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Starting Up a Vertical Farm — The Art of Knowing When Not to Answer

Imamura here. In vertical farm startups, I often find myself struggling less with what to teach and more with how much NOT to teach.

Why I Don’t Answer Right Away

“Hey — there’s something wrong with this seedling.”

When I hear something like that, I sometimes deliberately look off into the distance and say: “Hmm… not sure, honestly.”

If I look at it myself, I can tell immediately — it’s clearly a seedling showing signs of nutrient deficiency. I know what to do about it. But thinking about the new hire’s growth, I sometimes hold the answer back.

My inner state is anything but calm. I can see the cause right in front of me. If I opened my mouth, I could explain it in about 30 seconds. But if I tell them everything now, they’ll be looking to me the next time too. That thought is what keeps the words in my throat. I’m looking off into the distance, but the conflict going on inside me is quite close.

It might look cold. I sometimes think so myself. But in a vertical farm startup, this “time to let them figure it out” is genuinely important.

I’ve been involved in a number of vertical farm startups over the years. From that experience, there are two things I consider non-negotiable for making a startup succeed.

The first: give employees enough experience to develop real judgment on the floor. The second: when it’s time to help, help fully — 100%.

That may sound like a contradiction. But the balance between these two things has a major effect on how the operation performs going forward.

Small Failures Stick

When people imagine a new vertical farm startup, they tend to picture high-tech equipment and gleaming facilities. Equipment matters, of course. But what ultimately makes or breaks a startup is people.

When I come in as the coordinator on a new startup project, the first thing I see is the anxious faces of new hires who don’t know anything yet. Sometimes we’re starting from a point where they can’t even tell lettuce from arugula.

What becomes necessary is bringing a handful of employees up to a level where they can make independent judgments and carry out the work on their own.

But the human brain isn’t particularly cooperative. What someone learns one-sidedly from another person is surprisingly hard to retain.

Say I explain carefully to a new hire: “This seedling has a nitrogen deficiency — adjust the fertilizer this way.” They take thorough notes and say “Got it.”

But when the same symptom shows up the following week, the response in most cases is: “Wait — what was I supposed to do again?”

It’s not that they’re being lazy. I think somewhere in the brain it gets processed as: “If I get stuck, a senior colleague will sort it out.” I was probably the same when I was a new hire. If people have a convenient emergency button, they’re going to press it.

So I make a point of pushing new hires to take on increasingly challenging tasks on their own.

For the seedling example above, I’ll turn it around and ask: “What do you think we should do with this seedling?”

The new hire is stuck. “I… don’t know,” they’ll say.

So I say: “Then think it over. I’ll come back tomorrow.” And I step away for a while.

Of course, I’m not leaving them completely on their own. If a seedling is about to die and it’ll mean a significant loss, I’ll step in. But the experience of puzzling over something, opening the manual, asking a colleague, trying something yourself, and then seeing the outcome — working through that whole sequence is what matters.

One day, a new hire came to report: “Hey — I think that seedling has a nitrogen deficiency, so I tried adjusting the fertilizer.”

On the surface I responded with a simple “Nice work.” Internally, I was quite pleased. I didn’t do a happy dance exactly, but emotionally it felt like one foot was off the ground.

When I Let Go Too Much

That said, “stepping back” has its limits.

At one facility, I told the new hires “figure it out yourselves” one too many times, and they ended up creating their own work procedures. They were earnest about it. They weren’t cutting corners.

But those procedures were gradually drifting in the wrong direction. By the time I noticed, the harvest yield had come in at half the target.

The moment I saw that number, my back went cold. Half. I looked again — still half. Before I could be angry, the same words kept cycling through my head: “I drew the lines wrong.” I was the one who had drawn the boundaries badly.

The new hires had been thinking. They just kept thinking without enough knowledge, and ended up going the wrong direction. That time, I genuinely reflected: “I let go too much.”

This is where the second lesson becomes important. When it’s time to help, help fully — 100%.

Specifically: the basic design of the facility, building out operational processes and workflows, developing tools like management templates, and anything involving quality control.

The basic facility design, management templates, and quality control systems — once built, they get used indefinitely. Cut corners here and everyone will be struggling with “Why is this system so hard to use?” indefinitely.

At one facility, I had a less experienced staff member create the crop management form. What came out was an incomplete document with important fields missing. As a result of continuing to use that form, a large-scale disease outbreak occurred six months later.

That time too, I reflected deeply: “I should have been fully involved here.” Even now as I write this, I can still recall the unpleasant feeling of finding missing fields in a management record. The stomach reacts before you’ve even registered whether it’s paper or a screen.

When People Grow, the Farm Grows

The key to a successful farm startup is this: in developing people, deliberately build in time to step back; in building systems, stay close and give thorough support.

Getting the balance between “hands-off” and “hands-on support” right is genuinely difficult.

When you see new hires struggling, you want to explain everything. Watching someone look confused is honestly hard. It’s not that I’m looking away to be cruel.

But if you explain everything out of momentary sympathy, they don’t develop the capacity to think for themselves. They’ll always be the kind of person who can’t move until they’re told.

On the other hand, if you hand everything over with “figure it out yourselves,” they end up lost, lose their motivation, and in the worst case, leave.

Reading that subtle balance — that’s where the startup coordinator’s real skill is tested, I think.

I’m writing as if I have it all figured out, but I feel the tension every single time, no matter how many startups I’ve done.

Will this group of new hires develop? Will this facility find its footing? I carry those uncertainties forward.

Even so, when I see those new hires working with confidence a year later, I do think: “It was worth it.” Maybe that’s why starting up a vertical farm — no matter how many times I’ve done it — stays difficult, and yet I keep wanting to do it again.

That said, even now, when someone asks “there’s something wrong with this seedling” and I already know the answer, holding it back is still painful.

Today, I’m probably looking off into the distance again, saying “Hmm… not sure, honestly.” Telling myself it’s for them, while my own stomach quietly pays the price. The startup coordinator’s job is, in the end, a quietly unglamorous one.