I’ve learned a fair amount of technical knowledge in the course of taking care of my plot. As detailed in my previous blogpost, the workshops we’ve attended have helped me understand farming techniques and knowledge. Over the course of this semester, I’ve tried to use some of them in my own UA plot However, I suspect it is the values and principles I’ve learned about that will stay with me beyond the class.
I was once asked, in an interview about my relationship to the environment, what I would change about my childhood. My response to that was: my relationship to food (waste). I’ve always been more comfortable with wasting food than I should be. I suspect that this is influenced by the distance that I feel: as a Singaporean, born and raised here, I’ve never really known about where or how my food is grown. And I never really cared too much, either. Narratives about farmers breaking their backs for a grain of rice have always felt like mythical exaggerations I should ignore.
But now, I have immense respect for people who grow food! I am so much more aware of exactly how difficult it can be. My entire batch of kalian have unfortunately been decimated by leaf miners, for example. Farming is truly a long-term, iterative project. Even while some crops are extremely hardy (e.g. the Malabar spinach I’ve been growing), harvests truly need to be earned. One must always listen to the crops and the environment and respond appropriately!
Especially in an extremely sedentary and privileged environment like Yale-NUS, I feel very humbled by the urban farming experience. I am glad to literally get close to the soil and connect to the practice.
I’m also consistently inspired by my peers who are so careful and committed to the health of their crops. Even practices like green manuring – where legumes are planted in the plot at the end of a planting cycle – are new to me! And it’s heartening to know that regeneration can occur as long as we’re intentional with the way we treat the soil.
Beyond personal reflection, this experience has shifted my view on UA practices on broader levels.
From a reading we did in class, we learned about Neo and Chua (2017)’s heuristic scale of responsibilities in a community garden and the spectrum stretches from “garden-centric” to “community-centric” (674). “Garden-centric” would refer to more technical things like prioritizing yield, upgrading skills and expertise. “Community-centric” refers to sharing common spaces, sharing harvests, running workshops. In principle, I have always strongly favored community-centric approaches. For example, I used to be quite harsh in my judgment against what I saw was exclusionary practices like fencing community gardens. I thought they were antithetical to community-centrism. However, I have a much more nuanced perception. After struggling with my own plants, I can appreciate why farmers who spend so much time on their plots would not want people to steal their harvests! There is certainly much room for empathy all around.
References:
Neo, H., & Chua, C. Y. (2017). Beyond inclusion and exclusion: Community gardens as spaces of responsibility. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 107, 666–681.
farm time 