On Farms

In Lim Chu Kang, in northwest Singapore, seventy farms have been pushed out to transform the area into a high-tech agricultural zone. Isabelle Lim documents land transformed, and unrecognizable. But the vestiges of these places still exist under layers of cement: the Punggol District pig farms, the gambier and rubber plantations.

Originally published in Mynah, “On Farms” marries illuminating writing with comprehensive reporting — a delicate and assured dance scrutinizing different ideals with the rigor born from a writer who demands thoroughness and won’t accept less. This essay confronts the image of an Edenic land central to the romanticization of farming, and turns to possible futures for foodways in a place tangled within its own web of desire for perpetual reinvention.

— Alexandra Valahu for Guernica Global Spotlights

The gates to Green Circle Eco-Farm on Neo Tiew Road are padlocked shut now. Behind them lies a plot of land filled with verdant greenery, multilayered canopies, fruit trees, and wild herbs that grow on and around a haphazard walking path zigzagging across the property. As you move along the path, branches that bear ripening jambu stretch overhead. At some point, you are forced to duck under a fig tree or risk butting your head against boughs that heave with fruit.

It’s an unorthodox farm. Along this stretch of road, Green Circle’s riotous growth cuts a sharp contrast among other farms of strictly rowed monoculture crops. The farm, or “food forest” — as Evelyn Eng-Lim, its owner, would prefer it to be called — had been operating for more than two decades before the land was taken back by the state for military use.

In 2022, when the lease was expiring, the food forest was at its most mature, spread over 2.2 hectares and largely independent of human intervention. Its produce was driven not through intensive human cultivation but through strategies like the planting of perennials — plants that live longer than two years and don’t require replanting with seeds — and the deliberate scaffolding of a multilayered forest structure. This consisted of an overstory, shorter trees, a shrub layer, an herb layer, a ground cover, a vine layer, and roots, each insulating and supporting the others from extreme weather. Evelyn claims that by the time it closed, the food forest produced some 120 plant varieties — a diverse, resilient crop suited for the tropical climate.

Green Circle was one of seventy farms in Lim Chu Kang that were told to move. It’s a tale as old as Singapore has been independent: the state, convinced of its centrally rational plan for land use, has often issued directives to uproot. Sometimes there is resistance, but more often than not, such orders are greeted with resignation. In the cycles of renewal, whatever knowledge, practice, or intimacy has been cultivated between hands and soil is cemented over for a fresh slate.

While each farm represents a loss, perhaps what is most appealing about Evelyn’s is that it symbolizes the most extreme form of a kind of seduction for the Singaporean city slicker —