Organic farming in Southeast Asia




Excerpt from Organic farming in Southeast Asia:

"Johor Green is a Malaysia-based social enterprise focused on a sustainable urban lifestyle. Chris Parry, founder of Johor Green, started the initiative as a side project, after observing the strange lifestyle of Malaysians who were “living” in malls.

Together with Medini Iskandar, a township developer, Parry developed and managed the Medini Green Parks comprising of a four-acre Edible Park and a seven-acre Heritage Forest. The edible park is a landscape and platform for cultivating a community around the current idea of sustainable food, whereas the forest is a wild landscape showcasing the local botanic heritage and re-establishing biodiversity and eco-services.

Parry wanted to merge the idea of local food and native plants with the local context.

“I’m interested in this concept of food sovereignty. I don’t think we have a food security problem here because we still have access to food and a lot of food is grown here. The problem is people are eating the wrong food. So that is food sovereignty, where someone comes in and affects your culture in such a way that you change your mind about what you are supposed to be eating,” he said.

Johor Green has “a program to suggest an alternative” from the unhealthy diet of Malaysians to a more plant-based diet. “Our farm sells organic produce, and our vendors are doing artisanal food, which fits the idea of ‘slow food’ movement, quite the opposite to fast-food,” Parry added.

Johor Green’s edible park is a “hub for organic produce, and we also have a platform for people to knowledge share, which I think is great for urban citizens,” Parry said. The farm also holds nature classes, social gatherings, talks and workshops and also a regular farmers’ market. At the farm, people also learn how to make artisanal and heritage food.

Johor Green’s farmers’ market is also a place where communities gather and share healthy food values with their children, meet up with friends for a meal and connect with others through food and education. Being centrally located in an urban environment is advantageous for a neighbourhood market."

PLACEMAKER WEEK ASEAN SERIES

Chris Parry is the founder of Johor Green, a platform focusing on cultivating green urban lifestyles. He also designed and operates Medini Green Parks, a pair of urban parks in Johor that include an Edible Park (5 acres), and a Heritage Forest (7 acres of urban forest).


We talk with Chris about his work in the Medini Green Parks. Chris is one of the speakers in the ongoing Placemaker Week ASEAN. Tickets are still available, for those keen to attend.

Why does Medini Green Parks include 5 acres of edible landscape, and how does it affect the community around it?

I knew edible landscapes to be a successful idea having lived in New York City, and seeing markets, cafes and food-growing spaces embedded in parks and botanical gardens with regular programming. I also knew that the edible landscapes of my youth — neighbourhood fruit trees and small plantations in Malaysia — were fast disappearing.

Edible Park now allows visitors a blend of those two things; direct encounters with our past like heirloom fruit trees and pepper vines, as well as new ideas like edible flowers and organic vegetables farmed in the city. It allows community engagement at our markets, socials and workshops; is a resource for sustainable ingredients; and a platform for chefs and artisanal food makers.

How did you plan for the landscaping of the Heritage Forest?

I’m influenced by Piet Oudolf‘s work which combines native plant choices and a ‘wild’ planting style to evoke natural landscapes and a site’s ecological history. It’s different from the design of our parks and gardens which are usually manicured beds and lawns.

The site itself suggested some ideas, with a hill slope for wildflowers and stream side planting. I laid out areas like a perfume forest and a healing forest that showcase local flora and the ethnobotanic connections our various communities have with these plants.

The design strategy was also to create content for tours and workshops, which we could use to engage the community.

How does the environment have an impact on mental health?

There is a lot of emerging science about the effects of exposure to nature, from simply de-stressing to reduction of early onset dementia. There is an ‘attention restoration theory’ that asserts that spending time in nature provides measurable benefits to cognitive function.

Providing a nature-based escape can help an urbanite deal with negative impacts of city life, which are both social and environmental, and include increased anxiety, risk of psychosis, sleep impairment, and depression. Exercising and learning in outdoor environments also yield better outcomes.

In your essay, Eat Your Landscape, you discuss the issue of food sovereignty over food security in our local context. Are we really losing touch with our food sovereignty? Is this a question of class divide in food consumption?

The cultural influence and corporate reach of globalisation has fundamentally changed supply and demand in our food systems. Our urban environments now reflect this with fast food and convenience stores filled with unhealthy snacks replacing our traditional food supply of sundry stores, wet markets and warungs.

