Sowing seeds
> Langit Collective’s message to Malaysians is to be conscious of our own local produce
and smallholder farmers. The Langit story began with the rice where the four were brought together as colleagues and spent a lot of time doing non-profit work in rural communities in Sabah and Sarawak. “We stayed with our host families where we had their rice, and we were really surprised that Malaysia still had good, quality grains around. It happened really organically and in 2015, we brought in 30kg of rice, packaged it for Christmas and sold it to see if there were any response – and we got people asking for more,” Chen said. Langit Collective offers three varieties – Beras Adan (white rice), Beras Sia (red rice) and Beras Item (black rice) which have a soft texture, and each smells and tastes different. Adan is a very fine and small grain and when cooked, it is very fluffy, fragrant and sticky; unlike the white rice we know. Most first timers would say they cannot feel the rice.
What you see in the market is usually brown rice, but Sia is red rice and tastes a little nutty. Meanwhile, Item is very rich with a pandan taste to it. It also has a very sweet smell which will permeate throughout the house when you cook it.
The Lun Bawang community painstakingly plants these varieties by hand and are subsistence farmers, meaning they plant for their own consumption and any surplus will be sold for additional income. But there is no saying if they can sell the rice, and they pay a transporter who charges a certain amount to bring them and their produce down from the highlands.
“If it happens to be the season for rice, the price will decline and their rice are competing against rice coming from Indonesia which can be sold at a very low price. It doesn’t make sense for them to sell at that price point when they have worked so hard for it so some rather not sell. And when