Community farm Edible Garden City to leave Queenstown in June, pondering next steps

SINGAPORE – Community farm Edible Garden City (EGC) will lose its decade-old Queenstown home come end-June, following a government decision to take back the land when the lease expires.

Experts say this is just one of many cases that highlight the difficulties of running socially minded farms in a country that prioritises food productivity.

EGC’s 8,557 sq m plot in Jalan Penjara, which it has shared with several other companies over the years, supplies produce to about 100 restaurants and 20 households weekly.

Roughly the size of 1.2 football fields, the plot hosts EGC’s urban farming tours and horticulture therapy-based edible gardening workshops.

Since 2023, the urban farming pioneer has been attracting nearly 10,000 visitors, from pre-schoolers to university students to tourists, annually.

EGC’s lease expired at the end of 2025, but this was extended for six months to facilitate its transition elsewhere, said the Singapore Land Authority (SLA). The site is slated for future residential development.

SLA also said it informed EGC about an alternative site that is open for tender.

EGC, a social enterprise, also runs over 270 food gardens in underused spaces across Singapore, such as mall rooftops.

Its co-founder, Mr Bjorn Low, said the business may have to learn to manage without a home base, given that an alternative commercial space of a smaller size would cost about three times more in rent.

Its current premises were allocated to it in 2015 by an inter-agency urban farming task force led by the Ministry of National Development (MND), in a bid to support community-based food systems as part of Singapore’s food resilience effort.

But that mandate has since changed, said Mr Low.

“Now, it’s about productivity, technology. Because what we grow is not listed as the staples, we are not accorded the same level of attention or support.”

EGC mainly grows high-value plants such as herbs, edible flowers and microgreens – vegetables that are harvested as seedlings – although Mr Low said it can easily grow more commonly eaten produce should the need arise.

The task force concluded in 2015, MND said.

Reinstating the Penjara site for return will also set the firm back by several hundred thousand dollars, said Mr Low.

He is most concerned about how the farm’s restructuring will affect its beneficiaries: six adults with autism employed by EGC for the past 10 years.

“We need them to be in a safe working environment, which is accessible because public spaces are a bit tricky for them. We need a good back-of-house area where they can continue to do the work, and we can continue to employ them,” he said.

Experts say such community farms play a crucial role in building up robust food systems as they educate the public on how difficult it is to grow food.

Community farmers acknowledge that their farms may be less productive, yet they play a vital role in passing down agricultural knowledge from older generations to future ones.

Even when farms get access to land, it is not easy to get things up and running.

Ground-Up Initiative (GUI), which had been operating out of its Lorong Chencharu site since 2009, was relocated to a nearby plot in February 2025 after two years of negotiations with the authorities.

Although the land was allotted, it was completely undeveloped.

“There was no sewage line, no cable, no drain line, nothing,” said GUI chief operating officer Mei Chang, adding that the rent was doubled.

Government agencies eventually agreed to help GUI by installing closer connection points for basic necessities such as power and running water in October that year.

One year into its lease and still in development, the non-profit organisation will need to spend about $3.3 million to build the full facility.

Asked about the closure of farms like EGC, MND said the community farming scene has matured considerably, and pointed to examples such as rooftop and allotment gardens in HDB estates and parks.

Urbanist and author Sarah Ichioka said the refusal to extend EGC’s lease signals that “those responsible for this decision may be unaware of the crucial role played by such farms in building robust urban resilience”.

She said: “We want to avoid a scenario in which Singaporeans become ever more passive consumers who think that their food comes straight from a machine, delivered in plastic.”

Professor Jeffrey Hou, architecture department head at the National University of Singapore, agreed.

“Food is not just about production. It’s something that people need to see. They cannot all be locked up in a factory. It’s important that people actually see food being grown, to touch it, to learn,” he said.