Inside Singapore's Edible Skyscrapers

What if you could turn an entire city into a food forest? I'm here in Singapore to find out how much food can you produce in this hyper-urban environment? How much greenery can you produce? How many spaces and niches and nooks of production of food, of production of habitat, can you actually create in this hyper-dense urban environment? We're heading up to see something unbelievable. A permaculture food forest on top of a skyscraper. Welcome to the highest rooftop farm in Singapore. In the world. And we are on the 51st floor, right in the middle of the city. It's quite crazy. About a ton of food comes out of this garden on a yearly basis. It's all organic up here. So we've got so many fruits growing on this rooftop farm right now. We've got banana, we've got mulberry, we've got starfruits. Okay, Andy, let's go check out the food forest. We can try out some stuff. All right, so we've got a water apple. It's a really juicy fruit. Here we actually got pumpkin as well. And the amazing thing, even though we're on the 51st floor, we do get bees and bees do get pollinated. Same with one of our local native fruits, a kedongdong. It's got like a green apple, sourish kind of flavour profile to it. And the leaves are edible. Oh, that's really interesting. Yeah. It's like tart, but also has all these other flavours. Oh, yeah. Locally, they use it in salads. I've actually never tasted anything like that before. A salad green coming from a tree. You don't have to replant this. This thing actually gets bigger every year. And over here, we have our grapevine. And we do have some grapes forming on the vine. This one's wild watercress. Wild watercress? Yeah, wild watercress or Thai watercress. It's kind of cool how you have the watercress and the sweet potato are just growing together. Like there's some kind of... And then what's this one? They call it the miracle berry. Can I eat this? Yeah, you can. So what that does is actually if you eat anything sour now, it'll taste sweet. That's a miracle. There's just food everywhere. I mean, it's also a beautiful flower garden. And the flowers are edible. It's not just for show. You know, I've seen rooftop farms before where it's like one layer, rows of vegetables. I've never seen a rooftop food forest. You're not just forming one horizontal layer. You're actually farming vertically within this tight space here. You've got tree layers, shrub layers. There's herbs. There's vines going through here. I mean, this is a legit food production system. This garden helped me a lot in terms of my creativity. It actually inspired me a lot to actually think in a different way of cooking. Tastes better. Tastes healthier. In our philosophy in the kitchen, we try to use every part of the produce. We don't waste anything. This is our sustainable philosophy. Our garden is our creativity. It's our everything. It's the root of the restaurant. Thank you so much. And thank you so much to the restaurant as well. Use the begonia leaf to go together with the sauce. Oh, it's so good. Something you need to understand is that Singapore is a very small, hyper-urban island. There's almost no farmland, and they import nearly all of their food. But seeing this rooftop food forest makes me wonder. If you made all of these buildings into urban farms, how much food could you grow? But there's a few things we'd need to figure out. Like how much area of a building could you cover in food? And how would you even engineer that? So I went to one of the most epic examples in all of Singapore to find out. If we treat all our high-rise buildings as a little mountain, we can make use of the facade of the building and allow the ground to be extended upwards. And for this building, for example, the amount of greenery here, in terms of the horizontal and vertical surfaces, is about 200% of the building footprint. This is just so wild to see. Architecture that is designed for these little multi-storied jungle islands. Plants just dripping off the building. This gives a whole new meaning to the term concrete jungle. Sri, it's really great to meet you. I'm so honored to actually talk to the landscape architect that designed this building. I actually teach permaculture design at Oregon State University, and my students are always doing really diverse types of projects. But this is such a unique scenario. What are some design considerations that you have when you're putting a landscape up onto a building? The main thing is the roots need space to grow, right? So where we had the trees planned, we worked very closely with the architects and the structural engineer to make sure that we are able to get sufficient soil depth. If you don't have sufficient soil depth, what do you do? So either you give them depth to grow, or you give them the breadth to spread. One way is to widen the planters. So when you put any kind of trees on structure, there's always this danger that the roots may break the structures and all that. Usually it doesn't happen, but we do put in something called root barriers. So root barriers are like a netting which is put along the structure, and then you plant the roots. All of the planters also have drainage. There are drain cells. All these planters which you see, they all have a very simple maintenance walkway along which you can walk and you can trim and clean the plants. Often what happens is when you have these trees growing, after some time, the crowns start getting denser and bigger. Then you're always worried, will this topple and fall down? So there's something called an anchor, root anchor. So what you do is you have poles on the sides of the planter walls, and then you have stainless steel cables. So the roots are basically kind of tied to the side of the structure so that they don't kind of topple over. So these are all some things which we have to put in place when you're designing anything on structure. This is one of the first kind of buildings where this was tried. The number of plants is quite a lot. How is this building even possible? You know, nobody believed it's real. If this project can do it, I think every project can do that. It is so wild being in this city and seeing all the greenery, all of the biotexture and biophilic design in parks, on rooftops, within buildings, on