Micro-Naps for Your Plants? Wake up to Savings in the Greenhouse
August 21, 2020 It turns out that the plants don’t mind a little downtime. And learning that they can be grown under bursts of light rather than continuous illumination provides a way to potentially trim the expensive energy budget of indoor agriculture.
I’ve studied how light affects plant growth and development for more than 30 years. I recently found myself wondering: Rather than growing plants under a repeating cycle of one day of light and one night of darkness, what if the same daylight was split into pulses lasting only hours, minutes or seconds?
So my colleagues and I designed an experiment. We’d apply the normal amount of light in total, just break it up over different chunks of time.
After applying light for five seconds to activate photosynthesis and biological processes like pigment accumulation, we turned the light off for 10, or sometimes 20 seconds. Under these extended dark periods, the seedlings grew just as well as they had when the light and dark periods were equal.
If this could be done on the scale of an indoor farm, it might translate to a significant energy savings, at least 30% and maybe more.
Recent yet-to-be published work in our lab has shown that the same concept works in leaf lettuces; they also don’t mind an extended dark time between pulses. In some cases, the lettuces are green instead of purple and have larger leaves. That means a grower can produce a diversity of products, and with higher marketable product weight, by turning the lights off.
To shed more light on this subject, continue reading at TheConversation.com.
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