The agricultural sector is modernizing and it is becoming more and more common to find technified greenhouses that implement innovative computer systems that allow constant monitoring of crops, their objective: to achieve higher production, more efficient and higher quality.
Technified or intelligent greenhouses applied to hydroponic crops make it possible to obtain high quality products, control plant development and avoid pests.
Plants have a special sensitivity to the colors of light. Unlike human lighting, which is measured in lux, plants consume light in the form of photons in order to photosynthesize. The amount and the ratio between the various wavelengths of light determine how fast and how well plants grow and bear fruit. Modern artificial light technologies for greenhouses perfectly mimic any daily light integral (DLI), regardless of seasons or weather conditions, and provide stable and optimal conditions for each plant.
Plants need light to photosynthesize and grow. Inside the greenhouse, sunlight is significantly less than outside due to the interception exerted by the covering material and the structure.In addition, because plants are usually grown vertically in the greenhouse, the upper leaves shade the lower leaves and, although the upper leaves are saturated by light, the lower part of the canopy is not.
Therefore, light is often a limiting factor for plant growth, especially in the autumn-winter period. Artificial lighting can significantly increase the yield and quality of greenhouse crops by increasing the amount of light available to the plants. It is a widely established technology in northern European greenhouses, but has had little impact, for the time being, in Mediterranean greenhouses due to a lack of knowledge of the advantages of having optimal lighting together with the other abiotic factors controlled to get the maximum yield from the crop.
These are high investments initially, but if they are applied with the right personnel trained to use the technology correctly, the results can be seen from the beginning of its use.
We develop LED luminaires and bars for the 3 types of lighting that can be applied in a greenhouse:
1. Top Lighting : Generally, high wattage luminaires are used to have greater coverage and flow of micromoles at more than 3m high.
2. Lighting from below: Often the problem is that the lower parts of the crop do not develop properly due to lack of sunlight, so they become less productive. With the illumination from below the crop, the lower parts of the crop can be focused from bottom to top to give that extra DLI that they lack due to shading from the higher parts of the plant.
3. Inter-lighting: This lighting is generally characterized by 1.2 or 2.4m long LED bars to cover the intermediate areas of the crop. They usually radiate light from the sides of the LED bar to emit light on both sides. This lighting is currently being tested in vine-crops such as tomatoes, zucchini, peppers, strawberries, among others.
