Earth Calling: How the quest for good salad led Benjamin Swan to launch an urban farming company

For perspective, importing a kilogram of lettuce from Brisbane, for example, generates 7.2 kilograms of carbon dioxide. Other added benefits to Swan’s approach include reducing deforestation, bringing traceability to where our food comes from and eradicating nitrogen run‑off into waterways—an often overlooked but extremely harmful side effect of industrial farming that creates algae blooms that not only kill marine life, but also emit nitrous oxide, which is worse for the ozone layer than carbon dioxide.

“There’s a lot of good that [vertical farming] brings to the market,” says Swan. “But it’s a difficult and expensive way to grow produce and it’s not going to move the needle for us globally in [terms of ] where we need to be for a more resilient food future.”

The further down the rabbit hole Swan went, the more he realised that not only was vertical farming possible, but it was also crucial to the future of food security and sustainable agriculture. “It was in doing this study that I learnt about the impact of traditional farming, and what scared me the most was that no one was really talking about it,” says Swan. “Like the fact that 30 to 40 per cent of produce is wasted just getting it to the end consumer; or that when it comes to highly perishable products such as herbs and leafy greens, that can be as much as 70 per cent wasted.”

ALL SYSTEMS GROW

And so Swan got to work. He began drawing renderings of what he thought the growing space should look like. “The idea was to pack as many plants as possible inside a building, so I can maximise the output and offset my rent. It’s all about critical mass,” he explains.

Then he built the infrastructure, including the racking system that he now has a patent for. His first rack was in a basement under his business partner’s swimming pool. At the time, Swan, who was still working at Citibank, was on calls with clients in New York until 1 am or 2 am, then checking on his crops, taking measurements and recording his findings, until the wee hours of the morning.

This went on for 18 months; Swan would select seeds, adjust the nutrition for his crops and the lighting in the basement, and strategise from a spatial perspective how to pack more rows of crops in. “It was a lot of trial and error, and that’s where the engineering side came in; but when it came to the plants themselves, I was learning about everything from scratch,” he says. “It was all theoretical, so I just had to have an idea and take it for a ride.”

His patience and persistence paid off, and in 2013, Swan launched Sustenir, an urban farming company in Singapore that grows non‑native crops in indoor vertical farms all year round, through CEA. Not only that, but the crops are pesticide‑ and chemical‑free, use 95 per cent less water than traditional farms and, thanks to a clean growing environment and significantly shorter travelling distances, are far more nutritious than their imported counterparts. Sustenir’s Kinky Kale, for instance, is found to have six times more manganese, an antioxidant that may help to reduce or prevent cancer cells; three times more vitamin C; and 60 per cent more calcium.

Sustenir’s produce also tastes better, which is not by accident. “What I learnt was not only can you grow these impossible products in a basement, but you can also use technology to influence change … By changing the air temperature or humidity, you can accentuate the plant, making products taste better so they’re more palatable to the consumer,” shares Swan. The kale, for example, is less bitter than traditional kale to cater to Singaporean palates. Sustenir’s Almighty Arugula, meanwhile, is distinctly peppery compared to its imported counterparts, which lose their flavour and nutritional value during the shipping and cold storage processes.

Turns out the apple did not fall far from the tree. Swan’s great‑grandmother is Maria Ann Smith, who cultivated the first Granny Smith apple: the story goes that she threw apple cores discarded from baking pies out of her kitchen window and seedlings began to grow. She propagated the seedlings to grow the sweet, crisp Granny Smith apples consumers continue to enjoy to this day.

“And that’s the thing: we’ve lost touch with food. It’s now become just calories that we consume, and we value it on price point,” says Swan. “That’s a really sad thing.”

The breakthrough moment for him was in 2018—a moment Swan refers to as his “inflection point”—when he realised that the different components of his growing system were “fragmented” and “not talking to each other”. As Sustenir continued to grow, this became a major source of frustration and financial liability. “The technology wasn’t being designed to work efficiently as part of an ecosystem,” he says. With support from the Singaporean government, Swan and his team were able to build a complete, cohesive growing system that replicated the rhythms of nature. “In doing that, my total utilities cost came down by 48 per cent and my yield went up by more than 30 per cent. My capital expenditure came down by 70 per cent,” he says. “I had done my job.”

