The owners of Green Acres Orchard and Ecolodge, Kim and Eric Chong, are members of the Slow Food International movement founded by Carlo Petrini in Italy in 1986. Slow Food is a global, grassroots organisation with supporters in 150 countries around the world who are linking the pleasure of good food with a commitment to their community and the environment. It strives to encourage farming, seed planting and livestock characteristic of the local ecosystem to provide sustainable foods.
In 2014, as a family, they were invited to participate in the Terra Madre Slow Food Festival in Torino, Italy in conjunction with the United Nation's Year of International Farming Families. Green Acres exhibited their farm's heirloom species of nutmegs and cloves under Slow Food's Ark Of Taste showcase in the festival.
Green Acres is built on dreams of giving the couple's son, Adric, then only 5 years old, a safer, healthier and more experiential learning environment in a working farm.
A visit to Green Acres takes you a step back to memory lane reconnecting with our roots and practical lifestyle of our forefathers. Every farm visit made a family affair, Eric does the talking - sharing with guests the experience of sustainable farming first hand while walking the orchard. Kim does the preparation - preparing tasting sessions, farm brews and setting everything up to ensure a memorable experience. Adric, our son, is the entertainer - takes the children around with his bag of surprises (the magic seed, egg hunting in the chicken coop and fish feeding).
Mascot of the farm is Ciku, our beagle, born in June 2019. Ciku has brown, black and white hair, colours resembling the ciku fruit. She is our companion dog at the farm, after Sally, our 10-year-old beagle and the farm's much loved mascot, passed away on 15 March 2019.
Ciku keeps everyone safe at Green Acres as the early warning system.
Our journey began in 2008 when we put down the down payment for our farm without having the slightest inkling of what farming entailed. What convinced us to continue with what the previous three generations of farmers did before us was the taste of the fruits and eggs which came with the farm. The taste of the produce was vastly different from the ones bought from our usual stores.
It was a taste which brought us back to our grandparents’ time where eggs actual had such a rich taste on its own and could be eaten without soy sauce. The fruits from this farm had such a huge range of flavours. We could really eat the durians and rambutans without fear of having sore throats the next day. We felt like we had stumbled on a goldmine of how nature intended her fruits of labour to taste like.
As we continued our journey of relearning how conscientious farmers brought their products to the table, we decided that it would be of great injustice to these brands of farmers if we did not do anything to share their pride and knowledge they had in their production of chemical free food. That’s how we came about to open the doors of our farm to share the taste of food and preserve the local knowledge of traditional farming which we now call organic farming.
If you have somewhere where you can exercise in a rejuvenating environment and your exercise provides you with great tasting food, then it’s a 360 degree ‘chiak kah liau’ (win win) situation. Living the good life should be the goal now and not when you’re retired.
A few years ago, we conducted a little survey with 50 random kids under the age of 12. We asked the kids which of the two types of half boiled eggs they preferred.
Type A – supermarket (Tesco) eggs.
Type B – eggs from our free-range chickens.
80% of the kids preferred Type A eggs.
Type B eggs had a strong taste and smell which they were not used to.
When our younger generation picks food which are mass produced, we are not doing justice to them. We need to allow them to make better choices. To give the kids the tools to choose, we need them to come to the farm and experience for themselves how good food is grown and how we need to be more sustainable in growing our own food.
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