What It Takes To Keep 5 Million Fed: Inside Singapore's Race To Food Security | Feeding A City

in singapore we eat what we want when we want and we want it now but as the world stands at the brink of a possible food crisis this culinary paradise must take greater measures to fortify its food supply what does it take to keep a city of 5.6 million fed we cannot take food for granted in singapore it will so depend on other people the more we understand how food is produced the more we appreciate food singaporeans should go local because they will know where the food comes from and supporting a local producer also means that you're supporting sustainably the world is increasingly more resource constrained we need to produce more with less and i think technology will be a negative in this process [Music] when we talk about food security we're talking about situations where all people at all times can have access physical access economic access to food that is safe and nutritious it's no longer calories and that's where vegetables become so important hence also the focus and vegetables in singapore vegetables really supply you the minerals and vitamins that's what security is [Music] if we do it in a very conventional way the traditional farming it actually means that we have to devote a huge multiple of land many times of land in singapore for farming which we cannot afford we have to look at competing needs for our lands and therefore you know we have to make some serious choices between development between our schools between factories and hgb flats and farms when we started out we wanted to look at rooftops because currently only one percent of the area the land here is actually segmented for traditional farming so if we really wanted to contribute to i would say food production in a very meaningful way we need to look at alternative areas for farming car park rooftops they are usually underutilized as the sun is very hot so rarely would people want to actually park on a rooftop my parents they opened up a farm in batu paha area and i grew up actually going to the farm over there and then also doing like door-to-door deliveries hosting a farm tours at a traditional farm so that kind of exposure to i would say farming in general actually created a level of interest for me and i knew that all along i always wanted to go back to i would say urban farming aqua organic system growing technology was actually invented by my colleagues in house mr teo so he's someone who has very rich agriculture experience we really tested out with a lot of different growing mediums different growing methodology to create this aqua organic system that's unique to our company unique to i would say singapore we can even call it like a singapore innovation the aqua organic system here is actually a zero waste farming system so what do i mean by that is that every component in our farming system is actually reusable and recyclable so even for our growing medium here we are actually using a fire clay pebble and this fire clay pebbles here is actually every time we harvest it we actually reuse it we wash it and then we put it back in the system so with this fire clay pebble we also have thin film of water that flows below display of pebbles and every drop of water is actually in constant motion so you can imagine every molecule of water actually travels through about five kilometers of distance and then they are in constant motion so that actually helps to prevent like mosquito from breeding at the same time the angle of the farming system also helps to actually allow more efficient flow of the water so this reuses overall like the electricity consumption we have when we're trying to drive that water flow we're letting the players decide and we're funding them quite broadly based on some broad indicators like yield on the land and so on and it's really for us and the industry to prove that certain technologies will work or will not work when we were starting out to grow our produce we did experience a lot of challenges from such like climatic conditions because they were irregular and as such our produce they weren't growing in a way that we expected them to grow so over time we actually did a lot of research in terms of like plant science plant health from the growing medium that we use even the like the solution that we are using right now to really refine our growing technology [Music] okay so now i'm harvesting the nipah [Applause] and for us actually what we are trying to do here is that we're also hoping to share with consumers that actually plants vegetables some of them they actually come in varying shades of colors of greens and yellows and they are all still safe for consumption when you look at the local producers available in general we might cause slightly higher compared to produce that are imported from overseas for instance due to the fact that we don't really have as much economics of skills that we can tap on so the interesting thing about how we go about our harvesting is that for our sweet nifi order we actually harvest them and deliver them with the roots and then we do a quick dip and then we'll pack them like that as well so don't you think it looks like a bouquet of vegetables yeah we do hope that more and more locals can actually start to i will say focus to find out a bit more about the kind of variety of local produce that's available in singapore as actually i would dare to say that our local produce is actually of comparable quality as or even better quality compared to like imports coming into singapore if we are able to control the quantity of cheaply imported vegetables maybe the local farms here will have an opportunity to thrive as well so my question really is if locally grown greens are actually more expensive why don't we actually help our local farms to bring down their costs by increasing the demand for locally produced products [Music] farming and being a farmer is one of my identities i don't see it as a label that completely describes me i'm also raising awareness about food production conducting workshops i'm also doing like the business development aspect we know that these farms depending on what technology you use can be very