As fresh as it gets
Home-grown produce by local farms is gaining a following as prices of imported food rise
Tay Suan Chiang, Sunday Times 20 Dec 08;
Once a month, housewife Jenny Lee drives from her home in Jurong East to Lim Chu Kang to do her grocery shopping - she buys vegetables and fish from the farms in the area.
'The produce here is fresher than the stuff I get at supermarkets,' says the 34- year-old mother of two girls aged seven and five.
The food lasts about a week and she supplements it with groceries bought from supermarkets.
She pops by Aero-Green Technology at Neo Tiew Crescent to buy packs of chye sim, sweet potato leaves and chives. Three packs cost her $6. Then, it is off to the nearby Khai Seng Trading & Fish Farm to buy live prawns and fish. She buys half a kilogram of prawns and two soon hock fish, which add up to about $20.
She then heads over to Hay Dairies to buy a week's supply of goat's milk for her daughters for $16.
'Supermarkets are more convenient but here, I can see where the produce comes from and I feel it is safer to eat,' she says, adding that she does not mind paying more for local produce.
She is not alone. The Straits Times reported on Dec 12 that demand for home-grown produce has increased. Price increases in imported produce have narrowed the price gap. Also, there have been food safety concerns over imported produce.
Like Mrs Lee, some people are going straight to the farms to get their supply of vegetables, seafood and milk.
Khai Seng's managing director Teo Khai Seng, 50, says he has seen an increase in Singaporeans and even new citizens who move here from Hong Kong and China coming to his farm to buy fish.
He declines to give figures but says more people are patronising his farm because prices at wet markets and supermarkets have gone up. Depending on the type of fish, his prices can be as much as 40 per cent cheaper than those sold elsewhere.
He rears fish such as soon hock, tilapia and grouper, which he also supplies to restaurants such as the Crystal Jade chain.
According to the Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority (AVA), vegetable production in Singapore stood at 19,027 tonnes last year, up from 17,397 tonnes in 2005.
Singapore has also increased production of eggs by 29 million a year since 2005, with the total hitting 373 million last year.
The harvest is the result of the AVA's Agrotechnology Programme, which was started in 1986 to develop the agrotechnology parks in Singapore to house modern intensive farms.
Such farms in these parks develop, adapt and showcase advanced technologies and techniques for intensive farming systems.
The food production figures may look impressive but Singapore is nowhere close to being self-sufficient foodwise. AVA says more than 90 per cent of the Republic's food is imported.
Still, there are now six agrotechnology parks located in Lim Chu Kang, Murai, Sungei Tengah, Nee Soon, Mandai and Loyang. They occupy a total land area of 1,465ha and nearly 700ha have been allocated to more than 200 farms for the production of livestock, eggs, milk, ornamental and edible fish, vegetables, fruits, orchids, ornamental and aquatic plants, and for the breeding of birds and dogs.
Mr Chin Yew Neng, 53, AVA's head of food supply and agritech infrastructure, says the six areas were chosen because the land was suitable for farming.
'These parks produce a measure of our food supply and also set the benchmarks for food safety and quality,' he says.
Most of these farms are located in the Lim Chu Kang area. Not all are open to visitors but the ones that are, such as Khai Seng and Aero-Green, are bustling with visitors on the weekends.
At Aero-Green, people can also go on tours of the nursery, where heads of butterhead lettuce are grown via aeroponics. The roots of the lettuce are suspended in the air and a fine mist of soluble nutrients are sprayed on them. After visiting the nursery, visitors can snap up freshly harvested lettuce for $2 each. In supermarkets, two smaller ones sell for about $3.
Mr Ong Chee Kian, 38, vice-president of a semiconductor packaging company, visited Aero-Green with his family recently.
He says: 'Somehow, the lettuce here looks fresher, greener and bigger than the ones at supermarkets.'
It is this quality assurance that is winning over consumers.
Over at mushroom farm Mycofarm, formerly known as Everbloom, its director K.K. Tan, 61, says no pesticides or chemicals are used to grow its mushrooms, such as shiitake, king oyster, white oyster, Japanese oyster, abalone, willow and monkey head.
'They are safe to be eaten raw,' he says.
His farm supplies the major supermarkets and restaurants here but consumers can also buy the mushrooms direct from the farm at Seletar. The mushrooms are harvested daily, as are produce from the vegetable farms in the Lim Chu Kang area.
Housewife Koh Pei Pei, 27, goes shopping at the farms almost every weekend. The ones in Lim Chu Kang are just a 10- minute drive from her home in Choa Chu Kang. She says: 'Knowing that the produce doesn't have to travel too far to get to me makes me feel they are fresher.'
But there is a price to pay for freshness.
