Artisan Green Singapore

This interview details Artisan Green, an indoor farming company based in the Singapore. The interview is with Ray Poh, Founder and Managing Director of Artisan Green Singapore.

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What is the origin story of Artisan Green?

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Artisan Green’s origin started off in 2016 as an idea amongst the bustling casino floors of Macau. At that time, I had been in the casino gaming industry for over five years and was away from Singapore for over a decade. As interesting as the gaming industry had been, I wanted to try my hand at something completely different with a strong focus on sustainability and forward-looking for the future.

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During that time, I chanced upon an article on vertical farming and the idea of marrying the traditional industry of agriculture and technology grew on me. Armed with the idea, I carried out my research and built prototypes of grow systems in 2017, which resulted in our first farm build in Singapore in 2018.

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When it came to choosing a name to represent our farm, I wanted the name to imbue elements of the craftmanship us farmers go through to grow crops (Artisan) and also incorporate the sustainability aspect of it (Green). In addition, Artisan Green was chosen as the initials AG is an acrostic that represents the abbreviation of ‘agriculture’.

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What are some of the biggest challenges facing Artisan Green in the future?

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We are currently embarking on our next iteration of our farm, scaling from a 300m2 to a 5,500m2 production farm through process automation and developing our farming platform. The challenges that we currently face would be more on the regulatory side of the business as it is a farm of substantial scale in land-scarce Singapore. We are in a unique position whereby our demand is more than what we are able to supply, thus presenting a need for us to increase the size of our farm.

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With any novel businesses, we recognise that there will be more challenges ahead but we have always persevered and overcame any hurdles we have been presented. Whilst there may be other local farms in the market, we believe that the main competition comes from that of overseas farms as imports constitutes most of the produce we eat here in Singapore.

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What is unique about Artisan Green compared to competitors?

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We are proud of that fact that we have built our farm up with our own two hands and with this experience, we are able to tweak and improve on the system design for an efficient and word-class system for farm operators. We have never shied away from growing hard to grow crops such as baby spinach, and till now our produce have been out best promoter with the exceptional quality speaking for itself.

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Basing our farm design on first principles, we have a system that is unique whereby it is designed for crop modularity and most importantly, scalability. Our focus on our farming platform allows us to centralise R&D and digitise plant scientists and this allows us to grow anywhere in the world with our software taking on the role of farmers. This increases our productivity and positions us as a R&D and growing platform whereby all our knowledge can be scaled through our farming management system.

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How do you measure the impact of your company so far? (Revenue, Employees, Customer Quantity, Production Volume) etc?

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Customers consistently give us feedback that our produce quality surpasses that of what they usually get from the supermarkets and that encourages us as we know we are moving in the right direction. As a team, we are always excited to roll out new products and solve problems together, and being amongst a cohesive team is another aspect where I feel plays a major impact in the company. Looking back over the past four years of us producing food for the local community makes us even more determined to roll out our next farm to grow more produce and contribute to greater awareness of local agriculture and self sufficiency.

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What have you learned that you wish you knew when you joined the company?

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Starting off in 2018, I knew that plant science would be crucial for our operations, but I was surprised by the level of scientific knowledge needed to run the farm efficiently. Having the base knowledge would have helped us plan better and this became the reason why we have embarked on our farming platform development in order to help people farm better worldwide. Having this knowledge would have shaved off years of trial and error and allow people to farm more economically and efficiently.

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‍How can people connect with you or learn more about Artisan Green?‍

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The community can contact us through our social media channels, website or my email as we welcome all feedback and ideas about our farm:

Facebook and Instagram: @artisan.green

Website: www.artisan.green

Email: ray@artisan.green

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