Poster – Growth Efficacy

Introduction

Optimizing plant growth under sole-source LED lighting involves balancing light spectrum. LED grow lights, often optimized for plant growth, might not excel in photosynthetic photon efficacy (PPE) due to variations in LED colors. For instance, far-red (FR) light (700-800 nm) enhances plant development but is not counted in PPE calculations. We aim to compare the overall growth efficacy (g/kWh) between plant-optimized spectrum and high-PPE spectrum LED lights.

Conclusions

• By including far-red in the growth spectrum, the PPE is
  reduced.
• Plants grown with FR spectrum was larger in size and had higher biomass than the ones grown under the “PAR” spectrum.
• The growth efficacy in the crop where higher in the FR spectrum, even though the lower PPE.
• These results indicated that PPE of a grow light is not an accurate way of describing performance if the spectrum.