Welcome to LEDs Magazine’s Horticultural Lighting + Tech newsletter for April 3, 2023. This month’s featured story demonstrates a novel approach to designing LED-based lighting for controlled environment agriculture (CEA). Libra Design — a firm which leverages the combined vision of former Fluence and illumitex thought leaders Travis Williams and Dung Duong — customizes horticultural fixtures for indoor and greenhouse growers with a high level of attention to the customer needs, rather than developing off-the-shelf commercial solutions.

Now that is not to say that ready-to-ship OEM fixtures are “bad” and custom is “good.” There is a place for everyone at the table depending on operational needs and scale. What Williams and Duong are after are ways to make horticultural SSL more approachable to growers who want to balance their opex/capex with a guaranteed minimum photosynthetic efficacy out of fixtures designed specifically for the density and layout of their crops.

Also in this issue:

• Horticultural studies continue both on land and in space, driving new questions and experiments into optimal light levels, light source mixes, and schedules for crops.

• Varying approaches to horticultural spectra and environmental conditions influenced by lighting bring new options to the indoor farm.

• Our colleague Bill Wong at Electronic Design looks at ways that machine learning programmers could help address vertical farming problems — and where computing might not be ready for the challenges.

Please stay in touch about content we publish and to propose contributed articles.

Carrie Meadows, [email protected]