Our health outcomes are proof of the huge problem this has become. Malaysians are increasingly overweight. Malaysian children are both obese and malnourished at the same time. The top ten reasons we die include factors related to lifestyle and food. The global phenomenon is that lower income classes are primary targets for fast food consumption. Food corporations utilise advertising; addictive combinations of fat, sugar, and salt; and property ownership in dense city centres to secure their custom.

Here in Malaysia, the working middle class are similarly trapped in urban environments that don’t provide the healthier options that our heritage foods once did.

Are there issues raised in conversations regarding the climate crisis that placemakers in Southeast Asia should keep in mind?

Large corporations and malls drive the embedded values and outcomes of high consumption, and the waste and energy costs it generates in our cities. Placemakers must consider providing opportunities for alternative narratives and behaviours to impact the climate crisis. Hugely important is refrigerant management, and in South East Asia this means air-conditioning.

Outdoor activities, walkable cities, and green spaces become important solutions, as do alternatives based on experiences to replace lifestyles based on product consumerism.

Chris Parry is one of the speakers at the inaugural Placemaker Week ASEAN, 4–8 Nov 2019.

PLACEMAKER WEEK ASEAN SERIES: Chris Parry on environment, cultivation and consumption

Three Pavillions

Architecture Malaysia Issue 1 | 2019

Edible Park is a five acre edible landscape and platform for cultivating community around sustainable living values situated in the business district of Medini City, Iskandar Puteri. It is part of a larger initiative of a series of boutique urban parks titled Medini Green Parks, designed around sustainable principles and current thinking in urban green space.

Two pavillion buildings, the Studio and Cafe, designed by Y.architects, anchor the site inspired by the tropical umbrella with deep overhangs on angled ribs that reach out from the core structures. The buildings are designed to accommodate the place making activities of social enterprise JOGreen who harness the venue to develop community around new ideas of sustainable living, zero waste management, green entrepreneurship and farm to table dining.

“Climate place and time”, underlies y.architects’ approach with all their work, which resonates with this project’s primary mission to bring people back outside to spend time in nature. Airy and porous, the pavillions deeply connected with the landscaping that climb and circle the structures, provide shade and refuge yet never disconnects the visitors experience with the natural environment that surrounds them. The landscape design by Chris Parry both intertwines with the buildings and provides the content for the parks narrative of ‘edible’ incorporating a wide array of edible roots, shoots, herbs, flowers and foliage curated into an assortment of edible landscapes: groves, orchards, flower gardens, farm and patios.

Informed by the vernacular of local heritage tropical buildings, the buildings assume contemporary modernity in their material and aesthetic choices of prefabricated steel, stencilled concrete floors and walls that double up as chalkboards for wall murals and cafe menus. The space quickly transforms with roll down blinds, pop up tents and folding chairs to accommodate inclement weather and the swell of visitors on market days and festivals. Fan cooling, rainwater harvesting, LED lighting and solar lit pathways add to the visitors immersion in sustainable features.

The Studio, stands on a low hill with a tower rising out of a flower garden adding to its prominence and visibility from the road circling the site. It’s skeletal nature of metal frame with a skin of wire mesh feels light and sketched into the landscape its volume shifting over time as the creepers mature and flower. Yoga, soap making and nature classes for kids, talks, forums and dance performances are some of the ways this pavilion comes to life.

More nested, almost hidden in tall vegetation of sugar cane, bamboos and ginger plants, the Cafe’s overhangs are further enhanced with a fabric canopy at the front and shade structure at the back. A farm stand with produce from the park’s one acre urban farm and plant based cafe fare are available at weekends with the offering amplified every first Saturday of the month with an additional twenty or so vendors who bring more local, organic, artisanal and handmade offerings.

The site includes a recently completed third building: a washroom, its upturned roof housing a rainwater harvest tank to be hidden by climbers set in a citrus grove and planting selected for fragrance. There are also three small expandable market structures with planted green roofs that line the front of the park expanding the venue space when there are festivals, and a small nursery structure that services the farm. All of the above echo the same architectural language of light frames integrated into the planted landscape.

The park has since its launch in March 2018 quickly captured the interest of an emerging demographic of this new city, a vibrant mix of locals, expatriates, part and full time Singaporeans, tourists and new arrivals from other parts of Malaysia who have found work or homes in this ambitious development. This is not only visitors but also vendors and enterprises that partner in the parks activities.






