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The Growth of Controlled Environmental Agriculture
Under the strain of climate change impacts, over-population, and ever-expanding development, our planet’s resources and arable land continue to become more scarce…yet global food demand presses upward. Densely populated urban areas, dry, unproductive growing regions, and crop loss from unpredictable weather patterns increase the pressure to produce in order to meet food supply chain demand. In response, the agricultural landscape continues to evolve to meet today’s challenges, developing solutions that maximize yields and profits while minimizing demands on resources.
Controlled agriculture environment (CEA or CEAg) technology continues to develop to meet that demand—creative indoor growing environment solutions that conserve space and resources, while being able to manipulate and control growing conditions. Harnessing technology, growers, agricultural researchers, and greenhouse managers can monitor growing variables like temperature, humidity, light, and CO2 to fine-tune indoor agricultural environments to achieve peak production.
Let’s shed some light on controlled environmental agriculture, the problems it solves, examples of CEA applications, and, specifically, the role light plays on CEA plant growth and production—and, finally, monitoring tools indoor growers can leverage to optimize operations, yield, and cost-effectiveness.
The Advantages of Controlled Agriculture Environments
CEAg solutions offer several key advantages that make it an increasingly attractive agricultural solution in today’s world:
- Year-round production, unaffected by seasons and erratic weather patterns
- Consistent crop quality and yields
- Protection from pests and extreme weather
- Reduced residual pollutants that come from pesticides and herbicides
- Efficient resource use, particularly water
According to industry experts, controlled agriculture is poised to expand beyond its current typical crop—leafy greens and herbs—into key crops that the world may come to rely upon as climate change disrupts traditional agricultural patterns and production. The CEA industry is rapidly adopting new technologies to improve profitability and sustainability. And as urban populations grow and sustainability concerns intensify…controlled environmental agriculture is positioned to play a pivotal role.
“Any time you're controlling anything, even a greenhouse, you're controlling the temperature, the rainfall…everything. So, the term CEA applies to a range of applications, extending from simple greenhouses all the way to grow rooms that are controlling basically every single growing variable.” ~ Dave Johnson, Principal Scientist, LI-COR Environmental
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Types of Controlled Growing Environments
Indoor Agricultural Solutions, from Greenhouses to Vertical Farms
Controlled ag environments come in various forms. The most familiar are greenhouses and high tunnels (or hoop houses). These structures allow farmers to extend growing seasons and protect crops from harsh weather conditions. Typically constructed of glass or plastic, these indoor growing environments tend to be lower-cost solutions for setup and maintenance. Let’s take a look at more advanced types of CEA models:
Commercial Greenhouses: Crop Production At Scale
Commercial greenhouses step up controlled agriculture, using advanced technologies and automated systems to maximize yields and manipulate growing conditions. By optimizing conditions, large-scale commercial operations can precisely control water delivery, nutrients, and more to produce crops with maximum efficiency.
Vertical Farming: The Future of Urban Agriculture
A cutting-edge approach to controlled ag, vertical farming is on the rise amid high-rise landscapes. Perfectly suited to urban areas, this method often occurs in repurposed abandoned buildings or intentionally built structures, and involves growing crops in stacked layers and towers. Vertical farming has proven to produce high yields of leafy greens and herbs, the most studied crops of controlled environmental agriculture.
Mastering the Elements: Adjusting PAR and Other Growing Parameters for Optimal Crop Yields
In such focused farming applications, every inch of grow space counts—for crop yield, plant health, and efficiency. So, mastering the growing elements is essential. By carefully regulating key parameters, growers can create and maintain ideal conditions for optimal plant growth and productivity—year-round. Let’s illuminate the greatest force behind plant growth…light. Specifically—Photosynthtetically Active Radiation (PAR).
The Power of Light in Plant Growth
Light is the driving force behind photosynthesis. Observing and understanding how light intensity and types of light impact plant growth is at the heart of indoor growing. PAR directly links to photosynthesis, the very process that powers plant life, and refers to the range of light wavelengths (400–700 nm) that plants can use for photosynthesis, including light from both the blue and red parts of the spectrum, which plants use most efficiently. By understanding PAR levels, growers can optimize light conditions for their plants. Because each plant has chlorophyll pigments in the leaves, the peak absorption point where a plant likes to get light the most exists at a specific wavelength, but all plants have peaks somewhere in this 400-700 nanometer range.
