Farming In Singapore

Urban farming in Singapore - from The New York Times Travel Section -

Green Acres by Singapore’s Skyscrapers

Edwin Koo

Hundred-foot concrete “supertrees” at Gardens by the Bay are dripping with ferns, orchids and bromeliads.

 

July 10, 2013

Green Acres by Singapore’s Skyscrapers

By ADAM H. GRAHAM

In Singapore’s steamy, skyscraper-lined central business district, two American businessmen tackled a messy chili crab lunch at Lau Pa Sat hawker center, one of Singapore’s many street food vendor hubs, one afternoon last fall. Between brow wipes, they described the country as “the Switzerland of Asia.”

It’s true, Switzapore has attracted foreign investors with its solid currency and rigid cleanliness and lured tourists to its high-tech attractions like the 55-story Marina Bay Sands’ Sky Park and splashy Sentosa Island. But where Switzerland is agricultural, this tiny urbanized island imports 93 percent of its food. Though Singapore began as a kampong (farm village), the notion of farming in this densely populated place today seems downright implausible.  

But Singapore’s kampong spirit is rising, most notably over the last two years in its Kranji neighborhood. It is infrequently visited by many tourists but is home to a farm resort and ever-evolving agritourism circuit where locavore thinking has taken hold and begun to redefine Singaporean cuisine and culture. And as the entire 274-square-mile country finds itself enveloped by increasingly thick smog created by wildfires from its Indonesian neighbor, Sumatra, it has begun to seriously ponder issues like food chain supply and to whet ideas about sustainable agriculture. An assortment of new urban farms, farmers’ markets and skyscraping vertical gardens have sprung up across the land, pleasing both residents and tourists in search of authenticity, a quality often seen as lacking in a city lamented by some as too sterile.

“Singapore is a tropical island and home to thousands of native edible plants,” said Ivy Singh, a farmer and restaurateur. “It’s time for us to take back our land and use it for something more Singaporean.”

The most recent addition is Sky Greens, a collection of 120 30-foot towers that opened in late 2012 using a method called “A-Go-Gro Vertical Farming,” which resembles a sort of vegetable-stuffed Ferris wheel, and is designed for leafy greens like spinach and bok choy. Sky Greens is Singapore’s first vertical farm, located in Kranji, 14 miles from Singapore’s central business district, with bus service available every 75 minutes.

The Kranji Heritage Trail, instituted in 2011, includes 34 independent farms and agriculture-related businesses. Seventeen of the trail stops are open to the public, including a poultry farm, a goat farm, frog-breeding aquaculture, a community vegetable garden, a cooking school, and the no-frills D’Kranji Farm Resort, with 19 eco-friendly villas and a spa. A day spent exploring Kranji’s farms is a great antidote to Singapore’s crush of street-food hawkers and urban attractions.

A highlight of the trail is Bollywood Veggies, a cooking school, restaurant and farm owned by Ms. Singh, an outspoken “farmpreneur” and self-proclaimed “gentle warrior.” Ms. Singh, standing in a grove of Cavendish bananas, one of over 20 different banana species on site, reminded visitors that mud-crabs (used in Singapore’s signature chili crab dish) are often imported from Sri Lanka and that Singapore’s famed street food isn’t exactly local. Her restaurant Poison Ivy is helmed by a Cordon Bleu graduate whose indigenous takes on Singaporean comfort food include banana curry, rojak flower chicken, and otah (mashed fish with coconut milk and spices) omelets.

Food hawkers have jumped on the farm bandwagon too. Derrick Ng of the Wang Yuan Fish Soup stalls in the upscale neighborhood of Tampines runs a series of urban gardening projects he calls Generation Green, selling local produce to health shops, restaurants and vendors. As Mr. Ng forges roads back to Singapore’s locavore cuisine, chefs and diners are discovering heirloom vegetables, fruits and long forsaken herbs. The volunteer-driven Ground-Up Initiative (G.U.I.) helps individuals and institutions build and maintain gardens, like the vegetable plots they built at Pathlight, a school for autistic children. This might be commonplace in Copenhagen or Brooklyn, but enticing a generation of skyscraper-raised urbanites to get their hands dirty in soil is no easy feat.  

