When we think about commercial farms, what springs to mind are the heads of leafy vegetables—kailan, or perhaps bok choy—sprouting from neat rows of raised farm beds. Actually, scratch that. In these agri-tech-powered days, we might instead envision hydroponic towers of kale and basil suspended in chemicalised water.
In contrast, the moment you step onto the grounds of Green Circle Eco Farm, you are enveloped by foliage. Trees tower above, with climbing vines forming hedges that frame your vision. Tendrils snake at your feet, and birdsong rings overhead.
Visitors often remark on the “disorderliness” of the farm, or marvel at the “flourishing verdant oasis of edible vegetation.” Each urbanite’s choice of words reflects their level of comfort with the wilderness. But the point is that Green Circle resembles less a conventional commercial farm than a forest—precisely as Evelyn Eng-Lin, its 79-year-old founder, intends.
Evelyn manages Green Circle in a way that mimics the complex ecosystem of a natural forest. The farm employs permaculture techniques, enriching the soil with layers of compost made from landscape and food waste. This has yielded 15cm of topsoil—rich, dark earth teeming with nutrients and microbial life. Evelyn also cultivates the vegetation in layers, planting conventional leafy vegetables amidst edible weeds, herbs, medium-sized shrubs, and perennial fruit trees.
Green Circle is a partnership between Evelyn and nature. Even as the farmer cultivates her own crops, she accommodates nature’s plan too.
Her labour of love, involving 20 years of painstaking work, has birthed a dense and thriving food forest, home to edible and non-edible plant varieties, boars, birds, snakes, and all kinds of creatures and critters. It is also the home of Evelyn, her husband, and their farm hands.
What they have, or rather had, created is an ecosystem, a complex and intricate web of life. Green Circle is no more.
This time last year, Green Circle was one of Singapore’s last remaining soil-based organic farms whose leases expired.
Local community initiatives and green groups tried to make the best of the situation by organising farm tours, an attempt to invite more people onto the farms for one last gander. Jom published a piece at the time, as did other media, lamenting the worlds that were lost when Singapore’s traditional farms were closed.
More than a year has passed, so it’s understandable to wonder what purpose a retrospective piece serves now. What could be the value of writing about yet another slice of Singapore, lost to the never-ending redevelopment and terraforming of the island? There is, of course, the basic value of communal discourse over loss. Unfortunately, the circumstance of places dear to us being closed or repurposed has become commonplace; it is in this shared melancholy that Singaporeans find solace and meaning.
Yet, more than that, in the case of Green Circle, are the livelihoods and philosophies espoused. Until its end, Green Circle Eco Farm was a community that actively resisted relocation and closure, and the logic of “not making a fuss.”
Evelyn and I first met at her farm in 2021. It was the same year some of the farms in the Kranji countryside received the final confirmation that the government would not renew their leases and would go ahead with its redevelopment plan, allocating the land to the Singapore Armed Forces. (The Ministry of National Development said that the government had started informing farms in 2014 that their leases wouldn’t be renewed.) That meant farms such as Green Circle, Fireflies Farm, and Farm 85 would have to vacate their plots when their leases expired on July 31st 2022.
Owners had to make the difficult choice of relocating or permanently closing. Either option would displace farmers from the land that they’d built their entire lives and careers around. Relocating, especially for organic farms like Green Circle or the neighbouring Fireflies Farm, meant abandoning productive land that they had cultivated for decades, only to have to break ground on a new plot. Cultivating the soil using organic methods and without chemical input and getting it to a quality suitable for growing crops was especially painstaking, involving years of labour-intensive processes.
Instead of giving in to a typical Singaporean despondence over development, Evelyn rallied her supporters. Together, they fought to keep the farm as-is, even though the odds were stacked against them.
Sisters Gayle and Michelle initiated the appeal effort. Tirelessly, they worked with Evelyn for years—making multiple requests to various government agencies to stay the farm’s closure, and putting together a comprehensive appeal booklet. The 40-page document traced the history of the farm, outlined Evelyn’s philosophies, and even contextualised her farming methods with case studies of food forests worldwide.
In 2022, as the lease expiry drew nearer, Evelyn and her supporters mobilised wider public support. They contacted writers and local media outlets to raise awareness about the farm’s value and their intention to keep it. In June 2022, one month before the lease expired, they published a public petition, collecting more than 10,000 signatures in support of the campaign to save Green Circle.
This was when I met Yann, Evelyn’s niece. At the time, Yann had been volunteering as an ad-hoc farm hand for about a year, and had stepped up to support Evelyn’s efforts. Besides creating infographics and managing social media accounts, Yann was also pivotal in managing volunteers and supporters like myself. I asked Yann if Evelyn really believed that there was a chance of success.
