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Just minutes outside the city limits of Kyoto, Japan, the farmland begins. It’s lush, dotted with healthy paddy fields, halcyon against a mountain vista. Continue as far as Kameoka and you reach the place where the farmlands may end. Not because the horizon halts, but because a certain small factory, situated within these nearly neon green fields, is using water, artificial light and, soon, robots to take over agriculture.
The factory belongs to SPREAD, a Japanese company run by an ambitious and unlikely CEO, 56-year-old Shinji Inada. SPREAD was the subject of splashy press earlier this year when Inada announced plans for an automated factory by 2017. For now, SPREAD produces 21,000 heads of lettuce daily using vertical farming techniques; rather than a greenhouse, it utilizes hydroponics and fluorescent or LED lighting. Its expansion plans are huge — around 20 factories that will produce half a million heads of lettuce a day. Around 200 companies use artificial light methods in Japan alone, estimates vertical farming expert Toyoki Kozai, chief-director of the Japan Plant Factory Association and president of Chiba University.
SPREAD won’t tell us exactly what the automated factories will look like. But you can bet there won’t be C-3PO-esque gardeners strolling around. Instead, automation will subtly replace the most labor-intensive tasks, says J.J. Price, global marketing manager — which means spacing out the lettuce heads as they bloom then harvesting.
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