Croft Agricultural Corporation, the Korean company behind GrowPilot and its broader autonomous greenhouse control platform, has signed a memorandum of understanding with Asai Nursery, a fifth-generation commercial grower, establishing a strategic partnership to bring crop-responsive AI into one of Japan's most established commercial greenhouse operations. The agreement marks Croft's first move into the Japanese market and its first strategic partnership with a large commercial grower outside Korea.

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Asai Nursery has been in agriculture for 119 years and growing tomatoes in Mie Prefecture for the last 18. Five generations of the Asai family have run the operation from its base in Tsu City, most recently under current CEO Yuichiro Asai. Few commercial greenhouse operators anywhere can match such deep multi-generational expertise. Asai runs five tomato greenhouses across 13 hectares producing more than 1,000 tons of cherry tomatoes a year, and has two kiwi orchards across 15 hectares.  

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The company is expanding into a new greenhouse in Hokkaido and running early-stage avocado research in Okinawa, alongside exploratory work in wasabi, Japanese pear and strawberries. Asai’s multi-hectare scale and more than a century of continuous operation show they are one of the more established names in controlled environment agriculture globally.

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Asai's own facilities already run on highly sophisticated greenhouse technology — Priva for climate control and data, and, since 2018, the company have a joint venture with DENSO Corporation called AgriD, developing large-scale, next-generation greenhouse technology in Mie Prefecture. Yuichiro Asai has described the family business as “a production business anchored in R&D.” Their consistent pursuit of finding and adapting the latest technological solutions in their operations makes Asai an excellent strategic partner for Croft’s and their AI-powered solutions.

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‍"This is a very collaborative arrangement, and Asai has been the perfect partner for us to work with in expanding the capabilities of our management system." Hee Kyung Ryoo, CEO and Co-founder, Croft

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Croft and Asai signed a memorandum of understanding this year, establishing a strategic partnership between the two companies. At the center of the partnership is GrowBot, Croft's system for scanning crops directly and phenotyping each plant as it grows, rather than only tracking the environment around it. Folding that phenotyping data into Asai's day-to-day decisions doesn't mean replacing Asai's expertise with software; it means giving Asai's growers more to work with, drawn directly from plant feedback rather than fixed schedules and general assumptions.

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That phenotyping data feeds directly into GrowPilot, the platform that turns it into environmental decisions. GrowPilot was built to be sensor- and environment-agnostic; it can draw data from whatever hardware a greenhouse already has installed. For an operation the size of Asai's, that removes what's usually the biggest obstacle to adopting new technology: the cost and disruption of replacing equipment that already works.

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The work is already underway. Site surveys are complete at both companies' facilities, with representatives from each visiting the other's operation directly. Installations of new proprietary sensors Croft is developing are planned for October, and integration of Croft's AI into Asai's existing Priva-based systems is progressing as Asai finishes its ongoing greenhouse renovations.

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Croft is already running across several commercial deployments. Still, this partnership with Asai represents a different kind of scale test: consolidating all five of Asai's tomato greenhouses under a single grower and working from a single dashboard, rather than the industry norm, where many growers closely monitor each facility manually. Croft and Asai are targeting a yield increase and quality improvement, along with a reduction in the time growers spend on making day-to-day decisions, including crop registration.

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That target reflects a problem far bigger than Asai's five greenhouses. Commercial greenhouse operators everywhere are trying to figure out how to reduce greenhouse labor dependency, particularly as experienced growers become harder to find. Croft's approach is to reduce greenhouse labor requirements not by cutting positions, but by building expert-level decision-making into the system itself, so growing expertise isn’t stuck in a single person's memory. For an operation managing greenhouse labor costs across five separate sites, that shift changes the underlying economics of the whole operation. Scaling greenhouse operations of five large commercial facilities across 13 hectares without a proportional increase in specialized staff is exactly what Croft and Asai are testing for together.

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The MOU reflects an equal partnership rather than a client engagement. Asai contributes the commercial greenhouse environment, decades of grower expertise, and infrastructure already in place. Croft contributes GrowPilot, its platform for autonomous greenhouse control, along with automation that can work across any environment using any sensor.

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For Croft, founded in 2022 by CEO Hee Kyung Ryoo and CTO Woo Ram Lee, the Asai partnership is part of a broader push to expand beyond Korea, and Japan is the first stop.

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‍"Japan is one of the most technologically advanced markets in the world for controlled environment agriculture, with one of the largest and most sophisticated CEA sectors anywhere. That combination is exactly where we want to prove this works." Hee Kyung Ryoo, CEO and Co-founder, Croft

Croft has already worked with over 30 Korean growers. Like JE Farms, a cherry tomato grower in North Jeolla, South Korea, that saw a 45 percent gain in operational efficiency after adopting Croft's systems without needing to hire more staff for crop registration. Extending that work into Asai's greenhouses is the next real test of integrating crop-responsive intelligence into the day-to-day life of farmers everywhere.

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This partnership will be one of the biggest steps on our journey to help commercial greenhouse operators worldwide find ways to expand controlled environment agriculture without being bottlenecked by headcount.