Many of us, we came from the private or public sectors.

We used to draw a lot more, but there are many, many other motivations as well.

In this rat race, cushy office jobs are often seen as attractive career paths for city-dwellers.

However, there's a growing pushback, especially in metropolitan cities like Singapore,

as some people opt to forgo the swanky suits to get their hands dirty.

With a background in English linguistics, Kai is an unlikely candidate for a farmer.

She is now the co-founder of Singapore's first urban insect farm.

Insectta is Singapore's first biotech company rearing the black soldier fly.

The black soldier fly is a way to contribute to what we call the circular economy,

where we produce things without anything going to waste.

The black soldier fly does this in our food supply systems,

because their superpower is their ability to consume food waste.

Welcome to the nursery.

This is where we rear all our black soldier fly larvae.

Either they go to the mating chamber, or they get harvested for use in our research in our lab,

or for the products that we sell here, from the farm, such as pet feed or fertilizer.

So these guys are eating through all this waste right now?

That's right.

A kilo of larvae can go through 4kg of food waste in just 24 hours.

That's why they're really the superstars of the food waste valorization industry.

This is a big bin - about 150 kilos of food waste and we go through a few a day.

We use a mix of soybean leftovers, as well as spent grain from the beer-brewing industry.

And what people don't know is that tonnes and tonnes of this stuff is being generated

every day in our food factories and it's being thrown out.

Besides consuming hundreds of kilograms of food waste per day, the biomaterials extracted

the biomaterials extracted from the black soldier fly larvae are used in numerous industries,

from pharmaceuticals to electronics and even cosmetics.

From one little fly, we've taken out three biomaterials,

all each with their own individual high-value applications.

How many eggs can they lay per day?

600 to 800 eggs per female.

I do believe that a lot of us need to undo some of that conditioning

over insects being all gross and icky.

Because if we have a society that still shuns insects, there's no way we are going to have

a future where we have insect-derived anything, biomaterials, protein, so on and so forth.

It's not just people like Kai who are redefining what it means to be an urban farmer.

BT Leow counts himself as a farmer too, but unlike Kai, his office is out at sea.

I'm taking a ferry to visit the Eco-Ark, a high-tech floating fish farm

located along the East Johor Strait between Singapore and Malaysia.

There are more than a hundred licensed fish farms on the small island of Singapore,

with most located offshore.

The Eco-Ark, owned by Singapore food producer Aquaculture Centre of Excellence,

is slightly smaller than two basketball courts,

but it's able to yield more than 160 tonnes of fish yearly.

Singaporeans have not seen a farm like us

that they can consider, even think of, putting aquaculture as their career.

How is this Eco-Ark different from normal fish farms, traditional fish farms?

We farm fish in the sea, in the ocean.

It can be coastal, it can be river, it can be in the reservoir.

However, the fish does not interact with the seawater, freshwater, from the outside.

It only lives in very healthy, clean, highly oxygenated and pathogen-free water.

We produce our own oxygen, we produce our own ozone.

Open-net fish farms are vulnerable to environmental threats such as plankton blooms, oil spills

and warmer waters due to climate change.

Unlike these traditional farms, fish on the Eco-Ark are contained in seawater

that is filtered and treated to kill pathogens.

The same goes for its water discharge back to the sea, which is free of solid waste.

We protect the environment by making sure that the water we discharge is always cleaner,

or if not the same quality as the intake water.

We are scalable, we can be expandable.

Our green roof, we have a roof over the Eco-Ark, which uses solar panels, so we use green energy.

The Eco-Ark is one of over a hundred farms that was built with funds from the Singapore government,

to help farmers increase their yield and production capabilities.

In 2019, only 10% of the food consumed in the country was locally produced.

Singapore, which has little farming land,

aims to produce 30% of its nutritional needs by 2030.

The aim is to safeguard the country's food security and buffer against supply disruptions.

These high-tech farms are, in turn, drawing more people who are passionate about sustainability,

such as Nick Goh, who is an aquaculturist at Eco-Ark.

This is actually what I wanted to do.

It is not sustainable if we keep on doing fish-netting outside, fishing, fish trawling.

If we have aquaculture in the field, we can actually first sustain the ocean,

and then second sustain our own selves in terms of food security wise.

So you saw that there was a problem and you wanted to do something about it.

That's right.

More countries are recognizing that these non-traditional jobs are important

to keeping their cities functioning and sustainable.

Finland, the United Arab Emirates and South Korea are some of the countries allocating

resources to promote the growth of these industries.

They hope this will open new pathways for non-traditional careers.

One such person is Samuell Ang, who was a pharmacist before he decided to make the switch.

Today, he's the CEO of local farm Edible Garden City.

So what's it like working here?

What's it like working here?

I'll say wonderful, a lot of fresh air, a lot of nature around you.

I would say, very calming.

There's a lot of different ages of people working here.

The youngest in the team is 21.

The most senior in the team is 74 years.

We have people from all walks of life, different kinds of backgrounds, different kinds of experiences.

Edible Garden City isn't just a farm, but a social enterprise too,

which Samuell tells me makes the job even more fulfilling.

Our mission is really to reach out to every Singaporean,

to teach them how to grow their own food.

It could be one person at a time, it could be one school at a time.

Now how do we do that?

We do it through three facades.

The first façade is through our farm production.

Here, we grow edible plants both indoors and outdoors.

We grow a variety of plants like herbs, edible flowers, leafy vegetables.

The second façade would be in our education arm.

We organize farm tours, we organize workshops, to reach out to Singaporeans,

to teach them how to grow their own food.

The third aspect would be in, what you would call, foodscaping.

Foodscaping is quite unique because what we do is reach out to organizations or schools

or even residences, how to maybe design an edible garden.

And the next stage to do is to build the garden for them.

We talk about maximizing growth space.

Even in concrete areas here, we try to use the space.

What we try to do is try to show people the way that underutilized space

can be activated for growing edibles.

Today, more than half of the world's population is concentrated in urban areas.

That is expected to increase to 68% by 2050.

The urbanization shift is putting a strain on resources,

and more solutions such as vertical farming and hydroponics are sprouting up.

How do you see technology advancing your industry?

The way we see technology is a little bit different from the mainstream narrative.

How technology can help improve in the R&D, in the improvement of things like soil health,

or in the management of microbes, overall management of the farming sector.

What's the draw for someone to go into urban farming?

One of the draws is this mindset of saying, look,

what can I do to contribute or to champion the sustainability cause?

Nothing beats you walking the talk, right, you doing your bit.

This really is the future of urban agriculture, where we are not only reimagining what we farm,

but what we get out of the farming process.

In these high-tech farms, the urban farmers include your researchers, scientists and engineers.

And perhaps it's the charm of farming that makes it not just a job for these people,

but a way of life.

Pioneering anything, especially in a deep tech industry, is definitely scary,

but it's also empowering because you know that you're the first mover for change.

But if we don't go out there and look for new solutions to current problems such as

the food waste crisis, dwindling natural resources, we're never going to make any headway.