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What Hit Me When I Joined the Vertical Farming Industry

Imamura here. When I jumped from a securities firm into the vertical farming industry, the first thing I felt was the gap between the “futuristic” image and the gritty reality of the floor.

It Started with a Headline

After university, I joined a securities firm with the goal of developing my sales skills in a demanding, sports-club-style environment. The reason was simple: I wanted to become a better salesperson. Nothing more, nothing less.

That said, I’d already decided I’d leave after three years, so I was always keeping an eye on my next move. Looking back, I was quite a restless new employee.

One day, a headline caught my eye:

“Vertical farms — the cutting-edge agriculture of the future! The innovative business holding the key to a resource-recycling society!”

Working at a securities firm, you encounter polished, investment-hyping language on a daily basis. And yet I was completely swept up in the excitement of it.

“This is it. This is the industry.”

I applied on the spot. When I went in for the interview and walked into the facility for the first time, the moment the door swung open, the whole scene changed.

Lettuce in every direction, as far as the eye could see. Countless young leaves glowing under the lights. It looked genuinely surreal — like the human cultivation chambers in The Matrix.

For a few seconds, time seemed to stop. The white light was intense, and the interviewer’s explanations felt faintly distant. In my head, for some reason, the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey was playing. The one making it feel epic was entirely me.

And just like that, I decided to join — fully convinced I was about to become a champion of the future of farming.

What I Saw on Day Three

Three days into the job, still in orientation, I saw something that left a strong impression.

Elderly women were carrying crates of lettuce at full speed. Up ahead, another woman was calling out: “Hurry and bring those over!” Crate after crate of lettuce, carried in rapid succession, beads of sweat on every brow.

This was nothing like the futuristic scene from the interview.

Cutting-edge. Resource-recycling society. Innovative business. Wait — what’s happening in front of me right now is… pretty much manual labor, isn’t it? Those words lined up in my head, short and fragmentary.

Vertical farms do, of course, have genuinely advanced systems. Automated nutrient solution control systems. Environmental control systems. Automated transplanting machines. These are all essential pieces of equipment that make vertical farms work.

But they don’t sit there and generate results on their own. Floor staff have to watch what’s happening, operate the systems correctly, and change course when needed. Only when you include that part does anything actually function.

Before I joined, I’d imagined a world where systems managed everything cleanly. In reality, what was driving those systems was the people — carting lettuce in a sweat, checking the condition of the leaves, calling out to each other.

People Protect the Plants

The thing that drove this home most clearly was something a veteran employee said.

“Even if the system goes down, as long as we’re here, the plants won’t die.”

He told me he’d once received a system alert in the middle of the night, rushed to the facility in his pajamas, manually operated the equipment to maintain the environment, and saved several thousand lettuce plants that were scheduled for shipment.

Even now as I write this, I can still remember the feeling I had when I heard that story. We were supposed to be talking about cutting-edge equipment — and yet what had ultimately saved the plants was a person who got up in the middle of the night and ran over in their pajamas. Somehow that made perfect sense to me.

The real hero of vertical farming, I thought, isn’t just the advanced system — it’s the people.

I didn’t study agriculture or engineering. I have no formal background in plant physiology or electrical engineering — I came in as a complete outsider.

And yet, if I had to name the reason I’ve survived in this industry for over a decade, I’d say: a spirit of “just give it a try” and the resilience to bounce back from failure. That sounds like it’s all about guts, but on the floor, those things genuinely aren’t something to dismiss.

The dangerous failure mode in vertical farming is deciding “I don’t understand this, so I’ll do nothing.” The plants won’t wait while you’re putting off a decision. Try things. Accept failure as part of the process. That, I believe, is the attitude vertical farming demands.

High-Tech and Human Judgment

More than a decade has passed since I joined, and the industry has matured considerably. Automation and system efficiency have advanced dramatically, and the kind of emergency system failures I witnessed in my early days have become less common.

Even so, the people who are still most valued today are those who can respond on the fly to equipment failures and crop problems right there on the floor.

Next to a shelf fitted with the latest IoT sensors, a worker manually checks the condition of leaves by eye. In a room where AI controls the environment, a veteran employee looks at the leaves and plants and says, on instinct: “Something seems off with these plants.”

That balance between high-tech and analog is both what makes vertical farming fascinating and what makes it hard.

I came in having heard “the farming of the future” — and what I found, in the end, was a place that tests the power of people: communication skills and character.

But that isn’t a bad thing. The more technology advances, the more the power of people — the ability to put that technology to work right on the floor — comes to matter.

That is the biggest lesson I’ve drawn from over a decade in vertical farming.