energy intensive right but we also know there's a lot of research going on right now to tap solar energy for rooftop farms okay so so to me it's still a question mark but technically technologically can you grow vegetables on rooftops yes [Music] definitely [Music] do [Music] we often get asked why kale we didn't want to focus on growing products that can grow locally we don't believe that that is what indoor farms should be about it's it's really about disrupting the food value system we want to focus on the products that are imported the reason for that is that today 70 of produce is actually wasted getting it to the end consumer we grow in possible products and impossible places that are not only 100 clean uh they are completely free of pesticides they're traceable and they're very sustainable as well [Music] so the typical life cycle of a plant in traditional farming is they put the seed in soil it grows up and then it gets harvested for us we need to be super efficient with all of our resources everything from the rent the space that we have all the way through to electricity so we break the life cycle up into many many phases so we can be as optimal as we can with the imports at different parts of growth jocelyn works very closely with the r d team in fact justin was one of our first employees and now runs up the whole nursery section half the products we're growing today is because of jaslin all these roots is they push up they push it out and they have to push down absolutely absolutely because once they push up all these the plant the moisture they won't get so much because the root is already outside here yeah so i'm pushing in then to get the the moisture inside the form kill that's right so it can grow faster yeah absolutely yeah and then we have 100 germination success yeah and then we set the plan up for good growth in the main grower yes what is required is the ability to grow more with less as countries navigate a volatile uncertain complex and ambiguous environment i believe the most important word to them now is consistency and with our sort of program where we are able to consistently control our output our production has no surprises [Music] this is our sustainer seating machine what it does is actually auto seating so comparing a manual seating that's being done by an operator they would do it in one hour but for this machine it would actually do it in 20 minutes or less right so it helps on our yield and productivity and at the same time it helps on getting our germination and seed placement in a better position so it actually improves our process [Music] in august 2012 when i was traveling home from work and the illustrations that i was looking at on vertical farming gave me this idea about how this could actually be done in asia i didn't just jump into vertical farming i took it for a very very long test drive as much as 18 months trying to figure out can this actually work what do i need to create to make it happen i don't feel like i pursued this i feel like it kind of chose me in a way but it kept me getting up every day trying to figure a way that we can do this the perception of farming in singapore is completely changing i mean we're wearing clean suits and there's zero soil in fact we're farming in 22 degrees i think we're completely changing the landscape of farming which is necessary vegetables that kill their lettuce the people who buy them are willing to pay a premium okay but even kale itself you know it's difficult to compete with kelly imported from elsewhere we wanted to educate our community on the importance of high nutrition quality over quantity now when i first started serving kale to singaporeans a lot of them didn't actually enjoy the flavor whatsoever if we took the feedback from the customers and we found a way to actually adapt the taste the characteristics of the product by controlling the environment so today our kale is crispy it's actually sweet almost the most intriguing question is under non-normal circumstances what kind of food styles were people willing to buy and at what price and ask yourself the same question you know if there's a crisis no fresh vegetables from malaysia were you willing to buy hydroponics even at a higher price i think to me the answer is most likely [Music] yes fish is important to grow in singapore because we have sea spaces which tend to fuel competing needs compared to land there's also the problem of declining wild catch globally and that's why we think it's important to produce fish in singapore [Music] [Music] barramundi is the only ocean-based farm in singapore behind ocean-based farming there are a lot of sophisticated technology and investments involved i think most critically is the know-how brahmana asia is founded in 2007 by two dutchmen they brought with them the experience of how to farm salmon in their deep sea environment they came down to asia and singapore specifically to look for the next white salmon and they landed on brahmandi and landed in singapore has a unique taste and flavor it is an oilier fattier fish it has a very good texture to pan fry and grill so this is where we grow our fingerlings they are in very big circular tanks so this also designed specifically so that you know the water flow rate would be good for the fish to stay active our but only takes two years to grow and we grow the baby fish all the way from what we call fry all the way to adult size of 4 kg and we control and monitor the entire supply chain with great care yeah sort of all looking at me right now that actually shows that you know they are hungry and we actually in a way train them to eat accident timings we will try to scatter their feet across the tank so that they don't cluster they will spread out a little bit and actually it's through these methods of you know feeding and observing the fish that we can tell whether the fish you know they're healthy or not a lot of planning goes into making sure that we have a constant supply for our customers i think the worst thing to happen is to have a disrupter supply ocean-based farming requires a lot of expertise for veterinarians marine biologists we have engineers as well to make sure that we can set up all the systems