But Singapore’s national park farm programs are the most remarkable. Hort Park introduced rooftop gardens and vertical vegetable gardens and offers free gardening workshops for visitors and tourists. Sengkang Riverside Park has a fruit tree trail with more than 300 varieties including litchi, mangosteen and durian. Gardens by The Bay, managed by Singapore’s National Parks Board, opened in 2011 on reclaimed land. Its 250 acres are home to a variety of themed vertical gardens and conservatories, including a series of 100-foot concrete “supertrees” that resemble oversize stone palms, each dripping with ferns, orchids and bromeliads and the backdrop to a nightly laser show. In typical Singapore style, the $782 million garden complex is utterly over the top, but within it is an understated Kampong House that emphasizes local vegetation grown in Singapore’s former kampong settlements. All but one of these historic settlements — Kampong Buangkok — was bulldozed during the country’s rapid development.  

That remaining kampong is reached via the Park Connector Trails, a 60-mile network of paths linking the parks. A walk on it is an ideal opportunity to glimpse Singapore’s 2,000 native plants, 295 butterflies, 57 mammals and 370 bird species, a reminder of what came before the skyscrapers, light shows and chili crabs. Sadly, Buangkok, the original urban farm, is under constant threat of demolition. While it remains a symbol of Singapore’s past, it also harbors many lessons for its future.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: July 28, 2013
An article on July 14 about Singapore and its evolving agritourism initiatives misidentified the organization that helps people and institutions build gardens. It is the volunteer-driven Ground-Up Initiative, not the “bespoke urban farm consultancy” at Singapore’s Edible Gardens.

  

http://www.travel.nytimes.com/2013/07/14/travel/green-acres-by-singapores-skyscrapers.html

Victory gardens: a model for a more sustainable food future

By Adrian Higgins, Published: May 25

Since Britain’s Prince Charles came to town this month to talk up the vital need for more sustainable food systems, another event pressed the message home for me: exploding watermelons.

In China, the land of lethal milk, toxic pet food and tainted honey, we now have cucurbits that have spontaneously detonated after farmers sprayed them with a growth hormone. Read the label, guys!

The industrialization of agriculture is one thing; the globalization of it is something else. The closer I am to the source of the veggies I eat, the better I feel about myself and the planet. The most satisfying food on my plate is the carrot or pea that I knew as a seed. In my garden, I’ve been harvesting fattening heads of lettuce this month along with great quantities of kale, all grown with a small investment of money — a few dollars for seed — and the delightful duty of raising these plants. I’ve just put in some tomatoes I started in March and sowed some parsnip seed for a fall harvest. The beans and cucumbers will be close behind. The cycle spins merrily.

I don’t mention this to be smug (well, perhaps a little) but to reinforce what Prince Charles was exhorting at Georgetown University at the Future of Food conference, organized by Washington Post Live. His message, shared by a whole modern movement, is that our system of industrial agriculture is ultimately bad for our planet, if not our bodies. The conference speakers and panelists want to see a shift to organically grown food that is raised far closer to market. For them, this invariably comes down to a much larger network of small, local and regional farms and cooperatives supplying supermarkets and consumers directly through farm stands, farmers markets and community-supported agriculture cooperatives.

What seems to be flying under almost everyone’s radar is the difference millions of home vegetable gardens could make. This is a missed opportunity. If there were some almighty crisis that imperiled our food supply — exploding watermelons? — many of us have the potential, at least, to sustain much of our needs. The model exists in the victory garden that emerged in World War I and reached its zenith in World War II, when vegetables grown by homeowners and other amateurs supplied 40 percent of the nation’s needs.

Many of these 20 million gardens took the form of community gardens on vacant city land or at highly visible sites such as the White House or New York City mansions. Apart from the two-year-old vegetable garden at the White House, many of these urban farms and community gardens have either survived or are being reinvented in our time in cities such as New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore. One of the conference speakers, Will Allen, has established successful inner-city farms in Milwaukee as a national model.

