WHEN garbage collector, Alam Flora, does its round in the Sunway neighbourhood, it is unlikely to find any wet waste from Cho Suet Sen’s garbage bin. In the former banker’s household, no food is wasted.
Every crumb, peel, stump and even the shaded leaves in her garden are salvaged.
They all end up in her recycling bins. She is among the growing number of urbanites who dutifully turn their kitchen waste into fertiliser. She has been faithfully doing it since 1998 after she learnt the ropes of composting and kitchen gardening from Centre for Environment, Technology and Development Malaysia (Cetdem).
Contented: The Lohs are happier with their current lifestyle. She has 23 varieties of vegetables, 25 types of herbs and 27 fruit trees in her garden and backyard.
Cho is a testimony that leading an urban life can be literally a fruitful one when waste is reused, reduced and recycled.
She travelled more than 10,000km just so that she could be at a place where human labour in farming remains intensive.
A third year chemical engineering student, Rianne Elizen left the comforts of her home in the Netherlands after reading on-line that Cetdem offers a combination of projects that suits her course work that she minors in: international management.
“I wanted to know about organic farming and the use of sustainable energy, both of which Cetdem is actively advocating.
“Coming from a country where farming is heavily mechanised, I wanted to be in a place where the use of human labour is still greater than machinery,” said Elizen who would be based in Malaysia for close to four months.
For K.K. Tan, having lost his job as a seniour executive in the plastic industry that he had spent his 20 years of working life in, he decided to do something radical.
From a petrol chemical-dependent industry, he ventured into a chemical-free world.
After reading an article about organic farming in a magazine, he decided that he would give it a shot and got in touch with C organic farming co-ordinator, Tan Siew Luang.
For the past two months, he has been working as a volunteer at Cetdem’s Organic Farming Community Centre(OFCC) in Section 19 of Petaling Jaya.
It was a complete departure from his previous job where he was constantly exposed to environmental hazards, notably the solvents used during the spraying of paints on plastics.
“The chemicals used affected my health,” said the father of two who hails from Klang.
These days, instead of inhaling corrosive chemicals in a confined factory, he is out in the open, sweating it out as he goes back to the basics of farming.
For farmers Loh Siew Fook and his wife, Chen Hoong Meng, “honeymoon” comes belatedly.
After 11 years of toiling, they are finally reaping what they had sown on their two farms totaling 3ha in Semenyih, Selangor.
Closer to earth: Tan and Elizen working on the community farm. The seed was sown in 1998, after they resettled in Malaysia having spent four years in Australia.
The couple had wanted to do something completely opposite of their real estate business.
When a friend sold some compost to them, they decided that farming could be an option for them since they owned a piece of one-hectare industrial land in Semenyih.
Instead of building a factory, they took the giant leap of faith to turn the land into a fertile, self sustaining farm.
But as the couple admitted, they were under no illusion that it would be rosy.
The road ahead was indeed tough when they had to start from scratch.
“It is one thing to have a romantic idea of farming and another when you actually get down to it. More so, when one wants to farm organically which is labour intensive,” said Loh.
The logistics involved posed challenges every step of the way. They had to invest in a piping system, build plastic tunnels (shields to protect vegetables from being destroyed by torrential rain), contend with pest attacks and labour shortage.
They tried in vain to recruit locals to work on their farm.
“Even with an offer of RM800 a month, they didn’t want to take it so that we had no choice but to hire foreign workers,”said Loh. Now, he has 11 workers.
Loh advised aspiring organic farmers, that as a start-up at least RM100,000 was needed for the first three months, discounting the cost of leasing or acquiring land.
“We went in without any expectation,” he said.
That attitude helped the Lohs to weather the difficulties they faced along the way because the first two years they were indeed hard pressed.
A healthier alternative: Another organic enthusiast K.K. Tan moved from the plastic industry to organic farming. Whatever they grew in the first year, pests attacked and devoured most of their crops.
But once the predators came, the disquiet left.
Their yields started to improve once they had worked out the kinks in composting, rotating crops, getting the water supply tapped from a spring within the farm and having other infrastructure in place.
Still, as a yardstick, the output of an organic farm was only one third of a conventional one because the latter is aided by synthetic chemicals and other man-made growth agents.
“So we have to work doubly hard,” said Loh.
To ensure the farms remain viable, Loh does his own compost.
Being placed strategically close to poultry farms and food industries, he is able to source for raw materials for composting.
Taking care that the farm continues to give high yields is only part of the picture.
Marketing the produce to ensure a steady stream of buyers is just as important. “I take care of the marketing and Loh takes care of the farms,” said Chen.
Initially, the Lohs sold their produce only to organic retailers. But with more farmers joining in the fray, they found they had to compete with those offering lower prices.
With more options for the retailers, some did not honour their word to accept the agreed volume and hence, they had to sell at a loss or give away to charities.
So Chen took a step further.
Armed with her marketing experience gained from helping her father’s construction business, she approached TMC, a well known mini-market in Bangsar that is receptive to selling organic produce.
From there, doors were opened for her to sell to the chain of supermarkets, Giant and Cold Storage.
Today, the Lohs supply to a few retailers and 16 supermarkets in Selangor with an average of 300 to 400 packets of vegetables from a variety of six to eight greens.
The plus point about supplying to supermarkets, said Chen, was that they provided chillers and the Lohs were given a free hand on type of vegetables to sell.
While they had arrived at a point where they are comfortable financially, the perception of their three children’s school teachers that farmers are “poor and uneducated” had not changed.
Consequently, there had been instances where teachers looked down on their children.
So the Lohs decided that instead of filling petani as their vocation in their children’s school forms, they now call themselves, “permaculturist” , an euphemism for organic farmers.
Although to the uninitiated, the Lohs seems to have given up their middle class trappings to settle for a “harsher” life as farmers, they have no plans to quit.
“We can’t find any good reason to stop,” said Loh.
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