Yale-NUS Farming Collective

Kazuto Nakano

Class of 2025

Yale-NUS Farming Collective is a community of students and faculty passionate about urban agricultural principles and practices that serve the ultimate goals of food sovereignty, security and sustainability. Prior to being founded as a student organisation, it existed as a coalition project consisting of students and alumni across majors and years, including those who led past iterations of makeshift farming boxes on campus such as the ‘Farm to Table’ initiative, who pressed on to be given ownership of some green spaces on campus in the summer of 2020. It also enjoyed the support of many members of the faculty, such as Prof Montefrio and the various Rectors, Rector Khoo and Rector Bernasek, who have always championed for a more hands-on relationship with the green spaces on campus.

We build community practices around communal farming and create space for design and experimentation with various agricultural practices. Our main activities include germinating seeds, composting, caretaking, transplanting, watering, harvesting and cooking. Every week, farmers come together at Cendana and Saga farms. Farms are spaces for farmers to share the pleasure of being around various species of plants and animals in an urban environment. The spirit of YNC Farming Collective lies in the joy of having conversation with one another, finding a space of tranquility, and learning about people and plants.

In our first summer of 2021, Singapore unveiled its ‘30 by 30’ food security agenda, and we came onto the scene with a splash by leveraging on our position as students to spark conversations with a public audience on the topic. Partnering with local food anthropologist Nithiya Laila, we invited stakeholders ranging from statutory boards (Enterprise SG), research institutions (ASTAR), to local farm founders and practitioners (Edible Garden City, Green Circle Eco Farm), restaurateurs, and more. This would set the scene for how we positioned ourselves to learn and examine urban farming as part of a larger, collective food ecosystem by seeking out the voices of various stakeholders.

Semester Harvests
As farmers, one of the highlights of our semester is our end-of-semester harvests, where we literally get to enjoy the fruits of our labour. We collect the crops that we have carefully tended to over the weeks and experiment with dishes that we can make out of them. Over the years, our favourites have come to include ulam raja fried rice, malabar spinach omelette, sambal kang kong, roasted sweet potatoes, watercress soup, and lemongrass-ginger tea, since these are the plants that grow best on our farms! It wouldn’t be a complete meditation on our food systems without the cooking, and sharing a meal as a collective at the close of the semester has always been heartwarming and reflective.

We also became a conduit for learning from alumni and professors:

• Montefrio talk
• Todd talk
• Linda Puth talk
• Alumni in sustainability talk

Connect with farmers  
At the point of writing, in the short 2.5 years that we’ve been active, we’ve continued to enjoy the great privilege of engaging deeply with a host of local farmers and community organisers in food sustainability. Thankfully, it seems, we were able to visit Green Circle Eco Farm and Ground-Up Initiative in our first year, before their closure and move respectively, to witness and learn firsthand about the ecological dynamics of regenerative farming and sustainable food production.

Local farmers’ deep knowledge about the local crops and soil amazes us. In our 2nd year, we were able to collect seeds from previous farming iterations and took a deep dive into understanding seeds. We were hosted by Singapore Seed Exchange, and connected with other farmers and locals growing vegetables in their homes and gardens. In exchanging seeds, we enjoyed sharing the stories of growing plants and harvesting seeds.

Moving from urban farming to food itself, we connected with SayurStory, a community organization that engages Singaporeans and migrant domestic workers to promote personal and cultural exchange through food and the natural environment. We had the pleasure of hosting SayurStory at the college, where they conducted a banana craft workshop, sharing their knowledge of crafting plates and rings out of banana leaves.

It was a special moment for us, where we witnessed how our farms can transcend the boundaries of time and place – connecting memories from the past to the present, and connecting Singapore to the lands in which they grew up.

Multispecies Home
Our farms are home to various plants: kangkong, sweet potato, ulam raja, eggplants, lime, lemongrass, sugarcane, corn, pumpkin, banana, tomato, cucumber, mung bean, spinach, bok choy, etc! While we, farmers, germinate seeds and grow plants, it is not only us creating our farm. When you walk into the farm, you see various species hanging out: ants, beetles, bugs, snails, squirrels, birds, worms, micro-organisms, our college cat Putu and so on. Some species are critical. Snails love eating pumpkins we transplant. We spotted so many of them hiding in the lemongrass. Some species help us a lot. Bees are great pollinators. Worms soften and enrich the soil.

Challenges
Growing vegetables is difficult because we also rely on uncontrollable natural conditions like rain, sunlight, humidity, acid concentration of the soil, and wind. It’s sad if plants do not grow well because so many factors make it hard to identify the issue. We also do not use chemical fertilisers, insecticides and pesticides because they result in large amounts of greenhouse gas emission and the loss of biodiversity. As such, we need to be creative and patient in trying our best to tackle issues like pests. For example, to stop snails from eating our vegetables, we have tried various methods like enclosing the plot with a net and catching snails after the rain. It is through these experiences that we learn about ecological farming and complex entanglement with other species. It is also notable that our farms are not located on the ground. Cendana farm is on the 2nd floor, and Saga farm is on the 4th floor. Therefore, the depth of soil is much less than farms located on the ground. This limits plants’ roots from absorbing much nutrients that are usually brought by rainwater and trees’ carbon fixation.

Being an urban, rooftop farm that wants to adhere to ecological practices is also hard as we sometimes face opposition from the landscapers that prioritise neatness and aesthetics. Over school breaks, we had come back on occasion to find some plots of land completely cleared of plants without notice. While we like to keep weeds and other vegetation to attract pollinators and protect the soil from eroding, landscapers see these non-crop plants as nuisances. It has been a challenge to constantly negotiate our stance with landscape management, but we are glad that we have been able to keep to our principles. We greatly appreciate our farmers who have weathered these setbacks with us to ensure our farm keeps flourishing.

Legacy of Farm
However challenging farming on our plots may be, it is still a loving home for us. As much we help grow the plants, we also learn an incredible amount of knowledge from our environment — from the resilience of our hardy plants, the peaceful sharing of space amongst diverse organisms, and the wisdom of many farmers who have lent us a helping hand! We hope that the story of the Farming Collective lives on as a pivotal and core memory of our college legacy.