New Jersey. The farm is in a refurbished plastics warehouse with an adjacent 50-acre solar panel farm. Inside the vertical farm, the company uses robots and bees alongside humans to grow strawberries in the same footprint.The global vertical farming market was valued at $5.6 billion in 2022 and is forecasted to grow to more than $35 billion in eight years by 2032. Space efficiency, year-round growing, and harvest cycles have made indoor farming 170 times more productive than outdoor fields.
The company says the new farm is their most technologically advanced and is expected to grow 20 times more strawberries for consumers on the East Coast.60 billion data points tell a story—robots can see what the bees do and adjust environmental variables A blended work environment brings automation, nature and human ingenuity together in the same footprint
“This is a significant improvement in efficiency compared to traditional farming, where bee pollination is very hard to optimize,” said Koga. “Based on what they are seeing, the robots can adjust the environmental variables of our farm in real-time to ensure we are growing the perfect berries and picking them at their peak ripeness.”
“Until recently, our unique berry varietals could only be grown under very specific Japanese growing climate conditions, bearing fruit seasonally in the winter months,” said Koga. “The digital era is bringing more and more opportunities for companies in the agricultural sector to improve their performance significantly,” said Rios. “The sector works under a complex environment: price challenges, strict regulations to ensure quality and food safety from the farm to the consumer, foreign trade laws, changes in the weather patterns, among others.