At the ECHO Asia Seed Bank, various types of seed are at the end of
the production cycle, being cleaned and dried prior to packing and
storage. Such seed currently includes jack bean, sword bean,velvet bean, chickpea and grain amaranth.
The finest looking people at the ECHO Asia Seed Bank were chosen to
show off the permanent raised plant beds under construction in the
"Cambodia" plot (our production plots are named for various Asia
countries). Left to right: Abram, Kimberly, Lue, Faith, Jen, Wah,
Ruth, Marcia, Ricky and Asaeng.
A lot of people are working to bring positive change to communities, societies and the world. But in our business it's sometimes hard to see the forest for the trees. Working with the ECHO Asia Impact Center, I've been blessed with a certain vantage point. It's my goal to shed light on the good and practical that's being done to improve the circumstances of Asia's poor.
My wife, Ellen, and I have spent most of that past 25 years in S.E. Asia. In addition to earning BS and MS degrees in Plant and Soil Science (University of Tennessee), I spent two years (1985-1986) as an agricultural intern at the Mindanao Baptist Rural Life Center in the Philippines. Two years after our family moved to Thailand in 1994, we established the Upland Holistic Development Project (www.uhdp.org). UHDP focuses on improving the livelihoods of resource-poor upland families along the Thai-Burma border. Finally in 2009, we opened the ECHO Asia Impact Center in Chiang Mai, extending the presence and efforts of ECHO, based in Ft. Myers, Florida.