Medini Iskandar Malaysia Sdn Bhd ("MIM") is the
master planner and master developer of the
2,230-acre urban township Medini, located in the
Central Business District of Iskandar Puteri is
managing and maintaining the Medini Edible Park.

Iskandar Puteri City council (MBIP) is the local
authority which administrates Iskandar Puteri City in
Johor, Malaysia. MBIP is currently the land owner of
Medini Edible Park.

labDNA is the place-making consultant for Iskandar
Puteri, which strategizes the urban development of
public realm and help build communities through
tactical alliances and programming.

JOGREEN is a social enterprise focussed on
cultivating a green and sustainable urban lifestyle.
They currently operate the Edible Park as an edible
landscape and platform for cultivating community
around innovative ideas of sustainable living.

Eat Your Landscape

DSC_0051.JPG
“Breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.” Henry Thoreau

Introduction
Eating, and drinking has been inextricably tied to the bounty of the landscape around us since time immemorial. We hunted and gathered from streams and forests then we ploughed fields and pastured animals. Our prowess at agriculture and husbandry, our mastery of fire and fermentation would change yields, palatability and storage life but not the essential ecological relationship that bound us with the natural world.

That did not breach until industrialisation and its global expansion facilitated changes that would redefine how we eat. Factory farming would make what was once scarce - the dense nutrition of meat and dairy, more easily available and we no longer needed to wait for the dictate of seasons or suffer the limits of geography to enjoy eating whatever, whenever and cheaply. Global sourcing, economies of scale and the abuse of an invisible labour force allowed for a defining feature of modern food, cheap prices.

As the consequences of these changes became apparent, diminishing flavour, poor nutrition, failing health and the new cultural phenomena of eating fast food alone in a car or in front of a TV, it triggered a civil society response on both sides of the Atlantic that would evolve into a full fledged food movement, joining other great social movements of the 20th Century - labour, environment, civil rights, climate and feminist.

A Food Movement Emerges
It was American landscape designer, Rosalind Creasy who coined the term edible landscape back in 1982 with her book ‘The Complete Book of Edible Landscaping’ and gave a name to the repurposing of idle 20th century suburban lawns back to Victorian era kitchen gardens. People were rediscovering the joys of fresh, heirloom produce grown in their own back yard.

Around the same time in Europe, a slow food movement born out of protest against the arrival of McDonald’s in Rome, urged the preservation of local food traditions and renewed appreciation of the culinary artisan’s toil and craft. This was echoed back in the USA as the eat local movement championed local food grown within a hundred mile radius rationalizing that the shorter distances travelled guaranteed more flavour, nutrition and less impact on the environment in terms of carbon miles.

In 1996, Alice Walters transformed a vacant school lot near her famous restaurant in Berkeley into an organic garden. Whilst her intent was to reconnect school children with the idea of fresh nutritious food and teach them how to grow it, she was also shining a light on something new, the social injustice of low income families, having poor access to fresh food. Her edible schoolyard was the only source of fresh produce in their immediate urban landscape crowded out by fast food corporations who had begun to dominate the neighbourhood.

Michael Pollan’s investigative revelations in The Omnivore’s Dilemna in 2006 revealed even more sinister mechanisms of food and agriculture corporations and what he described as ‘industrial’ eating. Ingredients your grandmother would not recognize, without names only numbers, synthesized into ‘food like substances’ prioritizing high amounts of sugar, salt and fats that are able to create a psychological dependence on them. Studies since then continue to show the powerful connection between industrial food and their link to the epidemic of obesity and diabetes globally.

Along this timeline many other grassroot initiatives like animal rights, climate change justice and resistance against genetically modified foods would braid together into a movement of movements. New terminology would arise to describe problems and solutions like locavores, zero waste, food justice, artisanal. Fractious as the ideas are, the desire for an energy and health conscious, smaller-scale, more humane food system can be identified as the core shared values of this new food movement.

The Malaysian Context
Here in Malaysia triggered by concerns of toxicity and food safety grow your own food has gained momentum. Green markets are enjoying popularity as urban folk seek out organic produce from farmers utilising sustainable methods. But there are still more ideas from the bigger tent of the food movement that have yet to gain ground. There are also philosophic underpinnings to the movement that have yet to translate into our own cultural context.

