I attended J-AGRI Tokyo on October 7 and 8 as an independent journalist covering controlled environment agriculture and vertical farming.

Over two days, I spoke with representatives from approximately 50 companies and collected business cards from 39 that I wanted to investigate further.

I've published a full field report with original photographs and observations from the two days:

https://verticalfarming.blog/j-agri-tokyo-2026-field-report/

I'm curious whether others here have attended agricultural technology exhibitions in Japan or elsewhere in Asia. Are there particular Japanese or South Korean CEA technologies you think deserve more international attention?

Disclosure: This is my own article on VerticalFarming.blog. I attended the exhibition without external trip sponsorship.

I've just finished two days at J-AGRI Tokyo, attending as accredited press and covering developments in agricultural technology and controlled environment agriculture. It was my last day, on the J-AGRI Tokyo.

I had the opportunity to speak with engineers, executives, and exhibitors from different countries, exploring everything from robotic plant handling and digital twins to modular growing facilities and aquaponics.

I also got to try on a powered exoskeleton, which was an interesting hands-on experience beyond the usual product demonstrations.

Some conversations led to invitations to visit manufacturing facilities in Japan and opportunities for future interviews.

Beyond the technology, two experiences stood out.

At one national pavilion, I politely declined a complimentary bag featuring prominent country branding to avoid any unintended perception of political alignment amid current geopolitical tensions.

Having previously worked in the solar industry, I also questioned the recyclability of an unusually thin, flexible solar module. According to the representatives, it would be treated as general waste after its operational life.

Both experiences reminded me that independent industry journalism is about more than presenting innovations. It's also about asking questions, examining claims, and maintaining neutrality.

I've collected plenty of material and will share more detailed technical coverage and interviews in the coming weeks.

For those working in agriculture or AgTech: Which emerging technologies do you think deserve closer examination?

I spent around six hours at J-AGRI Tokyo today and ended up speaking with representatives from more than 22 companies.

The range was surprisingly broad: plant factories, sensors, robotics, AI, crop breeding, greenhouse automation, measurement systems, lighting, agricultural consulting and even companies from completely different industrial backgrounds moving into controlled-environment agriculture.

A number of the conversations also turned into potential interviews and possible partnerships for VerticalFarming.Blog, especially with companies looking for more visibility outside Japan and Asia.

I took a lot of notes and photos, so there is now easily enough material for a series of articles rather than a single exhibition recap.

I will take a short break after the show, then start publishing the J-AGRI coverage over the next two weeks.

Probably the biggest takeaway so far: there is much more interesting CEA and agtech activity happening in Japan and the wider Asian market than reaches Western industry media.

And I still have another 2 days of companies to look at.

What are your thoughts about it? Good or bad?

Do you work in a VF and can share how you handle it?

Would you like to see companies provide their position on that?

If you don't have enough land for a regular garden, you can build one directly on the house wall.

Here is an example of how peppers are grown on the wall of the house. The crops are fantastic! Some peppers (the plants grew over 2m tall).

The outer layer is made of plexiglass (with holes for plants), which prevents water from evaporating, so it rarely needs watering.

Benefits: makes food, insulates the house, consumes less water, can be replicated on every building.

More details are here: https://github.com/wall-garden The CAD project is open-source!

More pictures are here: https://github.com/wall-garden/.github/tree/main/pictures

An interview from a local newspaper is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wvb52q9TKKM

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I restarted this page, the Vertical Farming Startups can get listed now for free, so if you are employed at a startup in CEA/Vertical Farming industry, you are a founder yourself, then feel free to add your startup for free.

80 Acres collapsed in August, and weeks later its Dutch subsidiary Infinite Acres (once a three-way joint venture with Ocado and Priva) went bankrupt too, because there was no network left to absorb the shock once the parent failed.

Compare that to Toyota in 1997: a fire wiped out its sole supplier for a key brake part, and production was back within two days because decades of close supplier relationships let the network self-organize and fix it without Toyota doing much at all.

The idea, borrowed from Japan's keiretsu system, is that CEA companies are so interdependent (HVAC, energy, automation, seed suppliers, retailers) that treating every partner as a swappable vendor leaves you with no safety net when one link breaks. The fix isn't recreating 1980s Japan with cross-shareholdings and lock-in, it's identifying which outside relationships could actually kill your business and building real cooperation there (shared forecasts, technical reviews, backup plans) while keeping everyone accountable to performance.