“I think we should let our actions be guided by whatever Evelyn wants,” Yann told me. “Whatever her decision is, we respect it, and try to support her the best that we can.”
They were soon lost in the thick of organising. Other endeavours included academics appealing on Green Circle’s behalf to extend the lease to December 2022, on the grounds of conducting research. To no avail—Evelyn eventually accepted that she had to vacate the farm by end-August. She’d technically overstayed, and the authorities’ patience was running thin.
This marked my induction into the coalition of efforts surrounding Green Circle. Even though there was no need for further media publicity, Evelyn invited a few of us to witness the final weeks on the farm and to “use [our] creativity to tell stories.” In response, I gathered a small team of independent storytellers who made a short documentary of what transpired at Green Circle.
In the farm’s last days, Evelyn was still making plans to salvage and repurpose what was left. One of her longest-standing customers, Ania, was there to pick up a basket of fresh vegetables, and to also trawl the farm’s scattered remains.
In the hands of someone with less patience and perspective, they would have been junked. But Evelyn could not bear to dispose of usable objects. Volunteers sorted through the piles and found willing recipients for items like farming equipment (hoes, spades, and the like), household furniture, and other trinkets. Ania snagged some pillows and blankets to donate to her church community. I left with two teapots.
These seemingly small gestures signified how Green Circle’s community continued to prevail. It didn’t end with the farm’s closure. Yes, Green Circle’s supporters had appealed for years to keep the land as it was. But even when it became clear that they would lose the farm, the organising work wasn’t done. Evelyn’s supporters continued to rally around her, offering logistical support, or accompanying her in her grief.
Beyond “salvaging”, I was in awe of the way Evelyn strove to cultivate new life amongst the remnants. She continued to welcome those who sought to converse and to document the farm. She also moved some of her plants to a research plot at a local university. She gave seedlings to eager farmers and gardeners, and offered other farms some of that precious organic soil. My friends and I went home with plant cuttings to propagate small pieces of Green Circle in our gardens.
One afternoon, Evelyn invited us to stay for lunch. We prepared her signature nasi ulam, using a recipe shared with countless visitors over the years. Nasi ulam is a traditional Malay/Indonesian dish of steamed rice mixed with fresh herbs, leaves or vegetables.
We gathered edible flowers from hibiscus and butterfly blue pea blooms; plucked winged beans from the vine; and harvested herbs and edible weeds from the forest floor. The only ingredients not sourced from the food forest were grated coconut and rice from the grocery store.
Nasi ulam connects Evelyn to her Peranakan heritage. It’s also a symbol of her environmental ethic and farming philosophy. Evelyn touted growing what was naturally abundant and native to this region, and her variation of the dish comprised South-east Asian varieties of herbs and vegetables that thrived on her farm.
This adherence to nature’s bounty had sometimes rubbed up against more calculating philosophies. In one of her appeals for an extension to her farm’s lease, a civil servant asked for a list of plant species that she was growing. “When I received that reply, I knew that they didn’t understand my philosophy and [were] on a completely different track.” It was never about the exotic or endangered species that she cultivated on her farms: “The plants that I grow, many of them can be classified as weeds,” she said with a laugh.
Most conservation arguments emphasise the biodiversity of flora and fauna in a natural space. Of particular importance are the rare and endangered species. The approach can be traced back to one of Singapore’s first successfully coordinated public efforts to conserve Chek Jawa, an ecologically significant area.
In the early 2000s, nature groups and volunteers had conducted a biodiversity survey to detail the “rich ecosystems” discovered during walks at low tide, and petitioned the government to reverse their reclamation plans. Not only did they accede to these requests, the Ministry of Development and later NParks took it upon themselves to conserve the area.
In succession, similar efforts were mobilised for Bukit Brown Cemetery to conserve its sprawling greenery and rich cultural heritage. Nature groups also called for the government to redirect the Cross Island Mass Rapid Transit line around the Central Catchment Nature Reserve, instead of tunnelling directly beneath it. Both cases employed the biodiversity argument, with the latter focused on the eastern end of the reserve, which is a stronghold for the critically endangered Raffles’ banded langur.
