AgriD Established One of the Largest Greenhouse in Japan and Starts Shipping Tomatoes

AgriD Inc., which DENSO Corporation and Asai Nursery, Inc., jointly established, has started shipping cherry tomatoes cultivated at its newly built greenhouse, one of the largest in Japan, in Inabe City, Mie Prefecture.

Japanese agrirculture faces severe labor shortages due to the decreasing number and aging of famers. Smart farming based on robot technology and ICT holds the potential to help farmers compensate for lost labor while achieving high-quality agricultural production.

AgriD is combining Asai Nursery’s leading greenhouse cultivation and selective-breeding techniques with DENSO’s technology for industrialization, such as environmental control and automation, and applying those capabilities to large-scale tomato cultivation at its greenhouse. Its goal is to make farms better places to work and more profitable. Specifically, AgriD will stably cultivate vegetables throughout the year regardless of climate and season by controlling the temperature and humidity in greenhouses. The company will also automate the transportation of agricultural products, including crops, and night-time harvesting. Throughout these activities, AgriD will reduce human workload while enabling 24-hour agricultural activities and achieve optimal human-machine collaboration in farming.

AgriD will develop and work on next-generation greenhouse horticulture with high productivity and commit to agricultural production business in the world.

Main features of AgriD’s large-scale greenhouse

• Smart farming system through human-machine collaboration
  - Using the cloud to manage work shifts, tasks, and hours of employees to visualize operations through to harvesting to shipping of tomatoes, and to reduce excessive work, waste, and variability
  - Based on expertise of industrial technology such as Kaizen, manpower saving acquired even though the amount of harvested and sipped crop changed. 
• Automatic harvesting robot “FARO”
  - Using FARO, an agricultural robot developed by DENSO under Asai Nursey’s corporation, to automate harvesting and reduce human workload
• Automated crop transportation system
  - Automatically transporting tomato loads weighing up to 160 kg to optimize the transportation route and reduce the lead-time from harvest to shipment

Profile of the large-scale greenhouse

Full view of the greenhouse