LED grow lights are gaining a foothold in horticulture. For many years, extensive research projects and trials have been underway. Although a big part of the horticultural industry remain skeptical about this sustainable way of lighting, there are more and more growers carefully investing in LED installations. Therefore it is a busy time for the Finnish LED grow light manufacturer Valoya. CEO Lars Aikala: "This year will be an important year for LED lighting in horticulture, there are quite a few important activities coming up."As a Finnish supplier of horticultural LED's, Valoya might be a stranger in our midst. "People indeed look at you strangely when you attend an international horticultural exhibition and say that you are from Finland," Lars admits. "But nevertheless, people are quickly interested when we tell them that we approach LED lighting in horticulture in a different way to what they are accustomed.
When we started in 2009, we thought that the best light spectrum for plants was known, but soon realized that we had to unravel the crop’s “light DNA”. Unlike humans, plants need light from a different spectrum in order to grow and will not grow under normal white fluorescent light in which humans are living. Other horticultural LED suppliers try to solve this problem with red and blue LED light, but we have from the outset used the wide full light spectrum."
Valoya CEO Lars Aikala at the Horti Fair 2012.
There was just a small amount of knowledge available on the subject of ideal light recipes, but after Valoya started its first in-depth studies in collaboration with Finnish universities and industry, an initial prototype was carried out rapidly. The wide light spectrum of this prototype was entirely based on the needs as they were described in the books.
Video: Valoya LED Lights in Marttila:
"Unfortunately, the experiments with the prototype proved not to work, the crop grew didn’t grew at all”, says Lars. “Since that day, we continued our research and have experimented with a lot of different wide light spectra and crops. We have created light spectra for driving both plants leaf growth and flowering, which is desirable in many applications where plants should flower (quickly) and we have a light spectra which drives plants to use all energy to develop leaves while delaying flowering. This is very important with lettuce and herbs, which are sold and consumed before flowering. Over the years all these tests have led us to the availability of a huge amount of information relating to the light requirements of plants. Currently we are putting this ‘light DNA’ into a central database where all the other peripheral issues that have affected the tests are stored. Think about the type of greenhouse, fertilizer, growing strategy, etc. "
The intensive research of Valoya soon bore fruit and ensured international horticulture was not left in limbo. "Because we approach the light requirements of the plants in a different way, the LEDs distinguish themselves from the existing techniques. The technique is not only different, the results are different as well, "says Lars proudly. "Nowadays we have over 70 customers in more than 20 countries and there are some large-scale projects in which we achieved interesting results. For example, some growers of cucumbers achieved energy savings of up to 40 percent, while maintaining similar production levels compared to HPS and others have increased productivity by 20-30% with our LEDs. In general, it is therefore the same production results, but with lower energy costs. In addition, not only does irradiation play a role, but also the additional heat that comes from the fixture provides the crop with extra energy in inter-lighting applications. So it’s a win-win situation, all the energy that is put in to the greenhouse is being used, there is no spill.”
According to Lars, 2013 will be an important year for LED grow lights in horticulture. "There are major, large-scale projects to be launched, especially in the multilayer production of lettuce and herbs. There is still much research needed and it brings many challenges. When you think you solved a problem it's always followed by a new challenge. But we're obviously not sitting still and we hope that this year will bring a lot of these new challenges for us. We are ready for it.”
For more information:
Valoya
Lars Aikala
+538 40 546 6639
www.valoya.com