Indoor farming has caught up to and surpassed conventional methods thanks to LED grow lights. LED grow lights produce healthier and more delicious plants, use half as much energy, and produce twice as fast. We’re going to teach you all about lighting systems for vertical farming to paint a complete picture of how lighting technology improvements have changed the game forever.
What Is Vertical Farming?
Before we delve deeper into the appropriate lighting systems for vertical farming, it’s best to help you understand what vertical farming is. Simply put, vertical farming happens indoors, often in aeroponic towers or other vertically stacked growing stations. Vertical farms often use CEA (controlled-environment agriculture) and other state-of-the-art methods to maximize plant development.
Vertical farming doesn’t need access to fertile soil, favorable weather, or a significant transportation network. In fact, indoor farming is possible in almost any location. You may cultivate your crops near the people eating them, and you won’t have to worry about the effects of seasonal variations. In addition, you don’t need the same type of labor force as traditional farming to get optimum plant growth.
The Benefits of Vertical Farming
Stability throughout the year means consistent output, which is the primary appeal of vertical farming. The crops and herbs grown in vertical farms consistently go through 12 harvests yearly, making predicting yields easier.
When operations are stable, businesses can make strategic investments that fuel expansion. However, striking a balance between output and revenue is not always easy. Yet if you take advantage of the main benefits of vertical farming, the potential is huge.
Vertical farms can save significant amounts of money without the need for traditional farmland and equipment. Therefore, indoor farms seldom need to worry about chemical or pesticide use. Overall, the demand for resources and physical labor is minute compared to their outdoor counterparts.
The Role of LEDs
With a brief understanding of what vertical farming is and its benefits, let’s break down the key topic of the post: the role LED lights have in vertical farming.
LED grow lights are superior to conventional lighting for two key reasons:
- They use power more efficiently than any other light source.
- They enable more precise plant development regulation.
Researchers have determined plants respond differently to various light colors several times throughout their development cycles. We can think of light as a mixture of colors, each with its own wavelength. This means the various hues have distinct qualities that influence plant development differently.
Benefits of Using LED Lights
LED grow lights give indoor growers unprecedented precision in tailoring a plant’s flavor, appearance, and nutritional worth. Moreover, the extreme predictability of vertical farming is a direct result of using LED grow lights. Basically, it’s simple to replicate successful plant-growth recipes. The inefficiency of grow light technologies in the past may have given indoor farming a bad name, but that notion is a thing of the past.
LED grow lights are considerably better than the HPS (high-pressure sodium) and MH (metal halide) lights common in indoor farming, proving LED grow lights are the future of vertical farming. However, we’ll talk more about that later. Essentially, LEDs make indoor farming a sustainable enterprise by lowering prices and increasing standards for plant quality.
Understanding LEDs
We touched on this earlier, but each color a light emits has a different wavelength. White light has the highest luminosity with the shortest wavelength, red light is lower with a longer wavelength, and blue light falls somewhere in the middle of the spectrum.
Some folks may use ultraviolet (UV) light and white light interchangeably, but they are two different things, even though they work together. White light is the visible spectrum of light, while UV light is invisible. LED grow lights emit both white light and UV radiation. Plants benefit from this radiation, but prolonged exposure can be damaging.
Like people, plants can get sunburned when exposed to excessive UV rays. By carefully adjusting the wavelengths of our LED grow lights, we can easily prevent overexposure to light from harming our plants. This leads to dramatically increased productivity in plant cultivation.
Red and blue light, however, are the most beneficial to plant development. Because of this, these hues frequently illuminate plant life in vertical farms. Excess white light, such as sunshine, might hinder plant development. Thus, moderately white light is the best medicine for some crops in vertical farming.
Lumen and Lux vs. LED PAR
Lumens and lux are the most frequent measures of illumination. However, photosynthetic active radiation (PAR) is what matters when discussing light sources and plant growth.
Lumens and lux are easy-to-understand units of measurement for the brightness of light that reaches the human eye. Lumens quantify the output of a light source. Lux measures luminous flux, which is the light penetrating a certain area.
The PAR spectrum, on the other hand, reveals the wavelengths essential for plant development at different times of the year. To be clear, PAR is not a unit of measurement but rather a method for determining the optimal wavelengths of light for plant development. For instance, if you know a plant prefers blue or red light, you can use photosynthetic photon flux (PPF) to fine-tune the PAR wavelength. All this comes together in LED PAR lights, which use this measurement to provide optimal lighting for plants.
Superior LED Capabilities
The design behind LED grow lights has vertical farming in mind. Modern LED technology allows for very low power consumption. LED grow lights are in a class of their own and have surpassed all others.
LEDs have an edge above all other grow lights since they filter out all wavelengths, saving those necessary for plant development while covering a larger spectrum range. LED grow lights also have a far longer lifespan than conventional lights.
Another one of LEDs’ many advantages over HPSs and MHs is their dimming capabilities. LED grow lights provide more light with the same energy because of their superior heat dissipation. Also, LEDs are more economical since they’re reasonably priced. Vertical farms, thanks to LED lighting, have the potential to double the annual yield of traditional farms.
After learning all about lighting systems for vertical farming, it’s evident how beneficial they are for your gain and the world overall. Stylighting is proud to offer premier LED grow lights for indoor plants to help your crops thrive and grow better than you ever imagined.