a lot of talent and expertise is challenging for a farm like us especially when we're doing ocean-based systems a large part of the agricultural workforce is older and declining and it has been a challenge to try to attract a new generation of young people who want to join the agricultural sector because of its traditionally tough image the guys now are actually trying to join the nets so that the fish are then gathered to the point at the corner of the cage so that the crane can just then drop in the bucket to lift the fish out of the water and immediately load them into an ice bucket the harvesting process actually requires a lot of logistics so as the nets are being sent what happened is that the fish they were constantly fighting against the nets being drawn in they're getting a little bit tired and once they sort of settle down and we don't see much movement that's where we drop our harvest bucket in and then we start to scoop them up and each time we do that actually you know the weight is being measured so we know exactly how much comes out and on average we harvest about five to seven times each time when you look at the fish if you look at the color of the gills the eyes and also you know the kind of natural shine and slime that he has on his body this tells you that it's healthy fish it is almost a numbs length they are very active fish they swim very fast and there's a lot of activity our guys do dive inside to get to experience them very close up and they actually are not shy they'll come out close to you you'll brush past you they don't mind that kind of interaction not all fish are farmed equally so when you see a fish in a small market you know it could be caught unsustainably in a while when it comes to farming there are many ways you can farm a fish [Music] aquaculture and agricultural sectors represents one of the last frontiers which many people have talked about and we think that this will be the right time to look at using the positive forces of technology appropriately to basically reap the benefits traditionally i think when people think about agriculture and agua cultural sectors people think of traditional farmers very low paying jobs toiling in open field farms and so on but today i think we are seeing very different formats out there [Music] [Music] farming ornamental fish is actually not so far from farming marine fish in the way that they build the tanks in the fundamental fish right you also know is stack process if we are able to develop a single level here no one's stopping us from trying to stack them in verticals upwards [Music] away land-based agriculture facility and descending then close environment one of the key points of a land-based vertical farming like what we have here is actually we are very kept in a clean environment not exposed to any form of contamination the labor footprint is actually very low what you're looking at here is two great big tanks of coral trout in total down here i think we're looking at more than five tons of coral trout that we have here and over at level two you'll be seeing some of our hybrid grouper longhu [Music] i want you all to have a look at this place where we actually are housing some of the fries of the longhu there are small tanks that's housing all this different hybrid grouper we have four main species right now that we're farming and we have the hybrid grouper the coral trout the white streams and the blue streams our current production numbers are actually at about 200 tons to about 220 times per year [Music] money is a problem i think i think the biggest challenge of course is uh funds is one one challenge i think the other uh challenge is also the knowledge seafood or fish aquaculture farming is actually a very challenging business to understand and to grow in that kind of scale in terms of understanding first the technology the breeding the condition the environment and how to make sure that this fish grows in good consistent condition welcome to the apollo command center this is where we consolidate most of our farming data and remotely assessing all the different settings of the pump from whether it is the temperature the salinity the oxygen the ph they all can be monitored from this remote station whenever there is something like an alert that appears right we will be able to trigger a man power onsite yeah the high-tech farming sector is actually a really mason sector and it resulted from the confluence of a few fields traditional agriculture as well as engineering biotechnology robotics artificial intelligence farming today has much more possibilities than people have imagined in the past i think the golden question is always if apollo is using technology wouldn't your production be more expensive and not competitive than the other kind of traditional farming [Music] so the answer actually is because that we are now producing six times more right in terms of absolute production versus that cost right based on proportion we are actually more competitive to whether or not singaporeans support local produce i think a lot of it comes down to price price is always still the concern that singaporeans are looking at i mean to them they actually not so worried about produce where or imported because it hasn't really hit that point yet but kovit does bring up that awareness by the other day singaporeans like they still look at prices [Music] the industry players themselves are fully aware they cannot be producing all premium products because that will subject themselves to a risk so they're doing a portfolio approach producing some for the mass market and producing some for the premium market so that they can come up with a profitable formula [Music] it has been always part of us like in asian cuisine we use it as a complement to our noodles we put eggs in everything like migoring prata rojak so in our food that's eggs we use eggs on all our set menu as you know one of the basic ingredients is fried [Music] eggs in total per month i'm pretty shocked but yeah we are here [Music] today we just welcome another batch of 23 000 day old chicks from sfa aggregated breeder farms so every month we will welcome one batch of chickens into our farm i am taking the cheeks