Unsurprisingly, like most other nations that are surrounded on three sides by water, Singapore isn’t able to produce the majority of the food that they require to sustain their populace and so they have to import close to 90% of it.
Surprisingly, though, many in the Singapore government believe that they are going to be able to completely transform their agricultural community and help slash that figure dramatically in the years to come – and they are going to do so with a new and inventive high technology solution that they are helping to pioneer with the rest of the global community paying close attention every step of the way.
Land constraints force the people of Singapore to come up with new and inventive solutions
As we touched upon above, you don’t have to be a student of geography to understand that Singapore doesn’t have a tremendous amount of land available for agriculture in the first place. Not only that, but what little land they do have is quickly being repurposed and developed to support the quickly growing commercial sector that Singapore has been able to effortlessly attract with their business friendly policies and tax situation.
However, this hasn’t caused the people of Singapore to abandon agriculture by any stretch of the imagination. Instead, as they usually do, they have looked for new and inventive ways to leverage technology that allows them to grow more vegetables and farm more crabs than they ever would have been able to using more traditional methods.
Vertical crab farming explodes the seafood community in Singapore
Just a single vertical farming structure can house 1000 crabs in the same amount of space that just 30 crabs would have been sustained in previously – completely transforming the amount of crabs that can be sustainably harvested and changing the seafood industry almost entirely.
When running at full capacity, a single farm using these vertical farming systems can cultivate close to 50,000 crabs at any one particular point in time and almost 200 tons of crabs every single year.
This is game changing technology and has the potential to revolutionize everything about the seafood community in Singapore and not just when it comes to crabs, either. Expect to see this technology used to sustainably farm all kinds of seafood in the future.
High-tech vegetable farming is also exploding in popularity
It may surprise you to learn that Japanese electronics giant Panasonic is helping the people of Singapore grow more than 30 types of vegetables and herbs using advanced technology known as the Prototype Hyperspectral Imaging System (PHIS).
Farms all over Singapore are leveraging this new technology that allows farmers to better understand where their crops are during the growing cycle, how the soil is supporting these crops, and whether or not they are taking advantage of all the environmental factors that can dramatically improve yield.
Using this technology, farmers in Singapore have been able to improve their cultivation rate by 20% to 30% – and this is with brand-new almost prototype technology!
Just imagine where the world of agriculture and Singapore will be when the technology has advanced into its third or fourth generation.