Singapore’s Bold Plan to Build the Farms of the Future

This is the Singapore we all know, it's modern, futuristic, incredibly green and home to some of the most impressive

build

ings in the world, from airports to hotels and even floating apple stores, but there's one thing you really won't find here. Farmland Currently, Singapore imports 90% of its food. supply, that means that when something like, say, a global pandemic or geopolitical tensions disrupts the supply chain, being able to produce your own food within your own borders suddenly becomes really important to making your food supply more resilient , the Singapore government has set an ambitious goal of producing 30 of its own foods by 2030, but unused land is hard to find in Singapore, so urban

farms

are popping up inland and everywhere, as the population The world's urban area continues to grow, these could be the

farms

of the

future

and construction will require we know how to

build

them today Singapore's population is 100 urbanized and traditional farmland accounts for only one percent of the city's land mass, Agriculture has never been a large part of Singapore's economy.

In the 1960s it accounted for around four percent of GDP, but as Singapore continued to invest in urban development, the economic focus shifted from from agriculture to manufacturing and, in the early 2000s, the role of agriculture in Singapore's economy was almost non-existent, we have probably lost generations of knowledge and also participation in food production. You know, in our country, so I wanted to see what I could do to like that a little bit. It's Bjorn Lowe, a digital marketer turned urban farmer who co-founded Edible Garden City. We have built 260 edible gardens in Singapore. Whether it be for homes, hotels, restaurants, shopping centres, schools and then on many underutilized land around the city over the last decade, Bjorn has seen the sector go from being led by small farmers like him to gaining significant government and industrial investment. .

So there are a lot of big commercial players coming in, whether it's from fish farms or egg farms, you know, we have technology providers coming from Holland, from Japan, who want to use Singapore as a launch pad for their technology. has become a well-oiled ecosystem or almost an ecosystem at this point, in a sense the foundation for edible landscaping in Singapore has already been laid thanks to a 2009 urban

plan

ning policy called lush, which means landscaping for spaces urban buildings and skyscrapers that requires developers to incorporate greenery into their

plan

s and has helped give rise to a massive landscaping industry in the city in 2017.

Lush was updated to include a provision that allowed rooftop farms to count toward the area of required landscape replacement of a building now with the government's 30 by 30 push. To produce more of its own food, urban agriculture looks like it could have its own renaissance building, literally, on top of Lush's success, so Singapore If you are considering a strategy to increase production from that one percent of land, true technology is coming, whether you are building vertically. factory farms indoor farms battery farms egg production systems and intensive farming systems right now you are probably imagining something like this and to some extent you are right indoor farming is part of the Singapore plan.

Artisanal Green grows spinach in a controlled indoor environment using water. Instead of soil and pesticides, everything from light to temperature can be optimized for specific crops. Sky greens use hydraulic power to rotate and irrigate crops in modular vertical frames. The shelves can be stacked up to 9 meters and housed in outdoor greenhouses, but while controlled. Environmental settings can help avoid some of the problems of traditional agriculture, such as water pollution caused by pesticide runoff. The process can be energy-intensive and, after labor, energy and technology costs, it may be difficult for urban farmers to compete with the price of imports.

We know that the food system is challenged because of approaches to industrialized production by creating control environments, plant factory farm warehouses for example, we are going back to the same space, so once we have that approach make it highly publicized and focused, we need alternatives. One approach to that alternative to growing inside buildings is to simply build farms on top of them, in partnership with Singapore food agency City Cityponix opened a pilot commercial farm on the rooftop of a multi-storey car park growing lettuce, spinach and basil. or basil, if you're looking in the US, using their hydroponic vertical growing racks and edible garden.

The city has designed urban farms to live above shopping center parking lots and even in an unused outdoor hot tub. The government is making more space available for larger scale farms. Also since 2020, up to at least 16 rooftop parking spaces are offered for rent for three years as urban farms. In addition to contributing to the 30 by 30 goal, the government said urban farms can also help cool the city through rooftop greenery design companies. They are also looking at the urban island as they think about the

future

of sustainable design. Gensler had ideas for incorporating agricultural solutions into park benches, building facades and even roofs, and the Arabs visited Singapore in 2019 to explore the future of urban agriculture, but when it comes to urban agriculture, moving from Concept to construction is only half the battle, the biggest challenge of all may be getting people to actually eat the food, especially when it comes at a higher price.

It really requires everyone to participate in it, whether it's growing. those leafy greens at home and understanding that process or then starting community farms within you, know your hdb blocks to drive a community effort for growing food, I think that's really important because we may never get to 30 percent. 30 if we don't. have a whole of society approach because the industry can only do that much the government can only do that much so everyone needs to participate Singapore is not the first to turn to urban agriculture in the 1990s Cuba began to build its own infrastructure of urban agriculture out of necessity due to the collapse of the Soviet Union which led the country to lose approximately half of its oil imports and today cities such as Sao Paulo, Seoul and Tokyo have their own urban agriculture initiatives, making Singapore What's unique is that you are essentially building an agricultural industry from scratch.

What if we can develop and maintain a purposeful landscape or an edible landscape and what if we can start to build a nutritional index of the landscape instead of how much vegetation there is? We can start counting how many carbohydrates there are in this given development, how much protein is there? We produce from tubers or the moringa tree, the leaves are rich in protein, it can become a subsequent food bank to build a layer of resilience for the state and that can potentially take us to reach 30 years by 2030. Right now Singapore is something of a test case for modern urban agriculture, if it takes off it could serve as a model for building the food resilient cities of the future, but only if everyone comes together, if you like this video and want to.

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