Leafy greens grower Kok Fah Technology Farm (KFTF) is among the farms making headway in leveraging new technology to produce more. Mr Wong Kok Fah and his brothers succeeded their father’s vegetable farming business in 1979. Today, the farm is run by the second and third-generation family members. Throughout the years, KFTF has been a forerunner in test-bedding and adopting automation and innovation. Some examples include:
- Drip irrigation-cum-fertilisation (‘fertigation’) system
A trial that combines and automates both watering and fertilising processes. This trial is part of larger research on cultivating vegetables using multi-tier structures and coco peat (a combination of coconuts husk fibre and decomposing plant materials).
- Automatic earth flow composting
Helps to transform vegetable waste into high quality compost, which speeds up crop cycles and adds more harvest cycles. It also cuts down the time needed to generate compost from 30 days to 1 day.
- Mechanisation of the seeding process
Reduces manpower needs and increases vegetable growth rate by 20 percent.
Marine Life Aquaculture
Technology and automation is truly the way to go in increasing productivity. Marine Life Aquaculture used to manually transfer 100,000 fish fingerlings from land to offshore sea cages 100 metres away. That process took one week. With a new live fish pump, the process is automated and takes just one day. Integrated with imaging and scanning technology, fingerlings can also be automatically graded and counted.
Seng Choon Farm
Established in the 1980s, Seng Choon is another long-surviving Singapore agricultural business that has become more productive than ever. In its farm, the climate-controlled poultry housing system allows for automated feeding, egg collection, and manure collection. Elsewhere in the production process, an egg grading machine ensures that only quality and clean eggs are selected for sale, while a robot helps with packing. Over the years, Seng Choon has increased its production by 30 percent without increasing its personnel headcount.
Seng Choon innovatively applies photo-imaging technology to sift out dirty eggs before packing them for sale. Such automation ensures accuracy and requires little manpower.
A robot at Seng Choon transfers and stacks trays of eggs onto pallets for delivery.
Seng Choon’s feed mill conveyor system automatically delivers chicken feed into the bio-secured poultry houses.
Tap into AVA’s Agriculture Productivity Fund (APF) for farm upgrades and R&D. Find out more about APF here.
