Tenders for urban farming at a total of nine rooftop sites at multi-storey car parks of the Housing and Development Board (HDB) were awarded to six bidders, Channel News Asia (CNA) said, citing a joint release by the HDB and Singapore Food Agency (SFA).
The bids for the five single sites and two cluster sites, each containing two sites, were calculated through a price-quality approach in which both price and quality characteristics were taken into account, such as architecture and layout, development performance and business / marketing strategy.
Abyfarm, Red Green Collective and Nature’s Foreign Product, Gaurav Saraf, IT Meng Landscape Building, were granted the single sites at Hougang, Choa Chu Kang, Ang Mo Kio, Toa Payoh and Tampines respectively.
SFA CEO Lim Kok Thai disclosed that hydroponic and vertical farming systems with varied groundbreaking features such as blockchain technology, IoT and automatic climate management were included in the proposals of the successful tenderers.
“The sites have the capacity to collectively generate about 1,600 tonnes of vegetables annually across these farming systems,” he said, as cited by CNA.
SFA ‘s plans to achieve its target of fulfilling 30 percent of Singapore’s dietary needs with locally grown food by 2030 involve freeing up more room for commercial farming.
SFA said it would begin to partner with HDB to tender for additional urban agriculture HDB carpark rooftop sites in Q4 2020.
Meanwhile, in a Facebook post on Wednesday (30 September), Minister of Sustainability and the Environment Grace Fu stated that climate change and Covid-19’s threats, together with other environmental and trade stresses, “represent a danger to the supply of vital commodities such as food to Singapore.”
We set a ’30 by 30′ goal last year to mitigate the threats of damage to our food supply. We plan to fulfill 30 percent of our nutrient needs with food grown locally by 2030. As quoted by CNA, this will spur the development of our agri-food industry and create fresh and better employment for our people.
And SFA has been “unlocking alternate spaces for food development, such as empty buildings and car park rooftops, considering the lack of land in Singapore, and we will be providing more of these spaces.”
We will be master-planning the wider Lim Chu Kang region over the next few years and will include the partners and the public in the project. We would grow farming in the Lim Chu Kang region and aquaculture off our southern coast in the longer term , ” she said.
