LEDs Light the Way to Efficient Urban Farming
By Mike Martens, Senior Manager, Illumination Marketing at Osram Opto Semiconductors, North America
The global pandemic has turned the world upside down, bringing unprecedented change to the way we live, work and play. But the crisis has also paved the way for important new innovations. For instance, massive disruption to the global supply chain is now compelling many nations to ramp up their indoor and urban farming efforts to secure their food supply and feed their people.
Take the desert nation of the United Arab Emirates. Amid the ongoing pandemic, the country is experiencing something of a food crisis. That’s why it recently announced a $100 million investment in cutting-edge indoor farming facilities that can help feed its population. The effort will include the creation of the world’s largest vertical farm to help solve the challenge of local food production.
A key component of vertical farming is LED technology. In places across the globe where farmland is limited, innovative LED lighting solutions offer a major advantage because they can provide the exact light composition that various plants need for ideal growth or to develop certain characteristics. Plants can also be grown in a very space-saving manner and with considerably higher yields thanks to these lighting solutions.
LEDs are more efficient
For decades, traditional high-pressure sodium (HPS) lamps were commonly used for greenhouses and other horticultural purposes but they bring with them many challenges. They have a short lifespan and are often only suitable for top lighting in greenhouses due to their high heat output.
This is a big problem for greenhouse owners because efficient energy use is essential to economic production. In traditional greenhouse and urban farming setups, HPS lights are often inefficient. They do provide light for plants, but it is often not the most efficient wavelength range because the lamps cannot be customized to provide ideal growing conditions for different types of plants.
HPS lights often generate a lot of heat , causing considerable evaporation and ultimately limiting crop yield. What’s more, due to this heat production, HPS fixtures often cannot be placed very close to plant canopy, preventing more efficient vertical-farm setups. After all, you don’t want to singe your produce.
The good news is that innovative LED technologies can alleviate many of these concerns. For starters, LEDs produce almost no radiated heat, allowing for the light fixtures to be placed closer to plants and for plants to be stacked much higher, enabling farmers to grow more produce in smaller spaces while simultaneously reducing water costs.
LED lights also offer customizable wavelengths for different plants’ needs, allowing greenhouse operators and urban farmers to grow specific plants in their optimal conditions. For instance, LEDs can be tailored to supply light with a higher amount of red or blue content, generating exactly the wavelengths the plant, such as iceberg lettuce, tomatoes and basil need for optimal growth.
Urban farming is not a new phenomenon, but LEDs have the power to take it to the next level and more efficiently feed the world. In terms of sheer numbers, LEDs have an average lifespan of 50,000 hours compared to 8,000 hours for HPS lamps, making LEDS much more economical (and better for the environment). Indeed, vertical farms that leverage LED technology can achieve 40% energy savings compared to traditional lighting methods like HPS lamps. And due to the optimized light spectrum at 450, 660 and 730 nanometers, LEDs can provide the perfect lighting for all types of plants, allowing growers to adjust the lighting exactly to the needs of various crops.
LEDs grow healthier produce
LED are the most efficient lighting technologies to date for growing produce. They not only help produce fresh food in smaller spaces without the use of pesticides, they also make it easier for consumers in urban areas to obtain fresh and healthy food quickly, a must, considering the planet’s ever-growing population and ever-decreasing farmland.
Consumers in urban areas often rely on produce grown in faraway places that is brought to them on trucks using fossil fuels. This produce is often grown with pesticides to keep insects away, as well as fertilizers, so plants can be grown throughout the year, even in suboptimal conditions. All of these factors contribute to climate change and more polluted water sources. With horticultural LEDs, these issues can be mitigated.
LEDs also provide optimal growing conditions in any environment with minimal water waste, while reducing the need for pesticides in indoor growing environments. Communities then have the ability to grow produce closer to home, which allows consumers to learn more easily what exactly goes into their food and greatly reduces the fossil fuel usage to get produce from the (urban) farm to their tables. Urban farming has great potential to make positive impacts on local environments and communities. It’s more sustainable and decreases communities’ reliance on foods shipped in at great cost from around the globe.
LEDs light the way
As we grapple with the many concerns facing our modern society, it is imperative to invest in efficient and time-saving technology of all types. LEDs are one of these technologies. Indeed, they light the way to the farms of the future. They will have an enormously beneficial impact on agriculture by dramatically increasing crop production and putting food on every table more efficiently.