Photo credit: Citiponics Facebook
With many countries limiting the key food supply export, Singapore, which relies heavily on the import of food, faced a food security issue. As a means to protect the country’s food supply, the government has started leasing out rooftop car park spaces for potential farmers to plant vegetables.
One such of these rooftop vegetable farms belongs to Eyleen Goh, who started operations back in 2020. It is worth noting that Miss Goh’s farm isn’t some small-time vegetable patch that produces just a small number of vegetables.
Eyleen Goh. Photo credit: BBC
About a third of the size of a football field, Miss Goh’s urban farm produces up to 400 kg of vegetables a day for its nearby retailers. The farm employs about ten workers to seed, pick, trim, and pack the vegetables that were grown there.
Miss Goh said to the BBC, her farm is harvesting vegetables every day. However, it is still not enough to make a profit just yet. Even though the farm is harvesting in full swing, the cost to maintain the farm is still too high.
Photo credit: BBC
On top of the ten employees Miss Goh hires, she also needs to pay a rent of around SGD 90,000 (~RM 290,000) a year for the space as well as another car park site that she only just secured to set up as yet another farm.
Eyleen told BBC that starting the farm cost around SGD 1 million (~RM 3.2 million), and much of the money went into equipment to help speed up harvesting as well as logistics. As she set up the farm during the start of the Covid-19 pandemic logistics were way more expensive.
Photo credit: Nature's International Commodity
The Singapore government started leasing out the unusual plots in 2020 as part of its plans to increase food production. The country currently imports more than 90 percent of its food.
As such, when countries started announcing a limit or ban on their food export due to the Ukraine war, Singapore faced a potential food shortage. This drove the government to start subsidised programmes for Singaporeans to start producing their own food.
Photo credit: Citiponics Facebook
Singapore aims to produce 30 percent of the food it consumes itself, more than three times the current amount.
And since Singapore has a space constraint challenge, the city state’s government started leasing out spaces like rooftop car parks to help reach their projected aim.
Keyword: Rooftop car parks in Singapore are being turned into vegetable farms