Americans live in a land of plenty. Luscious greens, hearty meats, endless aisles of canned and boxed foods line the aisles of supermarkets. And most folks don’t give a second thought to how it gets there.
"People are definitely more and more detached from where their food comes from," says Matt Hess, education director for Waco-based World Hunger Relief, Inc. (WHRI). "Whether you’re a kid and your dad is a commodity farmer, or whether your dad is working on Wall Street, the food system is way more complicated than most of us understand."
WHRI was chartered in 1976 by real estate developers Bob and Jan Salley as a program in agriculture-related technologies. A few years later, programs were developed from academics and people with hands-on experience to train individuals on how to best use resources to alleviate hunger and poverty around the world.
In the following decades, WHRI has trained over 300 interns working in 20 countries, spanning four continents. Today, WHRI has a sister organization—World Hunger Relief, Haiti.
"Over the last five years, we’ve grown pretty significantly," Hess says. "We’ve gone from just a handful of people here working on the farm to at any one point in time, we’ve got probably 30 people that live here."
These interns now work for various international organizations promoting sustainable food production and economic development. Justin and Jessica Bullock, who have worked overseas, are now interns who live at the Waco- based farm.
"The experience, we feel, is invaluable," Justin says. "They really do put a lot of responsibility into the hands of the interns. It’s a little scary at first, but it really does give a higher quality of education."
"You do something different every single day," Jessica adds, looking up as she trims the hooves of one of many goats on the farm. "You never have the same task repeated. Maybe months from now we’ll be doing the same thing again, but you’re learning something different every single day."
Not everyone who shows up has a green thumb. Elise Voyvodic is a live-in volunteer at the WHRI farm whose past is far from agriculture.
"I grew up in suburbs of Denver," she says, clutching a book on herbs. "It’s very different and new for me."
As an undergraduate at nearby Baylor University, Voyvodic would come out to the farm once a week to unearth new knowledge. Now that she’s graduated, she spends her time studying and learning more about gardening and various herbs.
"I think it’s important to understand where your food comes from and understand the process of how things get from point A to point B," she says. "What seems like waste ends up being used to create new life."
In a trip out to the farm, visitors will find they’ve stepped into a multitude of different worlds. Students will see projects geared to Central Texas. And they’ll experience the realities of a developing world.
Goats are milked by hand, as electricity and money to buy milking equipment can be hard to come by in developing countries. Equipment use on the pastures and vegetable gardens is minimal. Most work is done by hand.
A structure that sits adjacent to the main education building—the Nicaragua House—is built in the same design that Habitat for Humanity uses to build homes in Latin America. Next to the Nicaragua house is a cook shack that houses a working Lorena stove—an adobe style simple-to-build cook stove for use in Central America.
WHRI is unique in the fact that it combines classroom instruction with hands- on experiences of a working farm – a "laboratory" for training. Each intern stays for about 13 months and is charged with running one of WHRI’s small businesses. In the case of the goats, interns are responsible for everything—care, milking and marketing the milk.
Thirty percent of the farm’s operational budget comes from selling what is grown on the 40 acres. Demand for the products is high, with a waiting list for the raw goat milk and vegetables. Eggs go quickly, pecans sell out every year and within two or three weeks of harvest, the honey sweetens consumers’ palates.
"People get to not only learn how to grow chickens, but figure out how are we going to grow these chickens in a way that’s going to make us enough money to make it worthwhile for all the work that we put in," Hess says. "Farmers around the world—even if they are growing for themselves—need to be selling something in order to pay for school fees or whatever other costs are involved. All farms are small businesses."
The other two-thirds of WHRI’s operating budget comes from individual donors and grant support from foundations and businesses. The organization continues to grow. It’s branching out into a consulting role for groups around the world that want to demonstrate agricultural improvements wherever they occur.
That includes Central Texas. WHRI works with schools and other organizations to form after-school garden clubs. Students are taught to set up their own "urban gardens," both vegetable and ornamental. Field trips to the farm are a common, almost daily, routine. Kids get down and dirty with the products and processes that put food on their dinner table every night.
The future looks bright to the organization as it works to improve its practices. Leaders at WHRI hope to become more involved both locally and internationally, searching for research-based models to ensure students get the best experience possible.
"We don’t see the farmers. We don’t know what all goes into farming. Across the board, we think it’s really important people experience farms," Hess says. "I think when we begin to value what goes into making a meal, then we can make the connection to start valuing the people who are raising all that food for us around the world."
For more information on WHRI, go to www.worldhungerrelief.org.
Most of the work at World Hunger Relief is done by hand, just like you would find in developing countries.
World Hunger Relief also branches out into local communities, helping organizations to form urban garden clubs.
Interns at the farm are charged with running the organization’s many businesses, including growing vegetables to marketing them.