Jan. 19, 2012 - The World Hunger Relief Farm had its beginning in 1976, when Waco-area real estate developers Bob and Jan Salley started the World Hunger Relief Organization to battle hunger on a grassroots, agricultural level. Three years later Carl Ryther returned to Texas after 15 years in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan). The Salleys tabbed him to help them formulate what they saw as a calling from God to battle hunger.
Ryther designed an agricultural system that incorporated a lot of what he learned in Bangladesh, which focused on a sustainable form of agriculture, long before the term was used. Since he was used to doing a lot with a little, he designed a system flexible enough to bend in relation to available water and the quality of the soil. More than 30 years later, the techniques that Ryther helped implement have been put into action all around the globe, and the World Hunger Farm near Waco survives, even in a year where Texas conditions were as bad as anywhere else in the world.
The system that Ryther developed uses intensive vegetable production in grow beds, rabbit husbandry (for protein) and agro forestry to get maximum food production on minimum amounts of land. Ryther's manual on Backyard Food Production Systems has been translated into several languages and is still widely used.
"The farm has been here almost as long as the organization," World Hunger Relief education director Matt Hess said during a recent tour of the farm. "It's evolved from Carl Ryther's systems, with the exception of the rabbits. We don't use them as much as we used to, but we keep them around for historical reasons."
In 1993, Lee and Kathleen Piche joined World Hunger Relief as co-directors with Ryther. They added a Grade-A goat dairy, dried flowers and fresh market vegetables, grown sustainably, for a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) model. The farm still has the goat dairy and sells raw goats milk at the farm; the goats are also utilized as meat. Murray Gray cattle produce a grassfed beef operation and there are also chickens for eggs and some turkeys for Thanksgiving. Vegetables are grown and sold year round, both through their CSA and at the newly-opened Waco Farmers Market. Newer, more experimental models include raising tilapia in an aquaculture operation.
Farm income was down about 10 percent last year, but Hess said the farm fared pretty well considering conditions, that included 87 days with temperatures of 100 degrees or more. Thanks to a partially-irrigated pasture and timely rotations, the farm didn't have to buy hay until October.
"The pecans and bees really suffered," Hess said. "The livestock did real well, considering everything. The vegetable garden did real well too considering the heat, which at least helped keep down some of the bug problems; it was too hot for the bugs. We were able to put in a new well and we're fortunate to have a shallow water table. We hit water at about 20 feet down."
Most of the farm labor is provided by interns and live-in volunteers who go on to work for World Hunger Relief in other countries or start their own farming operations. Brad Stufflebeam, who operates Home Sweet Farm in Brenham, got his hands-on training growing vegetables and running the dairy farm at World Hunger Farm. WHRI has trained more than 350 interns who are now working in 20 countries, including in Haiti, Guatemala, Mexico, Kenya and India.
Locally, the farm works with other like-minded organizations to develop community garden programs and conduction educational tours and programs to highlight sustainable agriculture, environmental responsibility and world hunger issues.
The organization is Christian-based and non-profit with funding from foundations and grants, donations from businesses, organizations, churches and individuals. The farm is experimenting with some new things, like the aquaculture operation to raise tilapia, and also hosts experiments on pests and varieties, sort of like its own mini-experiment stations.
"Overall, I don't see any major changes," Hess said. "There may be some adjustments to what we're growing and what kind of livestock we raise and how we do educational programs. The basic principles that we started with on the farm aren't going to change."
