Singapore's home-grown vegetables in demand

7% consumed here are produced by 53 local farms
THE next time you eat vegetables, think about where they were grown.
Teh Jen Lee, The New Paper 27 May 09;

THE next time you eat vegetables, think about where they were grown.

Did you know that local produce makes up 7 per cent of the leafy vegetables consumed here?

Last year, close to 19,000 tonnes of vegetables were produced in Singapore's 53 vegetable farms.

The rest were imported from countries like Malaysia, China and Indonesia.

These photographs were taken on a 4-hectare farm in Lim Chu Kang owned by Yili Vegetation and Trading Pte Ltd.

They grow vegetables such as spinach, chye sim and kangkong for local consumption, supplying to NTUC FairPrice and Sheng Siong supermarkets.

Depending on the weather, the farm can produce up to two tonnes of vegetables per day.

When it's rainy, production can fall to less than 1 tonne.

Mr Alan Toh, managing director of Yili, told The New Paper that he started the farm on a two-hectare lot 12 years ago but doubled it in 2007 because there is strong demand for local produce.

This is despite the fact that locally grown vegetables costs about 20 per cent more than imported vegetables.

Mr Toh said: 'Business is good. Singapore-grown vegetables are fresher than imported ones. Also, due to controls by AVA (Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority), food safety is very high.'

Local farming serves as a buffer during food supply disruptions and also helps to set benchmarks for the food safety and quality of imported food.

Stringent standards

Yili is one of seven farms here under AVA's Good Agricultural Practice certification scheme because it has met stringent standards for producing vegetables, ensuring that they are not contaminated during production, packaging or distribution.

AVA assesses the farms with thorough checks on the farms' soil and water as well as the use of pesticides and fertilisers.

Yili employs about 40 workers - half are locals while the others are from Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, China and East Malaysia.

Work starts at about 7am and ends at 7pm with a 90-minute break at around noon during the hottest part of the day.

Mr Toh hopes to expand the farm, but faces difficulty in finding local workers.

He said: 'We can only employ one foreigner for each local worker. The work is hard, Singaporeans don't want to be exposed to the elements so most of them prefer to do packing jobs that are indoors.'