When you cannot hit the target 2/3 🙅🏻‍♀️

Touristy Orchard Road used to be a fruit orchard 👩🏼‍🌾

I didn’t grow up in a farm where ducks and chicken roam or where we can harvest our own vegetables. But I remember short cuts and back alleys where neighbours lived in wooden houses, where uneven footpaths got muddy on rainy days, where we played outdoors more than stay glued on digital devices. Having lived for some years in the Philippines, I experienced wide open spaces, padi fields, and the fresh morning air of rural life.

I remember how excited our family was when we got our first colour TV or my excitement when I got my first computer. Tech entered our lives. For everything we gain, something is lost.

The disorganised mess of kampungs, land scarce, hygiene, the prevention of spread of diseases, and sustainability are some reasons cited for reasons for turning orchards and farms into housing, shopping centres, or military bases. We chose progress. This techie senior (me) who can’t live without tech misses days of a simpler life. For everything we gain, something is lost.

But there’s a greater concern than just nostalgia. I was talking recently with an affluent someone about how I had taken up a course in growing microgreens. He said, “Why bother? Just go and buy.” 🙄 Mainstream media has done well to assure us that all is well. Living in sanitised modern Singapore with our efficient and convenient shopping malls and neighbourhood NTUCs can blind us to possible hard times ahead for Singapore. For everything we gain, something is lost.

This is one of many stories of how we lost our farms.

Are we reading in between the lines of the narrative?

“For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

What have we lost? 😭 How do we as individuals and communities help ourselves? 🤔

Go Deeper

I Remember Orchard, National Archives of Singapore (old photos I’m not embedding here to respect copyrights)
Singapore Tried to Grow More of Its Own Food, YouTube Asianometry, 2025 (25 minutes)
When Traditional Fish Farming Gets Help From Science & Innovation In Singapore (12 minutes)
SG50 Special: Singapore’s Food Farms – A Story of Then and Now, SFA (2015)