Generally, prices of produce sold at the farms are about 30 per cent cheaper than those in supermarkets.
But when compared with imported produce, home-grown ones are still more expensive because of smaller economies of scale.
For example, a 200g pack of cai xin from a local farm costs $3, compared to $1.40 for a 300g pack from China.
The higher cost has not stopped marketing manager Gillian Lam, 45, from buying mostly local produce. 'I find local produce healthier and more delicious,' she says.
But Mrs Lee, who also buys imported vegetables from supermarkets to supplement the local produce, says: 'Local produce is fresher but I still have to be practical and buy cheaper imported vegetables.'
Raising veggies
John Lui, Sunday Times 20 Dec 08;
When your business is raising plants, you get up with the sun. The Chai family wake up at 6.30am every day.
From their four-room HDB flat in Bukit Batok, four of them - father, mother, son and Indonesian maid - climb into a white Ssangyong Musso Sports pickup parked downstairs. In 15 minutes, they are at their farm, FireFlies Health Farm, at Lim Chu Kang Lane 2, where they will spend the next 12 hours.
They do this seven days a week all year round, except for two days during Chinese New Year.
Eldest son Nian Kun, 28, disappears into the distribution and retail building. His father, Mr Chai Kien Chin, 57, does a tour of the farm's 100 or so growing plots, each tented in insect-proof netting.
Like most agricultural sites in Singapore, FireFlies is microscopic by international standards, about three football fields in size. It takes 15 minutes to walk around its shoe-shaped perimeter.
No bit of land is wasted. Some plots contain two crops, one growing atop the other. Bananas, pumpkins and sweetcorn plots fill the odd gaps.
In the morning light, Mr Chai checks for caterpillars and aphids. On a pesticide-free farm such as FireFlies, infestations have to be caught early.
His wife, Madam Chua Lye Gek, 53, is at the back of the retail building, sorting and bundling deliveries.
Their two key cash crops - xiao bai chai and chye sim - do not grow well in this year-end rainy season so the farm struggles to satisfy orders.
At 9am, inspection done, Mr Chai hops into a backhoe, guns the engine and starts shovelling compost, made mostly of plant matter and rock dust. This lets the mixture breathe and break down faster.
Farming is in his blood. His parents used to raise fish and pigs in the north-west of Singapore. When he became a farmer himself, he grew unhappy with the amount of chemicals he used and feared for the safety of the food.
A decade ago, he decided to let nature take care of itself. He was on his way to becoming an organic farmer without even knowing the concept existed.
FireFlies' produce would not win any beauty contests. The lettuce leaves are freckled with tiny holes. The pumpkins are mottled and the bananas have ugly black splotches.Peel away the skin of a FireFlies banana and it not only looks perfect but also has an intense, sweet flavour. One imagines this was what the fruit used to taste like before the era of industrial agriculture.
The produce is all sold in Singapore to organic food retailers, restaurants and wet market stallholders. 'We don't grow enough to sell to supermarkets,' says Nian Kun. 'Larger resellers like them have penalty clauses in their contracts. Fail to supply and you have to cough up damages.'
At 9.30am, he serves the first drop-in shopper of the day, a 44-year-old housewife who picks up several days' worth of vegetables for her family of five. Her bill totals $20. A cab driver comes by to shop later. Then a family of four pick up some vegetables, a potted basil plant and sweet potatoes imported from Malaysia. The bill: $15.
For lunch, Madam Chua makes a salad of alfalfa sprouts, dou miao and cherry tomatoes. Other vegetables are stir-fried and simply flavoured with seaweed and sea salt. Brown rice completes the meal.
The farm employs 10 workers comprising both Singaporeans and foreigners from Bangladesh, China, Myanmar and Malaysia. They have more people per sq m than conventional farms.
At dawn, the workers harvest the crops. These are sold or delivered to retailers the same day. In the afternoon, they weed, till the soil and transplant seedlings.
Almost every chore is done by hand and in a squatting position. Mr Chai says: 'Now you see how much effort it takes. People who put food into their mouths have no idea.'
In the afternoon and towards the early evening, he is busy sawing and hammering, building a rat-proof shed out of scrap wood to hold bags of bean-sprout seeds.
All three members of the Chai clan keep working till the sun goes down. There is a sudden power fault in one building and they will have to deal with the problem the next day. Being a farmer means being an electrician, plumber, businessman, manual labourer and scientist.
After dinner, another meal of vegetable dishes, it is 8.30pm and time to go home.
Throughout the day, F-16 fighters from the nearby Tengah Air Base screech across the sky. The Chai family like the ear-splitting noise. They like the troops and tanks rumbling around in the area too. It keeps the Kranji area unattractive to condo-builders, so that only madmen - and those who truly want to be farmers - will stay.
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