such we can collect their manure in that sawdust and be able to use that elsewhere otherwise it makes it really difficult specifically for chickens to collect their manure I take you guys to talk to you some external feeds yes we do it for chickens we do absolutely mm-hmm we do feed them especially some of this trial they really like Chaya and raw they yes Rousseau fowl can consume Chaya raw you can feed a little bit to goats and a little bit to cattle be it to make sure it's less than 20% of their feed by weight and then of course for all humans you must cook a Chaya please cook jaya learn something new Thank You Stacey yeah no problem yeah you can and that we do feed it to our goats a little bit we don't we try to keep it away from our cattle as much as possible it's kind of a little bit more sensitive thing a little keyhole demonstration garden it's great for anybody who doesn't like defend over a can't because of back problems I can actually stand up here and work in my garden without having to to bend over too much and then we compost everything in here so again this is almost itself its own system because after we compost and use things in here we can take out this compost and put it back on to the keyhole garden as well and we actually made all these bricks here deco as well you made the brim you made the bricks yeah Wow which is really cool we have a brick press in the 80 area so we left them on soon now and we're entering into the community garden where we have a lot of more interactive ways that we can engage children we can engage school groups we can engage church groups and gardening and what does that mean for them so we have again the keyhole garden we have some Square Foot Gardening which are really popular with students especially and then just creative designs and colors to bring out and pop some of the beauty of creation and some of the agricultural systems we also have a reg row back there of Moringa and Chaya again and this is the other Ringo which is also flowering you guys came at a good time this is Moringa stand potala so this is the African Moringa you can see beautiful flowers yes this is this is very big species and it doesn't you'll notice it's starting to drop all of its leaves it doesn't love a lot of water and so right now it's gonna drop a bunch of its leaves during the rainy season but it always comes back for us here and this is the biggest one we have on the farm of African Moringa and we have a composting latrines back there I think almost everybody uses it oh yes so there's no water running to that system it's just entirely your own recycled waste which is great and then we do have a wash station it does have water on the backside so you can wash your hands don't so this is also a great place where we hold some trainings this is our global classroom and this is where we do some teaching air exercises as well as we have a break usually in our public tour here in the global classroom but this is a great atmosphere especially when you are working with people who are development workers overseas or missionaries we all just sit here and relax and hear each other's stories that's what I love about this atmosphere here it's very welcoming it's very community oriented and it's great to have a space like that in your garden or in your community where everybody can just come together and share with one another their experiences what they're going through and and just kind of bring everybody together so that's kind of what this place is on the farm for me [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Pete Kanaris GreenDreamsTV

Views: 524,416

Rating: 4.9189892 out of 5

Keywords: Sustainability, Green, Going Green, Gardening, farming, landscaping, planting, trees, organic food, ecology, sustainability, growing food, agroforestry, tropical fruits, growing fruits, market garden, market farming, making a living, edible landscaping, organic gardening, organic farming, permaculture, food forest, landscape design, garden design, self-sufficiency, for income

Id: 1_nNo7adRTQ

Length: 24min 44sec (1484 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 21 2019