terraces, on street sides. However, a lot of these plants are exotic ornamental plants. And the country of Singapore spends a billion dollars a year managing all of this urban greenery. Imagine if all of that money was put towards food production. The basic structure is here. All you need to do is replace a lot of these ornamental plant species with productive plant species, and you'd have a hyper-abundant, multi-layered food forest production system. Right now, Singapore, we only have about 1% of our land use for farming. Why should we restrict ourselves? Can we reimagine the city to become a high-density farm space and turn that into a high-rise, three-dimensional community garden? How much food could you produce in a city like Singapore? There are people working to actually answer that question. My name is Bjorn Loh. I'm co-founder of Edible Garden City. We are an urban farming social enterprise. Today in Singapore, if you are planning to develop a building, you have to replace the land space you are developing with greenery. So this government policy called the Landscape Replacement Area is what has created the immense greenery on rooftops, vertical walls all around Singapore. I think with the will, the government would be able to re-look at policies again to really integrate urban farming techniques into our green landscape space. We have today 2,000 hectares of green rooftop spaces. Imagine that 2,000 hectares with agriculture systems, with a food forest that's continuously producing food, creating a truly edible garden city. Now, if we're going to take this idea seriously, transforming the city into a network of urban farms, there's one critical detail that we still need to figure out. The truth is, cities are often skeptical of growing food plants because ornamental landscaping plants are often easier to maintain. It's just less work to keep them looking nice. But right in the heart of the city, they've been developing a blueprint for exactly how to turn entire cities into abundant foodscapes. This is Jurong Lake Gardens, one of the most innovative edible plant repositories in the world. For most food gardens, people grow edible plants, the things that you're very familiar with, plots and plots of a single crop. That kind of planting, although it is functional, it makes maintenance quite difficult because you get pests and so on. So most of the time, it doesn't look very good. The food forest concept, which I'm experimenting with, is a diversified, multi-tiered planting, moving away from monoculture and looking pretty at the same time. You grow diversified crops, resilient crops, native plants. All these, they can serve as habitats for our biodiversity. And because if you grow resilient plants and you grow a lot of plants to dilute the attention from pests, you don't have to use so much pesticides. So you're friendly towards nature. And at the same time, we can put in flowering plants, say plants with edible flowers. Then they bring in the pollinators for us, friendly to nature, and they help us pollinate the fruit. So you see where I'm coming from? Conservation, biodiversity, lots of greenery. It looks nice and everybody can enjoy. So the idea with the edible garden city is to have a food forest of perennial plants that come back every year. You don't have to replant them. So perennial systems are really the way to go, especially when you're talking about streetscapes and these terrascapes. You're not going to be out there tilling up the soil and replacing annual plants that die back every year. You're going to put in these perennial plants that would provide yields year after year after year without replanting. We are always constantly sourcing for new plants that can be added to our urban landscapes. And then once they are successful and proven to be reliable and good, we will then introduce it to our industry partners, community gardens, whereby they can have access to all these plants. And then we spread that species far and wide, such as like, well, lemongrass. And you have the fragrant pandan that we use in cooking in this part of the world. The cassava or the tapioca, the tuberous roots, very drought tolerant when established. Things like sweet potato. And of course, there's one little leafy vegetable that I always like to advocate to people. It's the Brisbane spinach. There are some native edibles, some of these traditional vegetables that our grandparents would have grown back in the good old days. All these plants are very easy to take care of, serving the purpose of making a place green. It looks quite nice as an ornamental, but yet at the same time, they are edible. In the urban environment, if you're going to switch to food plants, they've got to look good. They've got to be easy to maintain. They've got to be productive. Well, there's no excuses because the research has been done. The plant genetics have been collected. They've been trialed here for everybody in the whole city to come and see and experience and taste. So if you're really going to transform the city of Singapore, then this is the key. This is the bio reserve of all of the genetic material, all of the different edible plants that could then actually be just moved right into the edible garden city of Singapore. To the people and the government of Singapore, it is so mind blowing and inspiring what you've already done here, creating this jungle city. It would not take much to just level this up to not only being the green city, but being the edible green city. Are you ready to design your own thriving permaculture site, build a meaningful career, and learn to restore ecosystems? In my 30 years as a permaculture designer, studying the best examples around the world, I've put everything I've learned into Oregon State University's online permaculture design courses. These online classes are the ultimate way to start mastering permaculture. My team and I will guide you through every step of the permaculture design process with personalized mentorship in a small group setting and over 100 hours of in-depth video training. By the end of the class, you'll create an advanced permaculture design for your chosen project. Gaining the professional skills that you'll need to start healing the world. 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