To create conditions that optimize PAR, LI-COR environmental monitoring expert Dave Johnson explains, many different kinds of lights are used in controlled environmental ag environments: old halogen lamps, metal halide (these specialty bulbs have a very high intensity light output level), and now, Johnson says, LEDs. LEDs deliver light in the ideal PAR range that plants like and they often offer options to select different parts of the light spectrum, which allows growers to customize their lighting “recipes” for plants.
Johnson says there is almost a one-to-one relationship of the level of PAR and photosynthesis. If you increase the light, you increase photosynthesis, but eventually, one can reach the point of saturation when more light not only stops helping, but can damage the plant.
Check out Johnson's video illuminating the importance of PAR in CEA
To strike that delicate growth balance for PAR and other parameters, key questions farmers usually ask are:
How does light intensity influence plant yield?
As Johnson points out, growers look to manipulate light intensity to optimize the yield of plants, which ties to the specific species or variety being grown.
DLI: How much light is the plant receiving throughout the day?
Plants’ growth cycle is heavily linked to the amount of hours of sunlight they receive during the day. Growers can reference a Daily Light Integral (DLI) measurement, calculated by taking multiple measurements to come up with a total units of light a plant receives over the course of a day/period.
How humid is the growing environment (What is the VPD)?
Indoor growers especially also need to know how humidity levels are impacting growth by monitoring the Vapor Pressure Deficit (VPD), the pressure in the air exerted by water vapor.
How much light are individual plants getting?
For growers, it’s also difficult to know what level of light is actually reaching plants, when factors like light location and spacing can impact the amount of light reaching individual plants.
Whether serving as a checks and balances for sophisticated high-tech commercial systems, or gauging refracting light from white-washed grow house walls, this is where light monitoring products can illuminate how efficiently and effectively plants are receiving the light they need to thrive.
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Monitoring the Light Spectrum for Optimal Plant Growth
Efficiency and efficacy is crucial to growers’ bottom line, which is why more time-saving, cost-effective light monitoring solutions keep cropping up to optimize operations and ensure their systems are maximizing value. Being able to track PAR at the plant level is invaluable for growers seeking to gauge how much light is reaching their plants, when factors like plant spacing can impact the amount of light reaching the understory and canopy of each plant.
Throughout CEAg applications, how PAR and other sensors are used to monitor these variables varies: A large, high-scale growing facility with high vegetable production might strategically locate PAR and other sensors throughout the greenhouse, continually recording light measurements to determine the facility’s DLI and efficacy of high-cost automated systems. Other smaller growers might use a portable PAR sensor to take measurements once a month to make sure the lights are working. Some greenhouses use light monitoring to ensure there’s no outdoor light coming in, to achieve zero UV light influencing growth.
From plant researchers to commercial greenhouse managers, all can benefit from some easy-to-implement, affordable monitoring tools and solutions to support their goals.
How to Assess Growing Environments for Plant Light Requirements
PAR Sensors
An industry leader in light monitoring sensors, LI-COR offers two PAR sensor solutions, the LI-190R and LI-191R Line Quantum Sensors, which both provide highly accurate PAR measurements of most broad-spectrum light sources—natural, artificial, and mixed light. These sensors can connect to a portable meter, data logger, remote monitoring sensor network.
Bluetooth Data Loggers for PAR, Temperature & Humidity
Equipped with Bluetooth for effortless data offloading from hard-to-reach locations in greenhouses and growing facilities, multiparameter data loggers like the HOBO MX2308 measure PAR leveraging a LI-COR 190R light sensor, in addition to measuring temperature and humidity…all with a single logger. These easy-to-use loggers offer a cost-effective way growers can track multiple conditions, as well as calculate Vapor Pressure Deficit (VPD) and Daily Light Integral (DLI) measurements.
Wireless Sensor Networks for Controlled Ag Monitoring
Indoor farmers can amplify their monitoring efforts by using a remote wireless sensor network. These customizable, scalable networks connect up to 50 wireless sensors to a central RX cellular station that transmits the data to the cloud (LI-COR Cloud remote monitoring software). Sensor networks allow growers to customize and scale their monitoring operations, give them real-time, around-the-clock access to key conditions data, and also provide customizable alarms that trigger email or text alerts when growing conditions exceed specified thresholds—all of which support timely decision-making that can prevent costly losses and optimize productivity.
As the future of indoor farming evolves, these monitoring solutions will serve as invaluable tools that can help CEA growers fine-tune their operations and growing conditions…and ultimately meet the growing demand for sustainable, cost-efficient food sources.
Learn More About Controlled Environmental Ag Monitoring:
Ag Monitoring in Greenhouses
Light Monitoring Solutions