Case study

Scaling cherry tomato production without scaling labor

North Jeolla, Korea

Cherry Tomatoes

20,000 m² Facility

Key Results

Yield increased from 12 kg/m² to 23 kg/m² annually
Reduced reliance on crop specialists by 45%
Expanded project scope to 2× the planned size

About the facility

JE Farms: cherry tomato production at scale

JE Farms is a controlled-environment agriculture (CEA) operation in North Jeolla Province, South Korea, focused on cherry tomato production. Prior to working with Croft, the team was already operating approximately 0.5 hectares and preparing for a major expansion.

The challenge

Struggling to scale without hiring more growers

The expansion plan followed a conventional model: increase greenhouse area and scale the team required to manage it.

In practice, this meant hiring additional experienced growers, crop monitoring specialists, and operational staff to maintain consistent production. These roles are both difficult to source and represent the highest ongoing cost in greenhouse operations.

For JE Farms, this created a clear limitation.

Expanding by an additional hectare would significantly increase upfront operating costs, particularly from high-salary technical roles. These costs would be incurred before the expanded facility had stabilized production, increasing financial risk and delaying time to profitability.

At the same time, hiring and training constraints meant that growth was not just a financial issue, but an operational bottleneck. As a result, the scale of the expansion had to be carefully limited to remain viable under a traditional model.

Our solution

Autonomous optimization with GrowZone

Croft deployed its GrowZone system across the facility, creating a fully controlled growing environment driven by continuous plant-response data and adaptive climate control.

The project included approximately 3 months of design and permitting, followed by 5 months of construction. An additional 5 months were dedicated to model refinement and system calibration, allowing the system to learn crop behavior and stabilize output.

We want to make reliable, profitable greenhouse production achievable at any scale

Rather than scaling labor alongside greenhouse size, the GrowZone solution replaced much of the manual crop monitoring and calibration typically handled by highly specialized staff.

The results

What the client achieved

JE Farms changed the structure of their expansion. Instead of adding just a single hectare to their plot, the reduced reliance on high-cost roles made it possible to increase the planned facility size to 2 hectares of AI-enabled CEA greenhouse, without taking on proportional increases in staffing or operational complexity.

+92%

Yield Increase

Doubled the yield per square meter, from 12 kg/m²/year to 23 kg/m²/year

+45%

Operational efficiency

Reduced the need for highly skilled growers and crop monitoring specialists

1.8×

Profit Efficiency

Higher output improved margins despite increased resource usage

2×

Scalable Operations

Enabled expansion without proportional increase in staffing, doubling the facility size

The challenge

The impact of our GrowZone solution extended beyond performance

The impact of our GrowZone solution extended beyond performance improvements — it changed the entire economics of JE Farm's expansion.

While total water and energy usage increased, output grew at a significantly higher rate, improving efficiency per kilogram and strengthening profitability.

More importantly, the operating model shifted. By reducing reliance on high-cost technical roles, JE Farms was able to double the originally planned expansion size, accelerating production capacity and improving capital efficiency without taking on the full burden of traditional staffing requirements.

1.8x

Estimated Annual Financial Impact

5.6 years

Estimated Payback Period