A "Berry Good" Story: Vertical Farming in Malaysia

Growing high-quality strawberries in tropical Malaysia has never been straightforward. The country’s heat and humidity make consistency difficult. That is why Malaysia still imports most strawberries, often at the expense of freshness, cost and sustainability.

BerryGood, a pioneering vertical farm in Malaysia, set out to defy the odds. Working with Siemens, the team asked: What if climate didn’t have to be a constraint at all?

The result is Controlled-Environment Agriculture (CEA), where crops are grown indoors under tightly managed conditions. Instead of reacting to weather, temperature, humidity, light and nutrients are designed and controlled from the start.

From Growing to Engineering

The incorporation of CEA means the strawberries are not left to seasonal variability. Each stage follows a defined “recipe,” executed by Siemens Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) running real-time control loops.

These recipes adjust the environment as the plant develops:

• Acclimation (early stage)
  ~21°C daytime temperature, high humidity (~85%), lower light intensity to stabilise young plants
• Fruiting and ripening (late stage)
  Higher light intensity (more than 3× increase), increased nutrient concentration (EC ~0.6 → ~1.5), lower night temperatures (~14°C) to enhance flavour and fruit quality
• Continuous adjustments
  pH levels (5.8 → 5.5), irrigation cycles (2–3 times daily), light duration (13–14 hours) are continuously fine-tuned and repeated consistently

This creates not just automation, but repeatable biological outcomes by design.

From Visibility to Better Decisions

Control only matters if you can see what’s happening.

Through Siemens Human-Machine Interfaces (HMI), operators have real-time visibility into each growing chamber. Conditions are continuously monitored, deviations flagged early, and adjustments made before they affect yield or quality.

In practice, this shifts decision-making:

• From instinct → data
• From reaction → anticipation

Each growing chamber is modular and self-contained, allowing production to scale step by step without redesigning the entire farm.

Vertical Farming Changes the Equation

Food quality and reliability are shifting. Imported produce depends on long cold-chain logistics and post-harvest handling to maintain shelf life, introducing variability between harvest and consumption. Controlled-environment systems like BerryGood’s reduce these pressures by producing closer to demand with stable conditions throughout cultivation.

Consistency also comes from high-quality strawberry seedlings sourced from established regions such as Taiwan, combined with standardized, recipe-based protocols to achieve consistent quality comparable to imported fruits.

More broadly, vertical farming enables:

• Closer-to-market production, reducing reliance on imports
• Efficient resource use, with water and nutrients delivered directly
• Consistent yields in climates constrained by heat and land

But it also requires:

• High upfront investment in infrastructure and automation
• Careful energy management for lighting and cooling
• Integration of complex digital and physical systems

Traditional agriculture scales by expanding land. Vertical farming scales by replicating systems. For high-value crops like strawberries, it offers a compelling alternative.

A Shift Already Underway

What’s happening at BerryGood reflects a broader shift. Technologies from manufacturing—automation, data, and precise control—are reshaping agriculture. Farming starts to look less like an unpredictable process and more like a designed system.

Mr. Lim Hooi Keong, Managing Director, shared: “We aimed to transform strawberry production in Malaysia and knew it was possible with the right technology, which is where Siemens came in. With recipe-based environmental control, we can scale to other crops and focus on consistently delivering high-quality organic produce grown closer to home.”

At Siemens, this reflects a wider ambition to apply industrial intelligence to agriculture.

From controlled environments to data-driven optimisation, agriculture becomes more connected, precise, and resilient—not by removing nature, but by designing systems that work with it more reliably.

And in that shift, farming becomes part of a larger transformation—where essentials of life are shaped by engineering, insight, and intelligent design, rather than left to chance.