Green Circle’s own petition echoed a similar language of pragmatism, arguing for conservation on the basis of its “promising scientific value” that might “[support] Singapore’s research initiatives”. The petition also positioned Green Circle as aligned with the Ministry of Sustainability and the Environment’s vision for Singapore, offering it as a case study for “ecological and economic sustainability value.” In this vein, we simultaneously celebrate and mourn the “120 varieties of plants, diverse species of birds (native and migratory—23 species observed in just over one hour), bees, butterflies, reptiles, plantain squirrels and even civet cats” that once lived on Green Circle Eco Farm. That biodiversity was worth conserving.
The language that we use matters. If we only employ scientific language and fight on the basis of data and statistics, we align ourselves with developmental narratives that are pragmatic. What this does is codify the value and essence of a place and its inhabitants as something tangible; but how do we quantify something that is intrinsically invaluable? Instead, we must weave in alternative narratives, and use language that communicates the intangible value imbued in all nature, heritage sites and neighbourhoods, as well as the grief that accompanies loss.
The term “biocultural diversity” is a simple yet expansive concept that may offer us a path forward. These two concepts—biodiversity and culture—are sometimes considered distinct from the other, which reflects the dominant perception that the human world—our language, heritage and culture, technologies—is separate from the natural environment. Biocultural diversity celebrates the diversity of life in all of its manifestations, challenges this distinction. Biocultural diversity encompasses the biological, the cultural, the human, the nonhuman; it suggests that we are more intertwined with our ecological systems than we realise. Just as each human society has its own language and culture, biocultural diversity expands this definition to include the unique set of entanglements, relationships and cultures that exist between humans and non-humans in each site.
In other words, imagine that each space on our island has its own distinct biocultural web; irreplaceable and inexorably lost if it falls to competing land use or a natural disaster.
Evelyn’s nasi ulam encapsulates this tension and loss. Even though her recipe lives on, that plate of nasi ulam I ate, cooked using fresh produce from the food forest, will never again be made. The harvested wing beans and butterfly peas were a unique entanglement of conditions and relationships that cannot be replicated: the microclimate of the farm, the soil biome, the interactions with other neighbouring plants and animals, all interwoven with Evelyn’s ecological philosophy and practice. The dozens of varieties of plants, species of birds, bees, butterflies, reptiles, plantain squirrels and civet cats that lived on the farm had their own intricate and specific interactions with each other and the humans who walked that land.
When we move towards the concept of “biocultural diversity” we have the opportunity to linger in the emotions that we develop for our natural spaces. Having observed how Evelyn interacted with her farm, it was clear that the land wasn’t merely a productive, utilitarian resource she extracted from. It was something that she had spent decades in communion with—breathing life into it, sacrificing time, energy, and compost.
Perhaps if we focused on nurturing deep feelings of attachment, love, and gratitude for the land and oceans that allow us to thrive, we may feel compelled to protect them. To do so, we’d need to change the way we talk about green spaces and our reasons for protecting them.
In April, I visited Evelyn at her house. In the months since returning the farm to the state, she had busied herself with nurturing her own neighbourhood food forest. A little raised platform fronts her home, its surface crowded with pots of soil housing a variety of seedlings, propagated cuttings, and adolescent saplings. This porch was a nursery meant to be transplanted elsewhere so that they could begin life in new edible gardens that Evelyn was overseeing.
A year after the farm’s closure, Evelyn remains hard at work to regenerate the soil and reconnect people with the land. And when I told her of my intention to write this retrospective piece, she listened to my ideas without interrupting. At the end, the only thing she said was that she hoped for the tone of the story to be “positive”, something that could motivate readers to change.
She needn’t have worried. Green Circle’s story is a blueprint of hope for how to carry on despite loss, while continuing to fight to protect each piece of land in Singapore; whether green, man-made or otherwise.
Evelyn and her community had fought until the very end to keep the farm. Today, they have found countless other ways to propagate the spirit of the farm. Community has persisted, which speaks to the richness of Green Circle’s biocultural diversity, one that has fostered deep connections powerful enough to weather change and loss.
Things were permanently lost when Green Circle Eco Farm ceased to be. But the struggle and conflict around competing land use in Singapore aren’t new. We have more places that we hold dear; spaces that we must insist on protecting and that we might still save. As Evelyn has shown, what’s important is how we choose to respond when faced with the imminent loss of spaces that we treasure.
Green Circle’s story lives on.
Ethel Pang is a community weaver, donning the roles of a writer, researcher, and educational facilitator. Her work stretches across Singapore and the broader South-east Asia, where she immerses herself in diverse communities and geographies. With her communities, she actively champions issues like environmentalism, women empowerment, and migrant worker rights. The “Green Circle Documentation Project” will be screened at an exhibition for Singapore Art Week 2024. For more information, e-mail loci.creatives@gmail.com.
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