On a bright December afternoon, food lovers of all ages curious about regenerative farming gathered in Kam Tin, in Hong Kong’s New Territories, for our first Slow Food Farms tour for a hands-on immersion into our city’s growing regenerative food movement.
This year marks an exciting chapter for Slow Food Hong Kong, as we proudly welcomed our first cohort of seven Slow Food Farms. These farms embody Slow Food’s core philosophy: that everyone deserves food that is good for our health, clean for the planet, and fair to the farmers and communities who produce it, and central to all this is farming using agroecological principles. The tour to Organic Farmula and R-Farm was a chance to see this in action.
Our first stop was R-Farm, run by farmer Chris. Chris explained how his farm uses different techniques like minimising soil disturbance for a resilient ecosystem, and amazed all the kids (and the adults, to be fair) with his myriad farming tools made for working as a solo farmer – for instance, all his beds are 80cm wide, as are his key tools.
Chris then brought out crisp, just-harvested radishes and we crunched into them – the texture and intensity of flavour flooded our senses – it was a delicious lesson in how caring for the soil directly translates to more nutritious and tasty food.
A short walk brought us next door to the second farm on the tour: the impressive Organic Farmula, a 1.65-acre plot operated by the dedicated Kelvis, who started out using regular certified organic methods but soon found her crops and soil suffering.
Kelvis guided us through what it means to farm regeneratively. Regenerative farming goes beyond “organic” – it actively works to restore and improve soil health by working with nature, building the soil microbiome which not only helps grow more nutrient-dense food, but also stores carbon from the atmosphere, thereby supporting climate change. We saw this first hand as Kelvis showed us how she makes compost teas and bioactive plant nutrients with food waste to feed the soil ecosystem.
Then, everyone – kids and adults alike – rolled up their sleeves to help spread mushroom compost onto the planting plots, showing that healthy soil is the living foundation for everything that grows.
Huge thanks to Kelvis and Chris for opening their farms and sharing their knowledge so generously and to Nick at our partners Zero Foodprint Asia for helping to put this event together.