Advanced Lighting for Indoor Agriculture: Products, Adoption, Opportunities
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Product Performance, Market Adoption, and Cost- and Energy-Savings Opportunities
Within controlled agricultural environments, there is a growing demand for technology that will ensure consistently high crop yields and growth quality, energy, water, nutrients, labor, and reduced time to complete a grow cycle. this practical report explores lighting for its role in precision, high-yield indoor horticultural operations and provides fact-based insights for investors, product, and operators.
Format: PDF slides
Length: 56 pages
Authors: Bryan D. Jungers and Carol L. Stimmel
© 2014 Manifest Mind, LLC
Within controlled agricultural environments, there is a growing demand for technology that will ensure consistently high crop yields and growth quality, energy, water, nutrients, labor, and reduced time to complete a grow cycle. this practical report explores lighting for its role in precision, high-yield indoor horticultural operations and provides fact-based insights for investors, product, and operators.
Format: PDF slides
Length: 56 pages
Authors: Bryan D. Jungers and Carol L. Stimmel
© 2014 Manifest Mind, LLC
Summary
A wide and growing array of commercially available lighting equipment is now being designed, manufactured, and marketed directly for use in controlled-environment agriculture (CEA) applications. CEA involves the use of technologies and techniques to protect and improve the cultivations of commercial agriculture. The reliable evaluation of performance for lighting-product performance is complicated by the diversity of technologies, the many variations in product design that “enhance” existing technology, and the wide variety of approaches to equipment and systems integration for commercial CEA applications.
There are currently no established industry standards for the design, performance, integration, interoperability, and test requirements and conditions for horticultural lighting equipment. As a result, product specifications and performance details are often inconsistent from one manufacturer to the next, making the direct comparison of relative performance attributes like operational energy usage nearly impossible. The serious need for equipment standardization— to enable more-reliable product evaluations and interoperability—is indicated by a large cloud of ambiguity hanging over the horticulture-lighting industry.
No matter how convincing lighting manufacturers may be at describing the benefits of their lamps’ light quality on plant growth, and perhaps many honestly believe their claims, light quality is less important for plant growth than light quantity. The spectral tweaking of lamplight output currently takes place at the factory, and the widely anticipated benefits of light-spectrum adjustment and control for grow-area lighting—including lower production costs, higher crop yields, shorter growth cycles, and better-quality horticulture products—are unlikely to be fully commercially available to the average horticulturist for years to come. These lighting benefits won’t be realized until after a corresponding level of functionality and sophistication in lighting system controls and performance analytics capabilities have been developed.
However, there are a great many reasons to be hopeful for the future of controlled-environment agriculture and its potential to deliver resource-conservation and performance-enhancement benefits to the commercial horticulture operations. Control, quality, and precision of lighting will all be enhanced and tailored to the requirements of tomorrow’s CEA facilities. For now, though few disagree that LEDs are the future of CEA lighting, there are also few who would claim they are ready for widespread deployment, except for their manufacturers, of course.
There are currently no established industry standards for the design, performance, integration, interoperability, and test requirements and conditions for horticultural lighting equipment. As a result, product specifications and performance details are often inconsistent from one manufacturer to the next, making the direct comparison of relative performance attributes like operational energy usage nearly impossible. The serious need for equipment standardization— to enable more-reliable product evaluations and interoperability—is indicated by a large cloud of ambiguity hanging over the horticulture-lighting industry.
No matter how convincing lighting manufacturers may be at describing the benefits of their lamps’ light quality on plant growth, and perhaps many honestly believe their claims, light quality is less important for plant growth than light quantity. The spectral tweaking of lamplight output currently takes place at the factory, and the widely anticipated benefits of light-spectrum adjustment and control for grow-area lighting—including lower production costs, higher crop yields, shorter growth cycles, and better-quality horticulture products—are unlikely to be fully commercially available to the average horticulturist for years to come. These lighting benefits won’t be realized until after a corresponding level of functionality and sophistication in lighting system controls and performance analytics capabilities have been developed.
However, there are a great many reasons to be hopeful for the future of controlled-environment agriculture and its potential to deliver resource-conservation and performance-enhancement benefits to the commercial horticulture operations. Control, quality, and precision of lighting will all be enhanced and tailored to the requirements of tomorrow’s CEA facilities. For now, though few disagree that LEDs are the future of CEA lighting, there are also few who would claim they are ready for widespread deployment, except for their manufacturers, of course.
