Startup teaches crab farming at home

Singapore Quitting her office job to become a farmer in 2011, Shannon Lim runs a seafood farm, grows vegetables and teaches crab farming at home.

Imagine making a seafood dinner at home, but instead of buying crabs from the market, you just pick one from a mini farm in the corner of your kitchen. This is the vision of “urban farmer” Shannon Lim, 37, for her students.

Lim, founder of OnHand Agrarian, runs home-grown food classes in Singapore, including one on how to farm your own mud crabs. The course costs S$680 ($510) for 10 hours over two days, which includes the cost of building a “crab condo” and pick-up and drop-off service. Students can bring a friend along if the class is not too crowded.

The "Crab Apartment" is a modified 7-tier plastic storage drawer. The water compartment is equipped with a pump and filter for the crabs to live in. There is also a UV sterilizer and algae that decompose organic waste to prevent unpleasant odors.

Shannon Lim holds a farmed crab in the "crab apartment" on the left. Photo: Instagram your_friendlyfarmer

Each crab is raised in a compartment, and can weigh from a few hundred grams to nearly 2 kilograms or sometimes more. The incoming crabs are small or skinny because the shops have raised them temporarily for a long time and have no customers, so they have to sell them at a cheap price. "Then we start fattening them up again," he said.

Lee Ray Sheng, 24, first learned about crab farming in boxes a few years ago when he visited another farm. A few months ago, he came across a video of Lim’s class on social media and signed up.

“First of all, I love eating crabs. Second of all, I definitely love raising crabs and eating them,” he said of his reasons for taking the course. He brought back palm-sized crabs from the class and estimated they had grown by about 50% in two months. “Crabs eat everything, so the easiest way is to go to the fishmonger and ask for fish,” Lee said. An avid kayaker, Lee also collects cockles from floating safety barriers off the coast of Singapore to feed the crabs.

Lim has taught about 50 students how to farm crabs since before the pandemic and wants to encourage more Singaporeans to become “urban farmers.” One piece of advice he offers is not to name your crabs if you plan to eat them, to avoid forming an emotional attachment. “I want to see more Singaporeans become self-sufficient in food because we are so dependent on Malaysia,” he said.

Before becoming a farmer, Shannon Lim was an office worker in the financial planning and market research field. In 2011, with 160,000 Singapore dollars (more than 120,000 USD) in hand, Lim quit her job to start a farming startup.

According to Temasek, Lim designed the first “Integrated Multi-trophic Recirculating Aquaculture System” (IMTRAS) to recycle waste from one organism into food for another. OnHand Agrarian’s goal is to produce seafood cheaper and more sustainably using basic science without disrupting the marine ecosystem.

Lim started farming about 2,000 ornamental and edible fish, such as groupers, in his backyard in Changi using the IMTRAS system. Without a license to sell, he gave the fish away to friends and neighbors.

Two years later, OnHand Agrarian's operations have become professional. They have a floating farm near Pulau Ubin island off the northeast coast of Singapore, about a five-minute boat ride from the Lorong Halus jetty on the mainland.

The floating farm is one of three locations that OnHand Agrarian operates. As for crabs, Lim started farming in plastic tanks around 2016, but it wasn’t his invention. Years ago, he saw a forum post about farming crayfish in plastic tanks and adapted it to farming crabs.

In addition to running crab farming classes, OnHand Agrarian is also raising 200 crabs for customers. His home farm also raises some fish, ducks and some vegetables. Lim has also done projects to help hotels, schools and individuals set up farming systems.

For those who don’t want to do it themselves, Lim offers seafood and vegetables as a subscription. The standard package costs S$180 ($136) a month for 10kg of seafood and vegetables, delivered in two installments.

Lim's passion for farming stemmed from stories his grandparents told him about World War II, which helped shape the way he thinks about food security. "It influenced my view that we should be a little more prepared for strange things to happen," he said.

Lim has big dreams for his home-based business. He hopes more people will learn to raise crabs and that Singapore will have its own crab hatchery. Crabs cannot mate and reproduce in a boxed environment. So the hatchery can provide baby crabs for farmers to raise.

Explaining his focus on crabs, Lim said that many Singaporeans love crabs, and that cleaning and preparing them is easier than scaling or filleting fish. Prawns and live fish can also live in caves, so Lee is planning to perfect the way of raising them in boxes like crabs. "If possible, I would also like to raise lobsters," Lim said. However, he said that raising lobsters at home is much more difficult because their living environment needs to be more carefully controlled.

Phien An ( according to CNA, Temasek )

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