In December 2021, Swan stepped down from his role as CEO of Sustenir, where he remains on the board, to found agtech venture fund Beco Ventures. Beco’s approach to solving current and future agricultural challenges is to look at farming practices holistically through an integrated platform, providing full turnkey greenhouse systems and upgrades to existing greenhouse infrastructure to increase productivity.

ANOTHER LEVEL

Beco’s integrated platform is called Deme OS, after Demeter, the Greek goddess of the harvest. “I saw that the industry needed help, and I’d personally gone through it,” says Swan. “Not a lot of people around the world have both created technology for high‑tech indoor farming, [and] operated it and created a consumer brand. So let us come in with you and let us be that peer review, that sounding board.”

With traditional farming, farmers are limited to the amount of space available on the ground level. But with vertical farming, the sky is quite literally the limit. In places such as Singapore and Hong Kong, where roughly only 1 per cent of the land is used for farming, indoor farms offer a sustainable and profitable solution. While land is scarce, what these regions do have is a lot of buildings.

“We can utilise these buildings and go from 4 kilograms to over 600 kilograms per square metre,” says Swan. It is a process he refers to as “intensive farming”, a way to reduce farming footprints not only to grow significantly more crops with less space but also as a solution to potentially reinstate forests. “Unlike Sustenir, which is wholly owned and we grow and sell our own products, what we’re doing at Beco is democratising farming assets so [that] every farmer can get the same equipment, standardising all these assets and [operating procedures] so you’re not only getting greater consistency, but also disrupting a major problem the industry has, which is financing.”

Since founding Beco, Swan has worked with the Singapore government to develop a top‑down, good‑to‑go “playbook” where, eventually, this technology can be taken to places such as Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and even the Maldives, which relies heavily on imported produce and is where Swan is currently working with hotels and the local government to develop farming solutions. “That’s where Beco comes in to work with the farmers to help them adopt the technology,” says Swan. “We can guarantee it will work well.”

Always eager to learn and do more, Swan is also working with Dean Ho, who is currently the director of The Institute for Digital Medicine, director of The N.1 Institute for Health, and head of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the National University of Singapore, to develop new ways of using technology to optimise crop growing. “[Ho] has created an algorithm where if you have a disease, it will match a combination of different medicines in the market that will specifically hone in [on] and target the disease for that particular individual,” Swan explains. “Taking those same principles and applying them to farming, and through captured data, we can pinpoint exactly what seed works best with what nutrition and which tools, and help [farmers] curate these growth recipes and maximise the outputs. More importantly, with the data insights we generate in real time, it provides a North Star compass to show where innovation needs to happen.”

Much like his operating systems, Swan recognises that for the effects of intensive farming to become meaningful, everyone—consumers, farmers, governments and even the so‑called enemies of the green movement—needs to work together. He has been working with multinational oil and gas company Shell to upcycle waste to reduce the cost and improve the economics of his growing systems. “We have the oil and gas company emitting tonnes of carbon dioxide into the ozone,” says Swan, who is also on the board of WWF‑Singapore. “That’s a commodity for plants, which eat carbon dioxide; when you enrich grow chambers with more carbon dioxide, you can potentially enjoy a 30 to 40 per cent increase in critical mass.”

It is proof that working together to meet a shared goal, and providing solutions that are not just sustainable but good for business, is the only way forward. “It’s impossible to deny the severity of the environmental problems we face today, and the doomsday predictions from some may leave us feeling overwhelmed and powerless. But as a species, we have a remarkable track record of rising to the challenge, learning quickly and innovating in the face of adversity. With the knowledge and technology we have at our fingertips, we can use our resources more efficiently and work towards a more resilient future,” says Swan. “There’s still a long way to go and we must all play our part in creating positive change. So let’s embrace this challenge with determination and courage, knowing that we have the tools and the will to create a better world for ourselves and future generations. We’ve got this.”

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