As laudable as these programs are, the movement needs to tap into every cross section of society, not least the suburban gardener. “It doesn’t seem like the suburban homeowner is being included in this,” said Laura Lawson, author of “City Bountiful: A Century of Community Gardening in America.” Victory gardens were successful because everyone was in it together, and the movement was something positive in the face of a crisis. The current debate, she says, “is not joyous, it’s reactionary.” Lawson chairs the landscape architecture department at Rutgers University.

In terms of the home victory garden, an exemplar persists in a fascinating wartime instructional film by Uncle Sam, which can be seen at www.archive.org/details/
victory_garden. Here the Holder family somewhere in northern Maryland (real or fictional, we wonder?) is shown creating a quarter-acre victory garden.

On several levels the film is sorely dated; on others it is not, offering valid and honest practical advice. If such a victory garden were planted today, it would be smaller, the soil would be mulched, with more compost and fewer and safer pesticides. We’d have more productive varieties, perhaps more trellising and a greater emphasis on fresh multi-seasonal veggies and less on canning.

I’d like to think we would still have as much teenage gusto to keep it humming along, though obviously there were aspects of gardening then, as now, that were burdensome. Indeed, soon after the war ended, most victory gardens quickly vanished.

This may not have been due to sloth as much as a new patriotic imperative. “The whole focus of the country turns to consumption,” said Amy Bentley, author of “Eating for Victory.” “Automobiles, houses, appliances. That whole ethos is directly contradictory to the previous ethos of saving and doing it yourself.”

And the gardening, when it occurred, wasn’t always the Catoctin cornucopia captured in the propaganda film. A lot of folks tried it but failed, especially in urban areas where the farming touch was already lost. But generally it worked, in part because there was food rationing and because people realized they could make a difference. “It was successful because it was needed, but it was also a concrete, visceral way to contribute to the war effort that wasn’t just sacrificing,” said Bentley, who is also an associate professor of food studies at New York University.

I think there will come a time when we will need victory gardens on every block, in a post-industrial, post-global planet, when advancement is measured in localizing our world, not expanding it. It will be medieval, in the best sense, but with law and order and antibiotics.

I think we are already moving toward that place. People such as Rosalind Creasy are showing us that fruit and vegetable gardens can be beautiful while making a statement. The lawn as landscape icon was a declaration that you didn’t have to farm anymore. Perhaps we can replace it with a front-yard veggie garden that declares the age of the lawn over. What a proclamation that would be for thrift, self-sufficiency, horticultural skill, concern for the environment and the world we pass on.

Prince Charles said the other day that “we have to put nature back at the heart of the equation.” I think we should put every gardener at the center of it, too.

Follow @adrian_higgins on Twitter for updates on gardening and other cosmic events.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/home_garden/victory-gardens-a-model-for-a-more-sustainable-food-future/2011/05/18/AGsc2MBH_story.html

Jumbo Indoor Grow

A very interesting indoor cultivation operation - can work in the city.

Virginia operation is one of the world's largest tulip producers

By Adrian Higgins
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 9, 2011; 2:01 PM

I bought a bunch of 10 tulips for $6.99 the other day and stuck them on my desk. One day, the buds were tight and pale, the next about the size of a plum and similar in color. They weren't the slinky, pastel French tulips that high-end florists coo over, but they lifted my spirits, lasted for days and brought a glimpse of spring.

I picked them up at a grocery story a couple of blocks from the office. Nothing strange about that, but here's the weird thing: I may well have seen the same bunch being grown and gathered a few days earlier in an enormous greenhouse just outside Culpeper, Va. I say "may" because one bunch was hard to see amid something like 1 million tulips in hydroponic cultivation at the glazed quarters of a company called Fresh Tulips USA, in Stevensburg. Here, hiding in plain sight, is one of the largest tulip factories in the world, and, yes, I did feel a bit like Charlie in the Chocolate Factory as a Dutchman named Coen Haakman put on the hat of Willy Wonka. Figuratively.

It probably helps to be Dutch to undertake an enterprise that involves the mass production of the tulip. It's in the blood: Greenhouse growers in the Netherlands raise 1.5 billion cut tulips a year, even if fewer of those blooms today are making it to the American marketplace.

