Singaporeans embrace farm life abroad, seeking self-sufficiency over urban hustle

Shalyn Thng's shovel struck something solid in the soil of her rented plot in Jianli County, Hubei. She lifted it to find a sweet potato the size of a tennis ball—leftover from a previous harvest, buried in the roughly 90 square meters of land in front of her two-storey home. She was 30, trained in applied linguistics, and had spent seven years teaching art in Singapore before moving to China with her businessman husband in September 2024. The discovery of that potato felt like a threshold. "So, this is what it feels like to harvest your own vegetables," she remembers thinking.

Thng and her husband had chosen a village on the outskirts of Jianli County over more developed cities like Wuhan or Changsha. The move aligned with a slower, more intentional life she had begun to crave—one where her mind could rest from the constant thinking required by office work. She had watched videos of homesteading routines online, the aesthetic now known as cottagecore, which gained significant traction during the Covid-19 pandemic as a nostalgic escape from lockdown stress and urban pressure. Even after its peak trending years, the appeal persisted: a rejection of hustle culture, a promise of space and slowness and self-sufficiency.

Thng is one of seven Singaporeans who spoke to The Straits Times about abandoning city life for farming abroad. Their shared observation was straightforward: Singapore optimizes for efficiency and productivity, leaving little room for the things farming offers—space, slowness, the ability to feed yourself. Thng has since cleared all the land in front of her home and planted cabbages, carrots, radishes, long beans, and pumpkins. Some have already made it into the stir-fries she cooks for herself and her husband. She documents her journey on Instagram, still learning to navigate village life without modern conveniences or nearby amenities.

Esther Peh, in her early 40s, reached a breaking point after 15 years as an educator in Singapore. She opened a private tuition centre in late 2019 and ran it alone for roughly six years before that, teaching English in secondary school. By 2024, she was at what she calls an all-time low, disenchanted by the culture of exam stress she felt she was perpetuating. She had visited the hospital twice in two weeks for panic attacks. The stress of sole proprietorship—marketing, lease negotiations, curriculum planning, parent management, teaching, administration—had exhausted her body into a state where she could not even push herself into consciousness during a rare hour of rest.

Peh had always been drawn to permaculture, a sustainable agricultural practice that considers entire ecosystems rather than working against them. She had glimpsed this holistic thinking as an undergraduate during a three-day trek through Gunung Stong forest reserve in Kelantan. The concept was difficult to grasp in Singapore, where agricultural land comprises around 1 percent of the city's total area. In December 2024, she flew to New Zealand and volunteered on three farms across the North Island through WWOOF, the global volunteer exchange programme for organic farms. Over a year and a half, she cleared overgrown vegetation, managed compost systems, cared for animals, and learned crop rotation and weed management. The work was backbreaking—hours under the sun daily left her knocked out by evening—yet something in it regulated her nervous system. "Even though by the end of the day I'm physically tired and just want to sleep, I know it is something I want to keep doing. It's not stressful to me, it's fulfilling," she says.

In February 2026, she met a New Zealand woman in her 80s who was sharing a strip of land with the local community for farming—a plot as large as the whole of Toa Payoh combined. The initiative had emerged after massive job cuts during the pandemic left locals without work and food security. Peh was offered the chance to place a tiny home on the land in exchange for helping maintain the farm, but she declined. After 18 months abroad, she decided to use her knowledge closer to home. She returned to Singapore in July 2026 and has since visited Gentle Farms in Johor, completed a four-day natural farming workshop, and begun growing coriander and long beans in planters on her parents' balcony.

Adeline Leong, 23, a global studies undergraduate from the National University of Singapore, spent four weeks volunteering at two agricultural sites in France—a vineyard in Provence and a farm in Burgundy. She collected eggs, harvested tomatoes, and made produce deliveries. "When you've spent an hour or two plucking zucchinis or tomatoes, and then get to eat them that same day, you feel a stronger connection to your food," she says. Her farmer host owned around 3,000 chickens and roughly 20 cows, numbers she found inconceivable. The host made milk into cream products, cheeses, butter, and panna cotta. Leong's perspective on food shifted through conversations about self-sufficiency and seasonal eating—concepts foreign to her upbringing in Singapore, where over 90 percent of food, including eggs, vegetables, poultry, and dairy, is imported from countries like Malaysia and Australia.

Others have turned farming into permanent careers. Nabilah Bagarib, 39, and Ashraf Bakar, 38, started Aliyah Rizq Farm in Mersing, Malaysia, over a decade ago with 30 goats and sheep and ambition. Ashraf, a former construction and manufacturing businessman, saw a gap in the halal meats market. Around 13 percent of Malaysia's sheep and goat livestock was imported roughly 10 years ago. With capital of around $50,000 from Nabilah's retired mother—formerly chief editor in the office of the mufti in Brunei—they began their 0.8-hectare farm in 2015. The company now produces 250 tonnes of mutton yearly, handles halal meat distribution to 12 countries, operates farms in Kenya and Morocco, and employs around 300 staff globally. Elena Chua, 29, co-founded Gentle Farms in Johor with her husband in 2023 after a health scare prompted them to examine their food sources and farming practices. She acknowledges that farm life carries stress, but says they manage it better than they did working in Singapore. "What makes it rewarding is that we're able to build something of our own and we can see it flourish," she says.