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FAX Machines and the Surprisingly Human Side of Farm Digitalization
Imamura here. Whenever I think about digitalization in agriculture, I always come back to a particular fax.
The Order Form I Couldn’t Read
Digitalization in agriculture seems to be moving more slowly compared to other industries. Agricultural produce involves nature, which means quality and specifications tend to vary — making it genuinely difficult to put everything into neat numbers and digital records. That part is real.
But it’s not the only reason.
At my facility, every day around 6 p.m., we’d receive the next day’s order from one of our regular customers by fax. We’d pick it up, look at the quantities, and start on the shipment preparation. It was a daily routine — except for the part where I couldn’t read the fax.
The critical numbers — always a smear of black.
Is it 3 bags of komatsuna, or 8? Maybe 5. Squinting doesn’t help. Holding the paper a little farther away doesn’t help. Standing there with the fax in hand, I’d feel time stop for a few seconds. I needed to get started on the shipment preparation. But I didn’t know the quantities. There was no guessing by instinct here.
So I’d make the call.
“Sorry — the number on the fax came through as a smear. How many bags of komatsuna was that?”
Getting through right away was the best-case scenario. The longer it took to confirm, the later the shipment preparation got. Hearing “The customer is currently unavailable” while holding the receiver, I’d feel my grip tighten slightly. In the background, the fax machine made its small mechanical sounds. For a moment, I’d think: so this is what digitalization looks like on the farm floor.
FAX and an Evening Drink
What made it harder was the timing: around 6 p.m. Customers had finished work for the day and, not infrequently, had started drinking at home. I needed to know the quantity. They were done for the day, probably in a pretty good mood.
“The fax isn’t readable? I sent it fine. Komatsuna is… 5 bags.” And in the middle of that, you’d hear ice clinking in a glass. I was asking seriously — but the whole scene was so domestic that I sometimes couldn’t help smiling.
I suggested switching to email more than once. But the answer that came back was almost always the same.
“Fax is just easier for me.”
In Japan, fax machines are still very much in active use, so this kind of thing happens all the time. It’s not simply a matter of installing a new system and calling it solved. Behind it is a way of doing things that feels familiar, easy to get right, and low-effort to the people involved. In that moment, I got a very concrete sense of what I’d call “the habit barrier” — the wall that stands in the way of digitalization before any system ever enters the picture.
When Paper Is Faster
Does that mean all records at a facility should be converted to data? In general, yes — most records are more convenient in digital form.
Cultivation data and yield data especially are only valuable if they can be analyzed later. Say you’re wondering whether there’s a correlation between environmental data and yield data during a particular growing period. If all you have is paper records, you’d need to re-enter everything into a system before you could even begin to analyze it. Anyone who’s done that knows how quietly painful the process is.
For certifications like GGAP, being able to pull up the required records in data form quickly is genuinely useful. It cuts down on search time, and from a management standpoint, it’s reassuring.
At the same time, digitizing everything isn’t always the right answer.
Sanitation checklists and daily inspection forms are sometimes faster on paper. Once the bathroom cleaning is done, you put a checkmark. That’s it — faster than opening an app, logging in, finding the right item, and tapping to check it off. Even more so when your hands are wet or you’re wearing gloves on-site.
Vertical farms employ people across a wide range of ages. Younger staff might wonder: “Isn’t keeping paper records a hassle?” But for people who aren’t comfortable with digital devices, paper genuinely feels more reliable — and that’s genuinely true.
Even so, I think it’s worth not assuming too much. These days, grandparent-age people exchange emoji stickers on messaging apps. Someone who said “I can’t use that app” has sometimes surprised me by picking it up quickly once we walked through it together.
The Right Level of Digitalization
In the end, the most practical approach is to match the paper-vs.-data balance to the reality of each facility. Full digitalization isn’t always the answer. Paper and data each have their strengths, and a hybrid approach that draws on both is often the right fit.
The customer who insists on fax, the colleague who finds paper records reassuring — I don’t think either of them is “behind the times.” What managers and implementation leads need to do is listen to what’s happening on the floor and nudge change forward, one small step at a time.
Even now as I write this, I can still picture those smeared numbers on that fax. Was it 3, or 8, or 5? Somehow, that one small illegible number contained everything: the shipment we still needed to prepare, the customer’s evening drink, and all the very real difficulty of digitalization in agriculture.
What small step toward digitalization could you try at your facility starting tomorrow?