Spectral investigation for efficient photosynthesis in controlled environment agriculture (CEA)

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Providing healthy foods to all Canadians is the main task of our agriculture, which is one of the crucial pillars for our economy. Due to the geographic location, maintaining a year-round outdoor farming is challenging for most parts of Canada. In Atlantic Canada, the agriculture is seriously restricted by long winter, which makes it impossible to grow vegetables outdoor during the winter and vulnerable for the transportation of foods under harsh weather conditions. New approaches, such as greenhouse farming and indoor agriculture, have become increasingly important to create efficiency, achieve scale and maximize profitability. However, production cost is the major concern in the greenhouse food crops production. Owing to the breakthroughs in the photonics technologies with the availability of robust, powerful, low-cost light-emitting diodes (LEDs), the use of LED lighting for greenhouse vegetable production has become a growing sector in Canadian horticulture. Various LED lighting sources are available on the market, however, selection of optimal LED lighting remains challenging, yet crucial for achieving high efficiency in plant growth and minimizing the cost of production. By establishing collaboration between the photonics group at Memorial University and CEPG Consulting and Design Inc., a start-up company, in the business of designing controlled environment plant growth (CEPG) systems used in cultivation of foods and therapeutics products, licensed and approved by Health Canada. This NSERC Engage Grant project investigates spectral measurement and analysis on some commercially available LED lighting systems and identify suitable LED lights for the "Indoor", "100% artificially lit" "Grow-room" growth of two specific plants, i.e., Basil and Rape (aka turnip greens). This project will help the industrial partner reveal plant action spectra of these two species, discover emission spectra of LEDs, and identify the optimal LED lighting system for these two vegetables. The knowledge acquired from this study will enhance our understanding of the photosynthesis with LED lighting, which will have potential applications in energy conservation, environmental protection, and food industry, thus benefit Canadian industries in these fields.