Abstract
White (W) light-emitting diode (LED) light has been used as an efficient light source for commercial plant cultivation in vertical farming. This study aimed to examine the effect of W LED light sources on the growth and quality of butterhead and romaine lettuce. Three W LED light sources including normal W light (NWL) which has 450 nm as its pumping wavelength and two specific W lights (SWL1 and SWL2) with shorter blue peak wavelength (437 nm) were used to grow lettuce in comparison to a red (R) and blue (B) LED combination. As a result, SWL1 and SWL2 treatments with the same electrical power or photosynthetic photon flux density (PPFD) resulted in more growth of both lettuce cultivars compared to RB treatment. Some phenolic and flavonol contents were increased in the RB treatment, whereas SWL2 treatment stimulated the accumulation of other phenolic and flavonol compounds. Meanwhile, neither NWL nor SWL1 treatments increased the individual phenolic and flavonol contents in either cultivar (except for some flavonols in romaine lettuce in the SWL1 group). In addition, light and energy use efficiencies were also highest in the SWL1 and SWL2 treatments. These results illustrate the positive effects of specific W LED light on lettuce growth and quality, and suggest that the specific W LED light sources, especially SWL2, could be preferably used in vertical farming.
Highlights
Modern agriculture is facing shortages in resources, such as land area, irrigation water, fertilizers, etc
The shoot fresh weight of plants grown in the SWL1 and SWL2 treatments was about 1.4 and 1.7 times higher than that of RB-treated plants, respectively, while no significant difference in this value was observed between the normal W light (NWL) and RB treatments (Figure 3A)
This study demonstrated the positive effects of W light-emitting diode (LED) light on improving the growth and quality of two lettuce cultivars grown in a vertical farming setup
Summary
Modern agriculture is facing shortages in resources, such as land area, irrigation water, fertilizers, etc. As a recent development in controlled environment systems, vertical farming systems inherits advanced greenhouse technologies for growing vegetables and valuable plants in fully controlled environmental conditions and in multiple shelf layers to increase crop yield per unit area. These systems enable the stable year-round production of high-quality plants with less resource consumption [2]. The price of LEDs has decreased remarkably over the past several years, and many studies have been concentrated on defining the optimal light environments to enable the high-quality, high-speed production of various plant species [5] This makes LED lighting systems a cost-effective solution for controlled environment agriculture systems
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