condition but the feathers the legs and the reaction is quite smooth then consider good but because we do the vaccine for these cheeks so it's green color after i take the cheese i'll put the cheese into the cake [Music] our government set a big goal to produce 30 of our nutritional needs by 2030 is challenging but we must act now and not later on when we need more food eggs are one of the most nutritious food on earth and definitely one of the most affordable forms of protein available eggs are also very versatile and it can be used widely in many cuisines so it makes sense for us to include eggs in our 30 by 30 vision eggs are the few main food types staples to singaporeans where most of us consume it's also about strategically targeting at food types where we think in singapore we have a good chance of producing it in scale in the new farm we are carrying more high technology for example in our old farm we have about 52 houses and moving into our new farm we only have about 26 houses okay so this is our cage free layer system there are about 25 000 birds inside this house let me show you how they live [Applause] please wash your way when you're going so as you can see the birds have the room to move around vertically and horizontally so over here we have automated feeding system and also drinking system the egg collections and also the manual dust system is automated as well so we do not need a lot of manpower inside this house to manage it you may be wondering what's behind the orange curtain that's actually where the chicken lay the eggs let me show you burst light very dark environment where they feel very secure so that they can lay their eggs in a very peace of mind so after they lay the eggs then they will come out then the next birds will go in we are expecting about 22 000 eggs to be late every day normally the hens will start laying between like 8 am up to like about 2 p.m so this is the period where they lay so we have to urge our workers to be ready to pick the eggs once the eggs are lit okay as you may realize one of the hands i keep on packing on my yellow color boots is because the color of my boots looked the same as the color of the feet so they came out packing on it it's a food it's fully automated in this control panel we are able to see the temperature the humidity the add ventilations of the house other than that we also able to see the feed consumption on that day and also the water consumption at that day our workers just need to go to the control panel to do some adjustment and we are able to manipulate the environment of the house motivation is important our egg farms are probably the most technology advanced most people don't realize this but in the 70s singapore's poultry farming was considered amongst the most advanced in the world with the support from agriculture productivity fund we invested in this state the egg grading salting and packaging machines these machines have the capacity to create up to 190 000 eggs per hour this is more than double of our old farms capacity we have this egg inspection over this egg inspection any dirty eggs and leaking eggs will be detected over tier then it will go through the orientator what this orientator will do is it will orientate all the egg so that all the air cell will be facing in one direction to maximize the freshness then we have this crack detector where as small as a hairline crack will be detected over here before it moves to the next qc check over here we will have the uv disinfection so all the uv ray will kill all the micro organism on the surface of the shell then it will be weighted and graded according to their size and sent to the respective lanes normally for the supermarket's item right we'll pack it in a pack of 10 so for those we use the plastic trays and for the one in the 30s which we sell it to the fmb market we sell it to the wholeseller we will normally use the egg trays to be in the paper form land constraint and manpower shortage are definitely two of the most common challenges that every farmer face in singapore but other than that we also face the challenges of like higher production costs as compared to the imported eggs higher production cost also means that we have to sell our eggs at a higher price as compared to some of the imported eggs this is something that not all the consumers understand and able to accept eggs is a simple commodity that all of us can recognize in singapore we've got three local farms but do you know that we do not control the eggs that are imported as well because sfa wanted to ensure that we have got the luxury of choice different countries and all that but recently because there's so much of imported eggs right there's been stories in the press that you are throwing away eggs because eggs has short shelf life so we have asked some of the local farms before hey if we do not import eggs do we have enough eggs you know are we able to give you enough mileage and say can our chickens actually produce enough eggs and the answer is yes [Music] our new farm has the capacity to produce up to one million eggs per day [Music] during the pandemic it's like a wake-up call for all singaporeans to realize the importance of our national food security because we can't just increase our production within a day or years it's a very long term goal for [Music] singapore [Music] it is not impossible at all to grow fruits commercially in singapore technically speaking uh we have the right a climate we've got the right even soil quality for it and space we do have a lot of space despite what other people may say but whether it is economically desirable that's of course another another question so why aren't we growing more fruit trees short answer planning priorities when there are more fruit trees you need people to harvest them you need people to take care of them you need people to maybe maintain them more than ornamental trees and we don't want to do that [Music] singapore would always want to eat the tempered foods just because we are very cosmopolitan city we will see these foods on television we will read about them we will travel we will like them and therefore we would crave for them all times of the year nothing wrong with that