December 18, 2015, was a day that changed Billy Tang’s life forever. He was driving a Land Rover in Kota Damansara, Selangor when he swerved into a divider to avoid hitting a motorcyclist who was not wearing a helmet and was talking on his handphone.
Tang woke up in hospital and learnt he had injured his spine and broken six ribs. He also discovered that he was paralysed from the waist down. Tang, 57, a father of two adult children, slipped into a deep depression. “For six months, I was thinking of how to exit from the earth,” he recalled.
He was using his experience as an agriculturist and private researcher to make safe and healthy food more accessible to underserved communities. In 2018, he designed a box using soil microbiology that people could place in their homes to harvest vegetables such as red watercress and Brazilian spinach, giving even the poorest the ability to feed themselves continuously without any agriculture experience or knowledge.
The box, which measures 57.5cm x 43.5cm x 35cm, is a small greenhouse. The longest box, he added, has been regenerative for three years and counting. In 2019, he started a social enterprise called PWD Smart FarmAbility. Two years later, he introduced the “Regenerative Organic Soil-U-tion Aquaponics Satellite Farm System”, an organic way to farm freshwater fish such as red tilapia. This, he added, is also a world’s first.
Read the entire article at Free Malaysia Today