SingaporeLeaving her office job to work as a farmer in 2011, Shannon Lim runs a seafood farm, grows vegetables and opens a mud crab raising class at home.
Imagine preparing a seafood dinner at home but instead of buying crabs from the market, just get one from the mini farm in the corner of the kitchen. This is “urban farmer” Shannon Lim, 37,'s vision for students.
Founder of OnHand Agrarian, Lim organizes classes on growing your own food at home in Singapore, including a course on raising your own mud crabs. For a fee of 680 Singapore dollars (510 USD), students will participate in a 10-hour course over two days, including the cost of building a "crab apartment" and door-to-door pick-up service. Students can bring friends if the class is not too crowded.
“Crab Apartment” is an improved set of 7-storey high plastic storage drawers. Water tank and equipped with pumps and filters for crabs to live in. There are also ultraviolet and algae sterilizers that decompose organic waste to help prevent unpleasant odors.
Shannon Lim holds a crab next to the "crab apartment" on the left. Image: Instagram your_friendlyfarmer
Each crab is kept in a compartment, which can weigh from a few hundred grams to nearly 2 kg or sometimes more. Input crabs are small in weight or skinny because stores have temporarily raised them for a long time, but customers have to sell them at cheap prices. “After that, we started fattening up again,” he said.
Lee Ray Sheng, 24, first learned about crab farming in boxes a few years ago when he visited another farm. A few months ago, he happened to see a video of Lim's class on social media and signed up to participate.
“First of all, I like eating crab. Second, I definitely like raising crabs and eating them," he said as his reason for participating in the course. He brought back palm-sized crabs from class and estimates they grew about 50 percent in two months. “Crabs eat everything, so the easiest way is to go to the fishmonger and ask to bring fish,” Lee said. An avid kayaker, Lee also catches clams from floating safety barriers off the coast of Singapore to feed to crabs.
Lim has taught about 50 students how to raise crabs since before the pandemic and wants to encourage more Singaporeans to become “urban farmers”. One piece of advice he gives is not to name the crabs if you want to eat them, to avoid forming an emotional attachment. “I want to see more Singaporeans being self-sufficient in food because we are so dependent on Malaysia,” he said.
Before becoming a farmer, Shannon Lim was an office worker in the field of financial planning and market research. In 2011, with 160.000 Singapore dollars (more than 120.000 USD) in hand, Lim quit his job to start a farming startup.
According to Temasek, Lim designed the first “Integrated Multi-Nutrient Recirculating Aquaculture System” (IMTRAS) to recycle waste from one organism as food for another. OnHand Agrarian's goal is to produce seafood cheaper and more sustainably using basic science without disrupting marine ecosystems.
Lim's farm started raising about 2.000 ornamental and edible fish, such as grouper, in his backyard in Changi using the IMTRAS system. Without a license to sell, he gave the fish away to give to friends and neighbors.
Two years later, OnHand Agrarian's operations became professional. They have a raft site near Pulau Ubin island off the northeast coast of Singapore, about a 5-minute boat ride from Lorong Halus jetty on the mainland.
The floating farm is one of three operating locations for OnHand Agrarian. As for crabs, Lim started farming them in plastic compartments around 2016, but that was not his invention. Many years ago, he saw a post on a forum about raising crayfish in plastic compartments and applied it to raising crabs.
In addition to opening crab raising classes, OnHand Agrarian is also adopting 200 crabs for customers. His home farm also raises some types of fish, ducks and some vegetable crops. Lim has also undertaken projects helping hotels, schools and individuals establish farming systems.
For those who don't want to make their own, Lim offers seafood and vegetables on a subscription basis. The standard package costs 180 Singapore dollars (136 USD) per month, for 10 kg of seafood and vegetables, divided into 2 deliveries.
Lim's passion for farming came from the stories his grandparents told him about World War II, which helped shape the way he thought about food security. Be a little more prepared for the strange things that can happen,” he said.
Lim has big dreams with home farming. He hopes more people will learn how to raise crabs and that Singapore will have its own crab hatchery. Crabs cannot mate and reproduce in a box culture. Therefore, the hatchery can provide baby crabs for farmers to raise.
Explaining the focus on crabs, Lim said many Singaporeans like to eat crabs, and cleaning and preparing them is easier than scaling or filleting fish. Live shrimp and fish can also live in caves, so Lee is planning to research and perfect how to raise them in boxes like crabs. “If possible, I would also like to raise lobsters,” Lim said. However, according to him, raising lobsters at home is much more difficult because the living environment for them needs to be more carefully controlled.
Session An (according to CNA, Temasek)
