PDF / 457 pages / 19 chapters / 172 topics
There is almost no practical information that systematically organizes how to run a vertical farm on site. Academic books lean toward theory, and materials from manufacturers focus mainly on equipment. This industry has not had any published resource that tells you how to actually run a vertical farm day to day.
This book was written to fill that gap. It covers what happens on the floor of a vertical farm across 19 chapters and 172 topics, broadly and concretely, including the cultivation environment, production plan, personnel management, hygiene, and work processes.
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If you raise the CO2 concentration, yield increases. But if you do not consider temperature, humidity, and light at the same time, growth disorders occur and yield drops instead. This kind of "on-site feel" is not in textbooks.
And profitability is not decided by the cultivation environment alone.
Profit is maximized only when cultivation, people, work, and planning all fit together.
This book is a collection of practical hints for achieving this "overall optimization." Its 172 topics are built from practical knowledge based on on-site experience.
As you read, there will be moments when you think, "So that is why it did not work." Things you thought were right turn out to be counterproductive, and small things you overlooked turn out to have a major impact on profitability. This is the kind of book that changes how you see your own operation.
Shohei Imamura
Since 2011, Shohei Imamura has worked in the vertical farm industry and has been involved in the launch support and operational management of more than 10 vertical farms of different sizes. That includes experience launching facilities with some of the largest production volumes in Japan. He has also trained more than 600 staff members in total.
At Farmship, Inc., he served as manager of the team supporting partner facility launches and turnarounds, staying on site and living at each facility. What that experience convinced him of was this: what determines the profitability of a vertical farm is not the most advanced system, but the power of the people who operate it. Things that are correct in theory still fail on site, while small adjustments that only become visible on site create major differences. This book is packed with those experiences.
Below are some of the questions the author is often asked in on-site support and consulting, along with excerpts from the book's answers.
From the viewpoint of on-site operations, one major reason is that improvements stop at "partial optimization" by trying to improve only one area, whether the cultivation environment, the production plan, personnel management, or work processes. For example, even if you raise the CO2 concentration and increase yield, growth disorders occur and yield drops instead if temperature and humidity are not adjusted at the same time. Profitability improves only when every element on site works together. In this book, I explain systematically across 172 topics how to think about changing the site and what concrete actions improve profitability.
In the cost structure of a vertical farm, electricity and labor account for a large share. But if you cut them blindly, yield and quality are affected directly. What matters is frontline capability: the ability to judge what to cut and what to maintain within daily crop management and work processes. Throughout this book, I explain how to improve profitability by changing how you run the site and how you think about it.
Across the 172 topics, I go into these questions one by one at the practical level of on-site work, covering the cultivation environment, growth disorders, work processes, and more in concrete detail.
Many people visit this site by searching for "tipburn," which shows how many people are struggling with it on site. This book also explains tipburn in multiple topics. One of them is included below.
From the book
As a countermeasure against tipburn, the first thing that may come to mind is "raising the calcium concentration of the nutrient solution." Among the producers I have interacted with so far, there were also people who casually thought, "If we increase the calcium in the nutrient solution, tipburn will be solved."
However, over many years, I have seen many vertical farm sites, and there were almost no cases where increasing the calcium concentration in the nutrient solution dramatically improved tipburn. This is because the essence of tipburn occurrence is not a lack of calcium inside the plant body, but the fact that the necessary amount of calcium is not supplied to the place where it is needed.
Plants release water absorbed from the roots as water vapor through the stomata of leaves by transpiration. Calcium rides on this flow of transpiration and spreads throughout the plant. In other words, leaves with more active transpiration can acquire more calcium.
However, in leafy greens such as lettuce grown in a vertical farm, inner leaves have a lower transpiration rate than outer leaves, and calcium supply tends to be insufficient. Furthermore, because newer leaves, which grow quickly and have underdeveloped cell walls, are more prone to tipburn, the new inner leaves are always at risk of calcium shortage.
Even if the calcium concentration of the nutrient solution is increased, that calcium is supplied preferentially to outer leaves with high transpiration rates. As a result, the amount of calcium supplied to the inner leaves, where tipburn is likely to occur, hardly improves.
Calcium absorption from the nutrient solution is affected by antagonism with ammonium, potassium, and magnesium. When these nutrients are present in large amounts, calcium absorption is inhibited, and as a result tipburn may worsen.
However, countermeasures against this antagonism also do not solve the root cause of tipburn, which is "insufficient calcium reaching the inner leaves." Unless the antagonism is extreme, the plant can absorb calcium to some extent. Tipburn still occurs because the absorbed calcium does not reach the inner leaves.
The essence of tipburn countermeasures is not increasing the amount of calcium inside the plant body, but delivering the necessary amount of calcium to the place where it is needed.
For that reason, it is important to promote transpiration in the inner leaves where tipburn occurs frequently. If transpiration in the inner leaves becomes active, calcium supply also increases, and the possibility of suppressing tipburn occurrence rises.
However, here we run into a major wall. Increasing the calcium concentration of the nutrient solution is relatively easy, but directing airflow precisely toward the inner leaves of tens of thousands of plants and promoting transpiration is extremely difficult in reality.
Then what should we do?
The answer lies in comprehensively optimizing the entire cultivation environment, such as improving airflow around plant spacing and managing humidity appropriately.
Rather than relying on partial countermeasures, the key is an integrated understanding of plant physiology, environmental control, and data analysis, suppressing tipburn while maximizing productivity across the whole farm. This "attack and then defend" strategy is the important way of thinking for generating profit in a vertical farm.
I will explain this "attack and then defend" strategy in more detail.
This is one of the 172 topics in the book.
You just need to increase calcium for tipburn
— that is what the internet and books say.
However, as explained in Topic 90 above, that alone does not solve tipburn on site.
You can learn the mechanism of tipburn itself from books and papers. However, what happens when you actually try to apply that on site is not written anywhere. Even if it is correct in theory, it is not realistic to direct airflow with pinpoint accuracy onto the inner leaves of tens of thousands of plants.
This book draws that line between "what can be done" and "what cannot be done" honestly, based on on-site experience.
This is what the book deals with:
You researched, learned, and tried. Even so, the results do not come.
What was missing was not knowledge,
but practical knowledge from a grower-first perspective.
It points out what is easily misunderstood on site and shows the ways of thinking that matter if you want to improve the site. These are the kind of "hints" that change your daily decisions depending on whether you know them or not, and this book contains 172 of them.
19 chapters · 172 topics · 457 pages
Because the areas to look at are organized by topic, it is convenient to turn to when you run into trouble. It helps you check, "Is my thinking right?" and it also reminds you, "Ah, I forgot about this." I could feel that this book leads to better results on site.
Because it is written consistently from a grower-first perspective, you immediately understand what you should be thinking about. To be honest, other books on cultivation never made enough sense for me to want to read them, but this one was different. As I read, there were moments when I thought, "So that is why it did not work," and it clicked. The way I look at my own site changed.
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Because this book is a technical work focused on the on-site operation of vertical farms, it contains many specialized terms. When translating from Japanese, some languages did not have direct equivalents for certain terms. This book has been translated through comparison with industry-standard terminology and multiple rounds of review, but a perfect translation does not exist.
If you want to check the tone and style of the translation before purchasing, please read the free articles on this site in each language. They are translated through the same process, so you can confirm almost the same tone and style as this book.
The 172 hints are built from practical knowledge based on on-site experience.
Whether you know them or not changes your frontline capability.