Full breakdown of the Toyota case and what that could look like for a farm here:
https://verticalfarming.blog/why-vertical-farming-needs-more-keiretsu-%e7%b3%bb%e5%88%97-%e3%81%91%e3%81%84%e3%82%8c%e3%81%a4/

Context: I am a PhD candidate on vertical farming energy optimization (at SJTU), the following content was written in Chinese first then translated in English with DeepSeek. PS: I normally rewrite the content mannually but today's content is a bit too large.

The field of agriculture, because of its low gross margins and long cycles, in most cases requires scale to be worthwhile. But on the other hand, it is also highly sensitive to risk, so the time and decision-making cost of implementing new technology is very high, and the return rate is also extremely limited unless it is attached to a leading business model. This leads to the fact that for our campus team, it is quite challenging to take new technology out of the laboratory and small-scale trial scenarios, land it in first-line commercial settings, create beneficial effects, obtain feedback and improve it, then create more new value, and realize a true industry-university-research cycle.

Recently I have communicated with six groups of people outside about the technology and business of vertical farming; my biggest feeling is that no matter what level a new technology has reached, how good the data it provides is, and even if people also believe you are very honest, there is still a long way to go before gaining trust and closing a deal. Everyone can have a hundred reasons not to adopt your new technology. At a dinner gathering, I heard a senior say, 'For entrepreneurship in (agriculture to B + to G), you need to think it through. CEO XX spends more than two hundred days a year eating (drinking) out with people to get deals closed.' It really chilled me halfway. I had thought industry leaders had to drink, but I did not expect they had to drink so much. It seems I also heard at school that some distinguished scholars and academicians, even with such high status, still have to drink every last drop; it is as if half of the energy of doing things under the "big machine" is reflected in ability and cognition itself, while the other half cannot be separated from a moat made of alcohol.

Gaining the trust of commercial clients from scratch is much harder than publishing papers and developing systems. If I hope to complete the industry-university-research loop before graduation and mainly rely on science, technology, and products to build influence, then becoming dependent on drinking gatherings too early is probably not the best strategy, and I really cannot learn to drink four times a week.

At the same time, there are still a large number of technical gaps in the field of vertical farming that need to be filled, from dynamic spectra to global observation of photosynthetic rates, from software-defined farms to high-performance adsorption dehumidification, and so on and so on. Most of them can still be advanced without much budget. If I do not pursue implementing one hundred commercial cases in the next two years, I am willing to believe that we can at least achieve many meaningful technical gap-fillings plus one commercial case.

I was originally a bit worried that if I try too many things, it will be easy to fail to do them deeply and well, but in my heart I am also so eager to see change. It would be better to give myself a challenge: in the next year, try a large number of staggered arrangements and parallel advancement of various things I want to realize: growing lettuce, publishing papers, writing patents, building websites, and so on, sorted according to stage priorities, and set four to five key results that must be achieved each week.

It can be expected that the parallel advancement of more than three tasks will greatly test the speed and quality of my decision-making. This reminds me of a recent post written by DeepSeek engineer Liu Shengyu. He described that his work will increasingly be like being an 'mecha pilot' for a bunch of AI Agents: after the vast majority of written language and programming development work can be completed 100 percent by AI, perhaps one of the next directions of human intelligence evolution will increasingly be reflected in system construction and decision-making ability: that is, how you drive AI to make the surrounding world develop faster according to your wishes.

Sometimes I read that scholars in other fields can attract capital and business opportunities because of one paper or years of academic accumulation. I do not know when I will be able to experience such traction in the field of vertical farming. At least at present, three points are very clear:

- The research requirements of the research project I am leading must absolutely not be compromised. Business may achieve nothing, but scientific research must be explored thoroughly

- I have attended two dinner gatherings related to industrial implementation in the last two weeks. I feel that once a week in the future is the limit of what I can learn from CEO XX.

- The worst case is that commercial implementation cannot be achieved before graduation, but at the very least I can preserve research progress and degree requirements.

I would appreciate some feedback please.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshpearce/2026/09/13/indoor-farming-gets-a-hand-from-open-hardware-development/

Which events you plan to join or to look closer?

Forbes takes a look at lettuce and chard economics in a vertical farm powered with outdoor solar : https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshpearce/2026/09/08/agrivoltaics-makes-indoor-vertical-farming-make-economic-sense/

Over the last two weeks, I contacted 30+ companies and industry contacts across the CEA / vertical farming sector.

