Case Study: Osaka Prefecture University achieves smart indoor farming and crop-loss prevention with Microsoft Azure

Japanese university uses cloud software to develop smart agriculture solutions

Osaka Prefecture University is advancing smart agriculture through its Plant Factory Research Center to address Japan’s shrinking, aging farming population and the need for higher-yield, cost-effective production. The university needed ways to monitor and control indoor growing environments precisely—capturing climate, soil, and image data—to reduce variability in crop growth and make agriculture more profitable and sustainable.

The solution was Midori Cloud, developed by partner Seraku on Microsoft Azure, which combines sensors, webcams, image analysis, Azure Machine Learning, and push notifications to give farmers real-time monitoring and alerts without on‑site servers. The system helped accelerate crop cycles (reducing cabbage growth from about 150 days to 60–90 days in experiments), improved facility management, prevented a reported near-30 million yen loss, and reached wider adoption (200+ units shipped), enabling scalable, low-cost smart farming.

Osaka Prefecture University

Yoshifumi Nishiura

Doctor of Agriculture and Associate Professor