About

Shohei Imamura

Born 1986, Hokkaido, Japan

I have been working in the vertical farming industry since 2011. Over that time, I have been directly involved — from the operational side — in the launch, management, and improvement of more than ten vertical farms of varying scales. This includes the new launch of one of Japan’s largest production facilities by volume.

At FarmShip Co., Ltd., I served as the manager of a team responsible for launching new partner farms and revitalizing existing ones, spending extended periods on-site at each facility while leading day-to-day operations.

Through that experience, I became convinced of one thing: what determines the productivity of a vertical farm is not the cutting-edge systems — it’s the people who run those systems every day. That conviction is the starting point for everything I write on PFBoost.

Why I Write

Every time I moved to a new farm, I ran into the same problems again. Issues we had already solved at one site were still troubling someone else at the next. This kind of know-how stays locked inside each company and rarely makes it out. PFBoost exists to put what we wished we could have read back then in a place where anyone can find it.

What I Can Write About — and What I Can’t

My hands-on experience is in fully artificial-light vertical farms, mostly growing leafy greens. I have no field experience with sunlight-type greenhouses, fruiting vegetables such as tomatoes or strawberries, open-field farming, or farms outside Japan.

When an article goes beyond that range, I base it on research and public information, or write it as inference from what I learned in artificial-light farming — and I make that clear. I don’t write about those topics as if I had seen them first-hand. Conversely, whenever I write “I saw this on the factory floor,” it is something I actually saw.

How I Write

Where I can write from experience, I do. Where I can’t, I draw on research and data, clearly marked as such. When I find a mistake, I fix it.

Stories of what actually happened on the factory floor are in my columns. If you want to know how I ended up in this industry, start with “What Hit Me When I Joined the Vertical Farming Industry”.

Career

Business Information

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