For example, I often hear the term food security used to describe imminent threat to our food system but it is not an accurate take on our local situation. Yes we are seeing the beginnings of the problem as neighbourhoods get colonized by fast food chains and hypermarkets displace our sundry stores, food stalls and traditional wet markets. But we have yet to see the desiccation of neighbourhoods into food deserts where no fresh food is available at all or the complete disappearance of local agricultural systems.

Our real issue here is food sovereignty which relates to the cultural aspect of heritage food systems. It is actually what precedes a food security problem when local culture and neighbourhoods become overwhelmed with globalized ideas about food and lose ground to the economic power of the corporations that colonize these urban landscapes.

We’ve traded a heritage of complex recipes full of locally sourced ingredients many exhibiting reparative and even medicinal properties to one of limited non native ingredients that actually cause harm. The nutritional wisdom embedded in heritage foods like noodles in collagen rich bone broths and the complex plant based offerings on a banana leaf are in stiff competition with burgers, chicken slime nuggets and super foods with incredulous nutritional powers. It doesn’t help also that we are awash with conflicting information about food as new studies declare new villains and heroes every week.

It's an abstract idea to grasp but the food we choose to eat can be acts of land conservation. What was once pictured as our native landscape of coconut trees, pineapple farms and kelongs is fast disappearing from view. The coconut milk we buy comes from coconuts grown in Batam the barren sand filled Straits devoid of kelongs and the few remaining pineapple farms far from view of our new highways. I hear from friends who once owned fruit orchards that they have converted them to palm oil because of higher returns and lower management costs which demonstrates the simple economics of what is happening here - as we change our tastes and values away from our heritage and geography, we also change the views of landscape that we once enjoyed.

As we shift our taste for produce that can only grow in the cooler climes of Cameron Highlands and want it cheap as well, we adversely affect the local communities there who suffer flooding as a direct result of deforestation. Hidden in those farms are also illegal immigrant farm workers deprived of lawful protection of their rights and proper protection from chemical exposure. If cheap food is blind to the inhumane treatment of humans, animals are even further back in line. Ideas of social justice, that what we eat should not impact marginalized communities and other living beings has sadly not found sufficient articulation here yet.

A Delicious Revolution
My interest in detailing the concepts and ideas about the food movement is biased as I have been involved in conceptualizing and designing a 4 acre Edible Park in Medini, Iskandar Puteri as part of their Medini Green Parks initiative that will be a showcase for green and sustainable urban living. When open in December 2017 the social enterprise I founded JOGreen will run it as a platform for individuals and entrepreneurs working in the front lines of the food movement to engage with the general public.

Eat your landscape will be its central mission as we provide an immersive environment in a sustainably managed edible landscape replete with orchards, gardens, an organic urban farm servicing the local neighbourhood, a plant based cafe and a studio space where all kinds of edible related skills can be learned from composting to sustainable cooking.

Alice Waters described the food movement as a delicious revolution and it is this spirit that I am most keen to cultivate here, not just the pragmatics of growing food but also the community, identity, pleasure, and its potential as a new social and economic space. Yes, gardening and growing your own food these days can be acts of environmental activism and civic rebellion against corporate food and agriculture but gardeners and farmers are also really nice people who love what they do and are happy to share cuttings and advice.

The green markets we have been running, which we will bring to the park, are also social spaces where you are not just a customer but an expat, a parent, a cook talking to a farmer, a baker or a gardener, and having ten times as many conversations as you would at a supermarket. Building an inclusive vibrant community around these ideas are also primary to our aims.

We are collaborating with local chefs, providing them with our herbs, flowers, salad greens and harder to find vegetables because we want to harness their creative energy to showcase our sustainably grown local produce. Our gardens have interesting design ideas from monochromatic colour schemes to exuberant cottage garden style profuse with flowers in the hope of seducing our visitors to take those ideas home to their own gardens.

Creativity and aesthetics are the secret ingredient in making edible landscapes desirable and aspirational and help you forget the drudge of all that digging and weeding and slaving in the hot sun. Innovation is also an energy we want to harness around ideas gaining popularity like botanic beverages, plant and insect based alternative proteins and flowers as a new food ingredient.

The food movement is rising, the revolution is here. Come share our table outside in the fresh air, eat the fruits of our labour, drink our flower infused beverages, and resign yourself to the influence of our Malaysian landscape.

Chris Parry
Originally published in Kool, the official journal to Iskarnival Kool, Nov 2017

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