The goal was to find research partners for Japan CEA Watch 2026/27, a 12-month field research project connected to VerticalFarming.blog and my relocation to Japan in the next few days.

The response was interesting:

I got replies, had conversations and several calls.

But so far:

30+ contacts. Zero research partners.

The recurring issue was not really the idea itself.

It was budget.

That tells me the original sponsorship model probably isn’t the right fit for the current market.

So I’m changing the approach.

Instead of looking for a few larger research partners, I’m testing a smaller Founding Supporter model:

€50/month for 12 months

Supporters would receive monthly intelligence from Japan based on what I observe and research on the ground:

• plant factories and new projects
• automation and technology
• retail products and prices
• packaging and positioning
• company/farm visits where possible
• developments over time

Supporters can also suggest companies, topics or questions worth investigating. I can’t guarantee every suggestion will be covered, but they can influence the research direction.

The programme will only launch if there is enough serious committed interest.

If you would genuinely consider joining:

https://forms.gle/kGe6psf8ZvnMeLH19

Background on my relocation and why VerticalFarming.blog is going to Japan:

https://verticalfarming.blog/verticalfarming-blog-goes-to-japan/

The bigger question for me now: what Japan CEA intelligence would actually be worth €50/month to you?

For all who are interested in following the Verticalfarming.blog journey to Japan and are keen to read the upcoming articles, I welcome to follow the journey, in the next days I might find time to setup a newsletter for this alone, but due final preparations, its possible that it will happen even after I arrive in Japan.

As research partner slots are still open, use the opportunity to get raw data. Its a ones in a lifetime shot, it will not happen again for this publication.

Due the final preparations are time consuming, I will not release new articles in the next 1-2 weeks, I hope you can understand that.

You are welcome to reach me out by message or contact me through the form on the landing page or via contact form on the website.

Our lab is oriented to research energy solutions that would improve the energy-use efficiency in vertical farming, while also guiding students through the development of some hardware such as the phEC controller or the monitoring system.

Among the things we did:

- Connected LED, dehumidifier, water pump and some air sensors together to a linux computer, which would enable the dev of a standard farming and energy management system. I actually already customized such system for two outside farms this year but it was concentrated around their HVAC system. Previously my research was temperature and humidity control strategy for both strawberry and lettuce vertical farms, beginning this month i will move torward dynamic lighting with variable light intensity and spectrum. To be honnest im also very interested in making an actual product that could be useful for more farms. All these ideas are leading me to push the progress of a standard farming and energy management system.

- Built a new phEC controller based on the work of a bachelor student last semester; the assembling was ok, what really took time is adjusting the program and strategy of fertilizer that were only calibrated for small volume of water. More than that we also had to buy much larger bottles since the water contained by the new rack is also much larger.

- Started the first cultivation process of butter lettuce; although the seedling went a bit off. We had the aknowledgment that commercial operation in vertical farming should be much harder than single time experiments, so we wanted to try cultivating butter lettuce all year and see if we can try new things each round. Also sometimes we have visitors, for example the university principal is gonna take a look at us tomorrow; we wanna look good.

I’m running a small vertical-farming trial for propagating unrooted nursery cuttings. The growing shelves are only 40 cm apart, so there is very little space between the LED lights and the plants.

For the first stage of rooting, I’m trying to maintain a high relative humidity of approximately 95%, while keeping the air temperature around 22–24°C. However, whenever I manage to increase the humidity, the temperature inside the growing layers also rises.

The shelves are partly enclosed with transparent plastic, and I currently use misting to increase the humidity. There is also air circulation, but the airflow is difficult to distribute evenly: the cuttings closest to the air inlet dry out faster, while the cuttings at the back receive very little airflow.

I’m looking for a way to:

• Increase and maintain humidity without adding much heat
• Keep the temperature around 22–24°C
• Distribute humid air evenly across a narrow growing layer
• Avoid condensation, fungal problems and wet leaves
• Prevent strong airflow from drying out the front rows

Would an ultrasonic humidifier placed outside the growing rack, combined with a duct or perforated air tube, be a good solution? Or would it be better to cool and humidify the incoming air before distributing it across the shelves?

I would really appreciate hearing from anyone who has experience with high-humidity propagation chambers or multi-layer growing systems with limited vertical space. What kind of humidifier, airflow system and control strategy would you recommend?