White paper | Grow all with one light fixture

HORTIBIZ DAILY (HB): What is your work at Sollum Technologies?

ROSE SÉGUIN (RS):  I work as an agronomist with Sollum Technologies. After the Sollum smart LED grow lights are installed in a greenhouse, I help the grower prepare lighting strategies according to their needs. Also, I conduct regular follow-ups to make sure the lighting strategy works from transplanting to crop clean-out.

HB: What Sollum Technologies do for growers?

RS: Sollum Technologies is a horticultural lighting company specializing in greenhouse lighting. We offer a  dynamic LED toplighting solution, allowing the grower to adjust the intensity and light spectrum at any point. Conventionally, greenhouses use HPS lights which produce a lot of heat and produce a yellowish light. As the technologies are evolving, greenhouse growers are moving towards LED. With most LED suppliers, you consult a catalogue, pick a spectrum, buy that light and install it. Then, that is the light you have for the product's lifespan.

With Sollum's dynamic LED solution, the fixtures are installed and we can then add essentially any spectrum that the grower wants. Our support technicians take the grower's request and develops a recipe accordingly. Within each light recipe, the spectrum and intensity can be adjusted throughout the photoperiod. For example, we could develop a recipe with a sunrise in the morning, increase the intensity to a certain point, apply a daytime recipe or light treatment and finish with a sunset.

In certain scenarios, the grower might find that a certain recipe isn't having the intended effects on the crops. So, we go back to the drawing board and develop a new recipe for their particular case. We see this mostly with different varieties, which can have variable responses to light quality. In a greenhouse, there are usually multiple crop varieties to ensure overall resilience and a steady production schedule. As different varieties may require different lighting strategies, we create zones so that the grower has the best light recipes over their crop. For example, certain pepper varieties have short internodes which can hinder proper fruit development. We can develop light recipes designed to stretch the internode and allow proper fruit development and airflow through the canopy. While a grower might have a lot of this short-internode variety, they may have a different variety a few rows down that doesn't have this problem. Sollum gives the grower the flexibility to manage different varieties or crops with one light fixture.

HB: What's the aim of Sollum's white paper on the dynamic spectrum?

RS: The aim is basically to show growers how far they can go with their lighting. Overall, the horticultural industry is shifting towards dynamic management rather than the relatively static environmental monitoring that once dominated the industry. Now, we're seeing new sensor technologies, artificial intelligence, autonomous growing and other strategies aimed at proactive plant-based growing and  focusing on how the plant is responding to the environmental conditions. At Sollum, we want it to be the same thing for lighting. With HPS, it was lights on or lights off. With other LEDs, it's lights on, off or dimmed. With Sollum Technologies, it's about looking at the crop and determining how to adjust both light quality and quantity to achieve production targets. And the goal of the white paper was to show the grower how we can do that. Developing light strategies take a lot of work, but the white paper provides some inspiration for actually doing it.

Sollum White Paper | Photoreceptors and Red/Far-red Impacts

HB: What makes Sollum's white paper special? 

RS: We've seen other white papers that focus on photoreceptors but when you aren't working with dynamic lighting, you are basically painting the grower into a box. With fixed-spectrum lighting, the grower needs to pull all that information together and pull it into a single decision when buying.  But with photoreceptors, there isn't a single right decision. It's about timing. Take the example of the far-red light. Adding far-red light to the spectrum typically causes the plant to stretch and can trigger flowering responses. There are times when that is really helpful, but there are other times when the grower doesn't want that. With fixed spectrum, you don't have the choice of adding it or not so. So, learning about far-red light as a tool isn't necessarily helpful in the case of fixed spectrum.

With the Sollum white paper, we bring that dynamic element to greenhouse lighting and are providing the grower with actionable information. Far red is an obvious example, but this holds true for any color and intensity.

HB: What are the benefits of Sollum white paper for growers? 
RS: It gives the growers some inspiration, some ideas for how they can keep optimizing their production strategy. All the growers that we work with are looking to do better by adjusting their varieties and every other element of their production strategy.

The benefit of Sollum white paper is that it explains the benefits of dynamic light and gives growers more opportunities. When it comes to varieties, there are some varieties about which the grower might say, "I can't grow this because I know it'll be too short, it'll be too this, too that." When you have a dynamic light and a better understanding of photoreceptors, you can implement some of those varieties and other production strategies because you know that you have this other tool that can help you to manage it.

HB: What is your message for the horticulture industry? 
RS: Generally, lighting in greenhouses has been a tool that you need to work around. If you know your plant needs so much light, you turn on the HPS light or fixed-spectrum LED and that's it. That's your only tool and you need to work around it.

When you're using dynamic lighting, you have a tool that you can work with. It's not just matter of turning something on and off. It's a dynamic tool that can help you solve other problems. For Sollum Technologies, that's what dynamic lighting is. It is really a way of getting the most out of your greenhouse and being able to grow any variety or any crop overall. As far as messaging horticultural industry, we want greenhouse management to be as dynamic as possible, and this includes lighting.

We've seen some other companies do variations of dynamic lighting. For Sollum Technologies, the difference is that we're capable of doing it at a large scale. With our recent installation over 12 acres of peppers, we are showing that you can take such a novel technology and install it on such a large area.

HB: What else do you want to add?
RS: We have had great success with peppers, but we also have been doing a lot of other crops as well. We've installed lights over most major greenhouse crops and many novel crops as well. We even have a grower using our lights  over Japanese citrus grown outside of Montreal. We're excited to tackle other markets as well.

For more information:

www.sollumtechnologies.com

Sollum White Paper | Photoreceptors and Red/Far-red Impacts

Rose Séguin

Agronomist at Sollum Technologies
r.seguin@sollum.tech

Source: HortiBiz