Brittni Trollinger, Campus Carrier Staff Reporter
Florence Reed, president and CEO of Sustainable Harvest International, visited campus this week to speak about her work as part of the Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow Lecture Series.
Sustainable Harvest International (SHI) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to working with rural Central American communities to implement sustainable land-use practices. The main goal of sustainable farming is to teach families new farming techniques to transition from chemical intensive farming to sustainable organic farming practices. These families can then use their crops as a source of food and income to improve their standard of living.
Reed has grown the organization from working with only a dozen families to working with nearly 2,200 families in Honduras, Panama, Belize and Nicaragua. SHI has helped families plant 2.8 million trees, convert 14,000 acres of degraded land to sustainable farms and save an estimated 70,000 acres of tropical forest from slash and burn destruction. The organization provides hands-on assistance to these Central American families through a five-phase teaching process.
Reed said that it feels great to impact so many lives, but her motivation is the other lives that have not yet been changed.
“Our goal is for each family to graduate from our programming being able to produce a healthy diet for themselves and able to produce enough income to meet their other basic needs in a way that preserves the natural ecosystems and improves the environment,” Reed said.
Reed and her team have started going back and visiting some of the first families they helped to evaluate if the families actually continued the program after Reed’s team left the country.
“100 percent of the families in the program were still using the sustainable organic practices two to three years after they had graduated,” Reed said. “100 percent eating better, 100 percent better income and each family trained on average seven more families.”
Reed said that helping others has always been a part of her life.
“I think I have been on a path toward this work my whole life,” Reed said. “My parents took me traveling a lot and instilled in me a love for other cultures.”
Tom Kennedy, dean of the Evans School, said that Reed is the type of person Berry students should strive to become.
“She is someone who is perceptive about and sensitive to the suffering and sorrows of other persons and has invested herself in bravely and creatively addressing that suffering,” Kennedy said. “I hope students, faculty and staff will be inspired by Florence Reed and her life of service.”
Molly Waters, co-manager of Berry Farms Season’s Harvest and Martha’s Herbs, said sustainable farming is new to Berry but rapidly growing. Berry has about four acres used for sustainable farming in production at different times of the year.
“It takes a lot [of] time to perfect a sustainable system and right now in agriculture we are trying to reassess the past of conventional farming,” Waters said. “It’s slowly becoming a thing of the past, but sustainable farming is still really new.”