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 agriculture faces severe labor shortages due to the decreasing number and aging of farmers. 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
AgriD is combining Asai Nursery’s 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.
24-hour agricultural activities
AgriD will develop and work on next-generation greenhouse horticulture with high productivity
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.
The 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 from harvesting to shipping of tomatoes, and to reduce excessive work, waste, and variability.
- Based on expertise in industrial technology such as Kaizen, manpower saving was acquired even though the amount of harvested and sipped crops 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.