but we should all then also put some effort and emphasis uh on learning about indigenous fruits and vegetables [Music] the ones here are much younger because we planted them when we came to the land just 20 years ago okay so um they're they're quite good though because jackfruit they get productive pretty quickly yeah they start to fruit you know as young as three years we would love to uh be able to like source some jackfruit here in singapore so do you have plans to grow more i think if our lease is renewed we would grow a lot more of everything uh jackfruit included you know now you start to see a lot of more mainstream restaurants using it as a meat substitute [Music] so karana is a whole plant-based meat brand dan my co-founder was the first to really kind of latch onto jackfruit he actually had a dish and he thought he was eating pork and it turned out it was jackfruit and that's where we really realized that it had this amazing potential [Music] we're trying to show the versatility of the fruit and how it can be used as an amazing meat substitute yeah but i think the one difficulty is that it it's really hard to use from a from a chef's perspective because it it's pretty laborious but the great thing about it is it is a sustainable crop and it's easy to grow i mean how do you guys find it we have dozens of jackfruit trees here you know they are fruit year-round they give us a lot of fruit the volume is great the yield is great because they're very heavy each fruit gives us a lot of um a lot of meat yeah so to speak it's actually the highest yielding tree free in the world we're taking alternative proteins very seriously because it is possible to produce them using less land compared to traditional forms of cattle farming and it's also more resource efficient and environmentally sustainable okay so once our knives and our hands are oiled we're just gonna go right into it and we're going to remove the skin of the jackfruit this is the part that needs a lot of strength [Music] this is why i don't do it too much because i know how difficult it is getting a lot of resistance and a nice kind of stuck so probably have to actually work it a little bit it's not the easiest and i think that's why a lot of chefs shy away from using it even though it's an amazing and versatile ingredient and what makes it really interesting for us is these fibers because you know when we're using it as a meat replacement these fibers are very naturally meaty we see the population in asia is growing and the population worldwide is growing and with that comes a huge insatiable demand for me in fact it's it's projected to grow by 78 to 2050. there are a number of reasons to eat less meat but i think the primary reason is because of climate change we are putting enormous stress and pressure on our planet through our animal agriculture system and if you layer on top of that things like swine flu and coronavirus that are putting increasing pressure on food supply chains it's clear that we need to do something a little bit different [Music] worldwide we know that there is about at least 30 000 different species of edible plants out of which though we're merely consuming 150 different ones on a regular basis we've worked very very intensely on finding the best way to actually translating the raw jackfruit into this meat like product here we are actually using traditional cooking techniques but of course at a slightly different scale and through this process we are managing to bring out this meat-like fibrousness texture in the best way in terms of texture what we really have seen is that jackfruit lends itself to that perfectly because of just the internal structure of jackfruit itself where the fibers are packed in a very dense way that resembles muscle fiber from an optical point of view it's more like a cooked meat where the proteins are already denatured so it does not provide the binding but of the individual pieces it really gives you that meat-like experience some of the challenges of introducing meat substitutes into asia is firstly you know there's consumer acceptance and a lot of consumers here they have a misconception about the nutritional values of the products so now that the product is available for chefs like me what i do is then i further get into different avatars or different dishes so that it becomes like a really really tasty treat to eat as well so in case an example is a bulgogi that i've done here [Music] so we need to you know strike a middle ground see as to which flavor profile will suit like the 80 percentile when you're doing something which is very meat like you're also thinking of like animal fat mouth feel apart from like just the flavor and the perspective but yeah like the latest tweaks that we did on the process for the color of the product that was of course with the benchmark to have it look as much like pork as possible yeah agri food tech startups are a natural agent and also a natural disruptor in the whole process because they are able to take on more risk and experiment in technologies in ways which traditional food companies are less able to they are therefore a better place to commercialize new food products and therefore bring new options i think the market for meat substitutes is definitely emerging here in asia it is definitely still nascent but you're seeing a lot more innovations and brands coming to market and a lot more interest [Music] as our production capacity ramps up over time singaporeans will have to adjust to a more sustainable way of producing things which may be at a slightly higher cost but it actually forms a certain security blanket as we ensure ourselves against future pandemics and also supply chain disruptions [Music] you

Channel: CNA Insider

Views: 64,566

Keywords: CNA Insider, Channel NewsAsia, People stories, Asian perspectives, Feeding A City, Singapore, food security, food supply, food, farming, hydroponic, Singapore farm, COVID-19, pandemic, urban farming, agriculture, farming technology, food production, buy local, local produce, vertical farming, aquaculture, sustainability, food tech, CNA

Id: wc9NfAIwJz8

Length: 44min 30sec (2670 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 27 2020