Speech by SMS Koh Poh Koon at the Launch of Sustenir Agriculture

SPEECH BY DR KOH POH KOON, SENIOR MINISTER OF STATE FOR TRADE & INDUSTRY, AT THE LAUNCH OF SUSTENIR AGRICULTURE ON WEDNESDAY, 20 JUNE 2018, 10AM, AT COLD STORAGE, CONNEXIS BUILDING@ONE NORTH​

Mr Benjamin Swan (Co-Founder, Sustenir Agriculture)

Mr Steve Quinn (Director of Fresh, Cold Storage)

Distinguished guests,

Ladies and gentlemen,

Good morning. It is a great pleasure for me to be here, to join Sustenir in celebrating this important milestone. I first visited Sustenir when I took over the portfolio at the Ministry of National Development. That was 2 years ago, when Sustenir was still experimenting how to make this product edible and make this technology mature in its basement. Look how far it has gone in the last 2 years - today we are here to celebrate three important milestones of Sustenir.

First, Sustenir’s success in growing strawberries in an indoor farm at commercial scale, the first of its kind in Singapore and the Southeast Asia region. The second milestone is the opening of Sustenir’s new R&D lab facility at Block 71 in Ayer Rajah Crescent. Now, R&D is a very important aspect of their work. It has allowed them to move very quickly over the last few years. The third milestone we are celebrating here today is their move into Hong Kong. A new market that they are exploring, moving out of Singapore into Hong Kong. So, three important milestones.

What they have shown today is a good example of how companies in Singapore, especially agri companies can leverage on technology to take their product further and beyond Singapore. Technology, we believe, will be the important enabler to ensure sustainable food production especially in the era of massive climate change affecting the global food production.

Now, through technology, be it adoption of automation, adoption of robotics, big data, internet of things, they are now able to do much more with much less. And here Sustenir has even showed that technology has allowed them to do things that were never possible before. In the past, when we had strawberries in Cameron Highlands, we thought that was a huge accomplishment. But now, through the use of technology, we see strawberries grown here in metropolitan Singapore, in a tropical country. And I’m sure with innovation and technology, they will do much more to grow crops that are normally not possible in this climate, and this time zone. We hope that with R&D, we will see much more diversity in the food here in Singapore.

The other milestone which we are celebrating is the fact that they are now able to go further one step into doing more R&D and innovation. We see that with use of technology, farming is no longer what you imagined it to be now. Farming, in fact, has become more of a manufacturing process. It’s more like a factory production because now with controlled environment, you have a defined input, you know what you are putting into the system, you have good control and you have then an assured and consistent output which is why crops would be much better managed. In fact, with technology, you can grow five times more with only 90 per cent less water so there is a huge resource saving. Not only that, this is more sustainable because now you can cut out the logistic chain. You can grow wherever, whenever you want right at the city itself where the consumption takes place, reducing the carbon footprint overall by cutting out airfreight and cutting out logistics. So this is something which we should all celebrate.

I’m encouraged to see that not just Sustenir is doing this. In fact, in Singapore, many entrepreneurial young people are taking on urban farming seriously. We have other companies like ComCrop and Citiponics that are doing rooftop farming, using spaces that were previously not used for any commercial or viable purposes now to do rooftop farming, producing food creatively. Other companies like Sky Greens is able to leverage their engineering expertise to create a 9-metre-tall growth tower that uses hydraulics powered by only 60 watts of electricity to grow 10 times more product compared to soil based farming with a fraction of the land use. That is something that we are very proud of. They have also taken technology to other places like China to grow out their farming operations. Just like Sustenir going into Hong Kong, some of our companies are going to other places in China as well.

Even in the area of agriculture, another home grown company Apollo Aquaculture uses their 3 tier Recirculating Aquaculture System is able to export their technology and farming operations into a nearby country in Brunei. So they are now producing fish in an indoor environment in a neighbouring country but we hope to see their products being re-exported back into Singapore for our local consumption. What this shows is that with technology, companies can take things out of Singapore and internationalise.

Sustenir is now building a 50,000 square foot facility in Hong Kong. It shows that with good technology and a modular system, you can actually plug and play. The entire farm operation can now be transplanted right into the city of Hong Kong where they can grow out, produce and distribute to the local market. This is a very exciting development and we hope that more companies will take the plunge.

Singapore as an eco-system, is equipped with many of the necessary elements that can help our urban famers grow significantly. First, we have a good technology base, we have good research facilities and institutions, we have good IP protection system and we have many institutions that delve into things like internet of things, robotics and automation. These are all frameworks within our ecosystem that many of our urban farmers should tap on and we will continue to support their move into more high tech farming.

The government is keen to support this move and in fact, many of the young urban farmers that are coming into this space today are not your typical farmers that are trained in agronomy. Ben himself was from the banking sector, I understand. He’s not a farmer by profession but through the use of technology and by bringing in his expertise from another field, he’s now able to amalgamate technology, business thinking, financial analytics and even bringing partners that have the computer IT skills to really make this viable and workable.

The government is also keen to support this. We will do it in several ways. First, we will ensure that we have a talent pipeline by working with our institutions of higher education to ensure that our students are able to participate in this process to through an Earn-and-Learn Programme with our farming partners. Secondly, we will continue to support through funding like Agriculture Productivity Fund (APF) which has been enhanced recently in the last Budget announcement, through other economic agencies funds like the Enterprise Development Grant (EDG) and the Productivity Solutions Grant (PSG).

So, I urge all farming enthusiasts and entrepreneurs to really look out for some of these grants that can help you take your business further. Do ask our officers from AVA and Enterprise Singapore on how you can tap on these initiatives to take your business development much further.

The third area in which we will help our farmer community take on is actually by providing more of these innovative spaces that they can use. If there are areas or rooftops that can be utilised, if we can cluster some of our faming companies together with R&D expertise, then I think that will create a synergy that multiplier effect that will hopefully catalyse more innovative solutions.

Finally, I just want to encourage all of us here and to thank Ben for the effort you have put in. I hope all of us will take Ben as an example as a way to do it and to continue to look for innovative products and to expand to new markets as well.

With that, let me thank all of you for coming and I hope you will enjoy the products as much as I did. I hope that with this launch, Sustenir will continue to fly our flag high in different parts of the world. I wish them great heights, new products and greater markets.

Thank you.