IN Singapore, more than 5.5 million people live in a small area of 720Km2. As more and more towering apartment buildings are built, what little land was available for farming was disappeared fast.
Only seven percent of Singapore’s food is grown locally. The country imports most of its fresh vegetables and fruits daily from neighboring countries such as Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines, as well as from more distant countries.
Into the 21st century, their agricultural landscape is vastly transformed. Innovation, technology, and automation are adopted by farmers to increase yields in lesser farmland available. Singapore was the first in the world to open the first commercial vertical farm. Vertical farming is an innovative process in which plants are placed in vertically inclined structures in order to minimize the amount of land needed for farming and can operate minimal manpower.
The first vertical farm, Sky Green Farms opened in 2012 in the North Western corner of the island near Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve. It has 100 towers that each stand at a height of 9 meters. Each tower produces five to 10 times more vegetables than conventional methods in the same land area. The farm now produces up to 1,000kg of vegetables a day. On just 5.5 sqm, one of the Sky Green towers can grow 2,500 plants and water usage is only 10% of the amount used in conventional farming with the same number of plants.
From just one in 2012, there are now seven licensed vertical farms producing vegetables, fish and crab.
At an indoor vertical farm in Admiralty, which began operations in 2014, their technology allows them to produce vegetables that have no exposure to chemicals, pesticides, pollutants and even dirt.
A vertical crab farm in Kranji fattens up Sri Lankan mud crabs that are bred in a hatchery in Sri Lanka and then sells them to crab dealers and restaurants here.
