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Sixty Hours of Hell — What Happened at a Vertical Farm Startup

Imamura here. During a vertical farm startup, I once came up for air and realized I’d been working for about sixty hours straight.

Something Off on the First Harvest Day

That day, I’d come on-site to support the vertical farm startup. My role was “backup.” It hadn’t occurred to me that this backup would end up becoming the last line of defense, glued to the packaging machine.

The farm manager’s words — “It’s fine, everything is ready” — I still remember them clearly. But the air was a little tense when I arrived. This was supposed to be the long-awaited first harvest day. Something felt unsettled.

“Are you all set?” I asked. The farm manager’s expression clouded slightly.

“Yes, well… pretty much.”

That “pretty much” carried quite a bit of weight.

The first harvest day needs a lot of hands. Yet the number of people on the floor was clearly too few. About half of them were brand-new staff — this was their very first day on the job. Their eyes were full of hope. Mine were starting to think: “Today might run pretty long.”

Then the first round of harvested produce arrived.

It was about two sizes bigger than expected. Impressive, honestly. Impressive — except it wouldn’t fit in the packaging bags. A strangely complicated moment — pride in the vegetables and dread about the problem, all at once.

“There’s someone who can run the packaging machine, right?” I confirmed. The response was silence and headshakes.

The only person in the facility who could operate the packaging machine was me. By that point, more or less everything was decided.

Night Turns to Morning at the Packaging Machine

At five in the afternoon, the part-time workers left on schedule. What remained were a handful of full-time staff, me, and a mountain of unprocessed produce.

The farm manager’s single line — “Let’s clear it on overtime” — became, as things turned out, the starting point of sixty hours of work.

I stood in front of the packaging machine, up against a purely physical problem: vegetables that wouldn’t fit in the bags. Trimming them down would make them unmarketable. Forcing them in tore the bags. I’d never imagined a day would come when I’d be this stumped by vegetables that had grown so beautifully.

Around two in the morning, things started flickering at the edges of my vision. The sound of the packaging machine was oddly crisp while voices around me started to sound far away. Sleepy. Won’t fit. Bag rips. Wait — angle? That’s all that was cycling through my head.

That’s when I came up with a method: rotate the vegetable at a specific angle, fold it slightly, and slide it into the bag. Somehow, I’d spent six hours just developing this “spin-and-slide” technique. In hindsight, I should have found a different approach much sooner — but when you’re on the floor, “just chip away at the pile in front of you” is everything.

When morning light came through, I was still at the packaging machine. Feet swollen. Wrists making their case for tendinitis.

“Good morning!”

The cheerful greetings of arriving staff announced a new day at the facility. But inside me, the day before hadn’t ended yet. The calendar moved forward. My time stayed frozen in front of the packaging machine.

Day two: the situation didn’t change — still understaffed, still packaging oversized vegetables. If anything, my efficiency was gradually slipping from the lack of sleep. Every time I pressed a button on the packaging machine, my eyelids threatened to close with it. But the hands kept moving. The human autopilot function turns out to be surprisingly stubborn.

A Mind That Refuses to Sleep

By the second night, my mental state had started to shift.

When exhaustion approaches its limit, the brain starts reaching in strange directions.

The vegetables flowing off the packaging machine seemed to be pleading: “Why are you wrapping me so tight?” Of course vegetables don’t talk. I knew that. I did — but in that moment, they looked a little uncomfortable to me.

The packaging by that point had drifted considerably from standard procedure. There was no room to handle oversized vegetables gracefully — I was folding them into triangles and cramming them into bags.

“This doesn’t meet product spec.”

Some faint remnant of reason said that, somewhere in my head. But my exhausted brain flat-out ignored it. In retrospect, I was in full “rogue packaging mode.”

At one point, I realized I was talking to the packaging machine.

“Come on — let’s push through this together.”

Cheering on the packaging machine. At that stage, this wasn’t floor improvement work. It was just someone badly in need of sleep.

On the morning of the third day, my body felt like someone else’s. Forty-eight hours of packaging without sleep — hands gone numb, legs heavy as lead. The work kept going. By then, even with consciousness barely online, my body had memorized the packaging rhythm on its own.

The farm manager came over with a worried look.

“Are you okay? Maybe you should rest—”

I answered: “At this point, if I stop, I don’t think I’ll be able to move again.” That wasn’t a joke. I was genuinely afraid that if I stopped, I’d never get back up. Writing this now, I know I absolutely should have rested. But at the time, all I was choosing was not to stop.

Sixty Hours Later

About sixty hours after the packaging work started, I finally hit the wall.

My finger hovered over the packaging machine button and wouldn’t move — it felt like someone else’s. My feet seemed fixed to the floor; lifting one took real effort. Seconds stretched strangely long. Press. No — can’t press. I can’t anymore. That’s when I finally admitted I was done.

I’m fairly sure I made it home after that. But how — I barely remember. The next morning I came to lying on the floor of my room, still in my work clothes, the front door unlocked. The refrigerator was hanging open. Inside it, for some reason: one pair of chopsticks. Whether I’d been trying to eat, or whether the memory of seeing chopsticks was itself a hallucination — I still don’t know.

According to a colleague, I gave the normal goodbye on my way out. I have no memory of that either. It seems the human body has a feature: even when your mind has practically shut down, your body still knows how to say goodbye.

The first and simplest thing I took from this experience: humans are genuinely dangerous without sleep. That might sound like a joke. I mean it.

And the real lesson was the importance of preparation and training. No matter how hard any individual pushes, without proper staffing and training the floor can’t function. Going into a first harvest day with only one person who can operate the packaging machine is, looking back, just unreasonable.

In the farm startups I’ve worked since, I’ve become quite particular about securing staff in advance and training them before day one. I’ve been told it’s “overkill.” But for someone who spent sixty hours at a packaging machine, that’s about right.

Years later, something in me still flinches at the sound of a packaging machine. Probably something like mild PTSD. But surviving that extreme experience has also become a real asset in who I am now.

To anyone who’ll be involved in a farm startup:

Sleep is not a luxury. It’s a necessity.