For Gordon Tam, food safety is personal. A sufferer of eczema, Tam experiences painful skin irritation and swelling after eating certain foods, and he knows first-hand how important the provenance of the produce we eat is to our health.

Farm66, the company of which he is founder and CEO, aims to address that with self-contained indoor farming systems that also promise to tackle the shortage of fresh produce in Hong Kong, a city that only produces about one per cent of its food locally. With racks of produce layered on top of each other to maximise available space, it grows its vegetables using so-called aquaponics, a system in which plants grow in nutrient-rich water that also contains fish, whose waste feeds the plants, which in turn filter the water for the fish. Featured in the Forbes Asia 100 to Watch list— which showcases notable start-ups on the rise across the Asia Pacific region—the company uses its own patented LED lighting system and plentiful data to tightly control every aspect of the crop it produces.

Building upon research

The idea for the system initially came to Tam when he was in college, studying for a masters in sustainable development. His research involved looking at how to remodel old industrial buildings. Tam soon realised that, with their plentiful space and easily controlled conditions—without extreme weather or pest issues—they’d make ideal environments for agriculture.

Ten years ago, he left his job as an architect and started researching indoor farming, working out of a small space in an old industrial building in Kwun Tong. With no examples of other similar companies to follow, it was largely a matter of trial and error.

“We built the whole thing up by ourselves,” he says. “That first year, we couldn’t produce any products; it was purely research. We studied how to balance the environment, society and economics. We started by using hydroponics, but hydroponics mostly uses chemical fertilisers. With aquaponics, we use fish to create natural fertiliser for the plants, and the plants clean the water for the fish.”

Indoor farming means everything can be guaranteed organic. Outdoors, says Tam, organic farming relies on expensive fertilisers and isn’t guaranteed to remain pesticide-free. But indoor farming comes with its own challenges.

“The problem indoors is that we don’t have sunshine so we cannot create photosynthesis. Then we discovered about LED technology. We’ve had good results: we can control the height, shape, colour and taste using photosynthesis, with different lighting. We patented our wavelength technology in 2014.”

“We collect a lot of data, and we know how to make things grow however people want. We can control the shape of vegetables—it’s so exciting. You want a basil leaf bigger than your face? I can produce a solution as we have grown a basil leaf in 2020, which is bigger than my face. We’re completely different from traditional farmers. Some people say we’re not farmers, we’re scientists,” says Tam.