With the rise of high-volume supermarket floral departments, Haakman and his business partners figured that by bringing Dutch methods and techniques to the mid-Atlantic, they could meet consumer demand for cheap and cheerful tulips while cutting out middlemen and the delays of shipping flowers from abroad.

He came to Virginia in 2004 with a plan to grow 5 million tulips a year. Seven years later, he and his Dutch grower, Hans Meester, and a workforce of around 100 churn out 45 million in five adjoining greenhouse bays covering eight acres.

In the dead of winter, it's not a bad place to be, especially with the curious overhead lines of hanging Boston ferns. Big and fluffy, they number 32,000 and function to shade and cool the greenhouse while generating additional income through sales. Early February is high season; the glass houses are empty only in high summer when it's too hot for plants, especially tulips.

The company ships about a million tulips a week to stores such as Whole Foods Market, Wegmans and Giant Food, in markets as far west as Dallas, north to Boston and south to Miami. This week the production more than doubles for an annual peak of tulips in three colors: red, white and pink. These are cupid's hues around St. Valentine's Day, and Haakman is counting on legions of swains choosing tulips over the pricier and more predictable bouquet of red roses. For plant geeks like myself, I should add that these varities are all Triumph tulips, by name Ile de France, Jumbo Pink and White Marvel.

Timing is everything

With tulips, as in affairs of the heart and politics, timing is everything. The task is made somewhat easier for the 43-year-old general manager by the fact that the bulbs themselves are farmed by sister companies back in the Netherlands, as well as in France and Chile.

In Europe, new bulbs are harvested in July, but then the art of climate-controlled storage takes over. First the bulbs are kept warm enough for next year's embryonic tulip to form. But to trick the flowers into greenhouse bloom - gardeners call it forcing - the bulbs must be chilled and remain so for 16 to 18 weeks, including the two-week voyage to the United States.

Haakman shows me the room where the shipped boxes are stored, and suddenly the air is filled with the roar of a fan and the blast of cold air. Massed tulip bulbs can produce enough ethylene gas to mess up their eventual flowering, hence the frequent forced ventilation.

After the dry bulbs have initiated a little root growth, they are taken out of cold storage and "potted up" for growth, except there is no pot and no soil. As the bulbs roll down a conveyor belt, workers rogue out any rotten ones and then place the healthy ones, 100 at a time, on a horizontal board. A peg spears the base of each bulb, allowing the board to sit in a black plastic tray where the bulbs grow. Lined up on the greenhouse floor, the trays are filled with water and a little liquid fertilizer, and the bulbs shoot up in the 65-degree temperatures, lowered to the 50s at night. Robotic watering arms move across the acres of trays several times a day to keep the growing bulbs happy.

The stems are harvested just as the buds begin to show color. After a night in cold storage, they go to a bouquet production room where the tulips are bundled, tied, de-bulbed and wrapped.

This process may seem convoluted: Imagine the logistics of having bulbs in various stages of forcing for 40 weeks of the year. The scheduling is further complicated by the fact the bulbs take 30 days to bloom in December but just 15 days by April.

Bulbs from Chile kick off production in September, followed by ones from France and the Dutch province of Zeeland.

"The Dutch have absolutely figured out the science of timing," said Sally Ferguson of the Netherlands Flower Bulb Information Center.

What does this local mass production mean for humble consumers who just want a touch of spring in their kitchen or apartment window? Haakman says that at least three links have been removed in the production chain, the carbon footprint is lowered all around and the flowers reach the marketplace about five days earlier than before.

With spring still six weeks away, that sounds pretty good to me.

Tulip tips

How to keep tulips and other cut flowers fresh:

-Choose bunches whose buds are showing color but are still tight.

-As soon as possible, get the flowers into fresh water.

-Cut the bottoms of the stems at an angle. It is not necessary to do this under water.

-Keep leaves out of the water.

-Preservative is helpful but not necessary.

-Don't allow the water to drop below the stems.

-Change the water before it gets cloudy, at least by the third day. Take the opportunity to remove faded or damaged blooms.

-Recut stems if they have browned or gone soft.

-Keep the vase in the coolest setting possible and away from heat registers.

-Keep the flowers away from apples, pears and bananas, which speed flower aging.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/09/AR2011020903831.html