"If you're not doing data collection today, you really need to start"

When Garrett Wagg first walked into Indoor Ag-Con in early 2025, he wasn't there to sell anything, just to listen and gather as much information as possible. "I'm not the expert in that space. I want to hear from the grower what their needs and wants are, what they don't like, what they want," says Wagg, the Automation and Electrification Product Manager at Bosch Rexroth.

What he heard shaped everything that followed. A year later, Bosch Rexroth returned to Indoor Ag-Con with a booth, a partner ecosystem, and a clear point of view on what the CEA controls market was getting wrong.

© Eelkje Pulley | VerticalFarmDaily.com
Bosch Rexroth's Garrett Wagg, Mike Vandemortel, Dave Cameron, and Asvin Parsad, at Indoor Ag-Con 2026

A gap worth filling
Bosch Rexroth is best known as a leading supplier in motion control and drive technology, but when the company launched its ctrlX AUTOMATION platform in late 2019, it opened a much wider aperture. "When we rolled out ctrlX, our device had the capability of doing data collection, environmental control, a lot of PLC functionality that you'd find in smart building automation," Wagg explains. "When we were looking at markets, we learned that there aren't really products out there that can do environmental control and also do data collection, and also do motion control. We saw that there's kind of a nice market here."

The CEA sector's reliance on proprietary, closed systems made the opportunity clearer still. The vertical farming industry has seen its share of well-capitalised operations collapse under the weight of bloated operating costs and infrastructure that couldn't adapt, in part because growers had locked themselves into control systems that offered little room to move. "A lot of these larger control system companies get you locked into a software package. You may be forced to upgrade if you have limited devices that you can connect to it," Wagg says. "We wanted to go the opposite route."

© Bosch Rexroth
Bosch Rexroth's ctrlX CORE controller (left) and ctrlX IO Coupler (right)

Open by design
At the heart of ctrlX is an app-based architecture modelled on the smartphone. "ctrlX is made up of over 100 apps right now, so you can pick and choose," Wagg says. "It's kind of like your iPhone with the App Store. You can use it in all different ways, but the power behind it is really the apps that you download and how you use them."

In addition to the apps developed internally by Bosch Rexroth, many come from third-party partners within the ctrlX ecosystem, among them Microclimates, whose climate control and monitoring operating system runs as a single app on ctrlX hardware. "I saw the vision of what they were doing," he says of the Microclimates integration. "We gave them a bunch of our hardware, got it to their CTO. He played around with it and found that we had a lot more with our hardware device than what they could do before." The result is an intuitive app that provides the end-user with flexibility in how to manage resources in a real-time setting.

For growers who want to build their own tools, the platform supports coding in virtually any language. For those who aren't engineers, Bosch Rexroth offers drag-and-drop dashboard building, instructional videos, and a GitHub community. More than a dozen US distributors carry a full complement of app engineers and technical staff positioned to provide on-site support, which is a deliberate response to feedback Wagg heard repeatedly at the show. "Some of the feedback we heard is there are some good products out there, but the lack of support, especially with companies headquartered over in the Netherlands or other areas in Europe, can make it hard sometimes to get that on-site support where people can come in and help a grower get things up and running."

Remote support is equally central to the offering. Through screen-sharing and device remote access tools, Bosch Rexroth can troubleshoot and guide operators through issues without sending anyone on site, a capability that matters as vertical and container farms push into increasingly remote geographies. Additionally, regarding cybersecurity, the ctrlX CORE controller utilises an operating system that's Cyber Resilience Act compliant, which adds further security to farmers' operations.

© Bosch Rexroth

Try before you invest
One of the more pragmatic features of ctrlX is its virtual control environment, which allows growers to test apps and simulate functions on their computer before committing capital to hardware. Ten-day trial licences are available across the app catalogue. For a sector where margins on leafy greens can be razor-thin, the ability to validate a concept before deployment carries real weight. "Why don't you try this concept out first, see if it could work for you, and then you can make that purchase and deploy it," Wagg says. "You don't have to invest all this money upfront."

Tackling energy and water
At Indoor Ag-Con, no topic generated more floor conversation than operating costs. Energy and water sit at the centre of the CEA efficiency challenge, and Wagg is direct about what growers need to do first. "The big key point at the show this year was data collection; if you're not doing that today, you really need to start." ctrlX addresses this through sensor integration, scheduling automation, and data historian apps that push real-time alerts to a grower's phone. "Instead of just turning a valve on manually, you set a timer because you've done the research. This crop only needs this amount of water at this time," he explains. "You can ask: how many kilowatts am I using per hour with this light? What is my water usage for this fill tank? And then you tighten it up."

AI, Wagg says, is already beginning to support this process, not by running facilities autonomously, but by processing the data they generate. "AI is not ready yet to run a facility completely, but something it can be used for today, really efficiently, is running through the data of your pre- and post-harvesting and the different aspects of the growing process, and finding those inefficiencies more easily."


© Bosch Rexroth

Real-world deployment
The system is scale-agnostic and crop-agnostic. Bosch Rexroth is currently in conversation with strawberry growers, cannabis operations, and leafy greens facilities. One southern US grower is looking at replacing a more traditional system with ctrlX for motion control while simultaneously deploying it for data collection and supervisory control across the facility. "The most efficient way to use the product is for multiple purposes," Wagg says. "You're only buying one piece of hardware that's doing motion control, data collection, and environmental control, all under one hub."

Two weeks before the interview, Wagg visited NC State University, meeting with the dean and eight professors from the Ag Engineering group. The university is exploring adopting ctrlX into its curriculum, pairing students with nearby CEA facilities to remote in, build dashboards, and run dosing functions as live coursework. "There are kids today in middle school learning how to use basic coding functions," Wagg says. "We wanted that next generation of up-and-coming engineers and even farmers to have the ability to be an artist with the product."

Built to last
In a sector where growers have watched well-funded companies disappear and leave them stranded mid-build, the question of vendor stability is not abstract. Wagg addresses it directly. "You don't have to fear that our company is going away," he says. ctrlX is already deployed across Fortune 500 manufacturers, as Bosch Rexroth's footprint spans over 80 countries from its established expertise within factory automation. The CEA division is one of several new markets, alongside wastewater treatment and smart building automation, that ctrlX has opened up.

Looking ahead, Bosch Rexroth is exploring AI and computer vision integrations, including a potential collaboration with a major imaging provider on a camera system capable of identifying disease, pathogens, and optimal growth levels in real time. "The way to go is having an open platform that can bring in these technologies and scale as new developments come out and the sector evolves."

For more information:
Bosch Rexroth
Garrett Wagg, Automation and Electrification Product Manager
Mobile: +1 224 688-3249
[email protected]
www.boschrexroth-us.com