ENSURING FOOD SECURITY
It is quite rare to see a woman take the lead in the farming industry, even more so when said farm i s p owered b y t echnology – a nother fi eld typically associated with males. That is why meeting Eleanor Choong, the Chief Operating Officer of Sunway XFarms, feels like a breath of fresh air that is both interesting and inspiring. The mother of two children (and two fur kids, she adds) leads a team of 12, all with the aim of addressing food security in Malaysia via farms currently strewn about underutilised spaces like rooftops and carparks around Bandar Sunway, with fresh produce made available through weekly, monthly and annual subscriptions.
Embracing the future of farming, the agritech urban farming start-up aimed at nourishing communities with pesticide-free produce makes use of data from the sensors at their farms for live farming updates. Automatically detecting when nutrients and water levels are low, turning fans and lights on and off to create an optimum temperature, and estimating predictions on what their yield would be in the next few weeks help avoid food wastage. Eleanor tells us how the journey is fruitful (metaphorically and literally) as well as an exciting one for the future of Malaysia.
Even before joining Sunway XFarms you seem to have a very extensive background as a venture builder, tell us more about that.
I spent two years in England and one year in South Korea studying Business. Right after that I s pent five years with a t ech s tart-up mainly focusing on Asia Pacific and that led me to develop my own business and a tech recruitment platform for a year and a half, before joining iFlix, focusing on regional business development. During that time, I also cofounded a couple of brands on my own; a handmade bags and crafts brand, Bagimu, and my own consultancy firm, Project Eighty Ventures, because of my network with Korea.
I have always been passionate about how I can turn an idea into reality. How to develop something that could really improve lives and the status quo – challenging myself to do things differently. Being able to develop something into a viable business or skill has always been a passion of mine, and that’s how I stumbled across Sunway XFarms.
Tell us more about Sunway XFarms and how you came to lead it.
They needed someone to be a venture builder, someone who could bring in innovation from the outside to their existing businesses and find opportunities to build something from within. I was doing both – running the start-up accelerator and incorporating them into our ecosystem. Agrifood tech was an area we felt we had the expertise internally. We have so little agriculture land, and most of it are for palm oil and other commodities rather than the food we consume. In the supermarket you see all kinds of labels – food from Mexico, Australia and U.S. – and they seem cool, but when you think about sustainability and the nutrition that is lost as they travel from one country to the other, the inefficiencies throughout the food chain got me really keen to see how we could do something about it. We wanted to build the farms ourselves, we wanted to learn how to grow different kinds of food you wouldn’t typically think of being grown here, and how to have these farms right next to the everyday consumer. We have a concept where we want to build farms within 5 km of every vicinity. If there are roadblocks or other logistical issues, people can just walk over to our farm.
What’s next for Sunway XFarms?
Going into our second year, we’re building a new farm on the rooftop of Sunway Hotel and will be supplying our crops to the upcoming Gordon Ramsey restaurant. We are planning to launch a new outdoor farm in Sunway Pyramid as well. Our main goal and vision is to address food security. In order to do that we need to go large. We’re looking at a space in downtown KL in the third quarter of this year and possibly up North and down South in Peninsula Malaysia.
What is it like being a woman in the agritech industry?
I never really thought about the whole gender thing, being a woman in this industry. But when I think about it, our partners – from the suppliers to the vendors, it is quite a male dominated field. The first five to six people in my team were all females and it was a coincidence. A majority of our team are females. As women we know there are challenges when you start a family and have responsibilities to juggle, but I see that those in my team who have evolved in their lives, like motherhood and such, are still so passionate about the field. Compared to traditional farming, urban farming has its benefits and is a lot easier to manage. I would encourage more females to venture into agritech.