Finland: Year round production with just 5 hours of daylight

Currently, the sun doesn’t rise until around ten o'clock in the Finnish town of Närpes and at three o'clock in the afternoon it's dark again. So, year-round cultivation of tomatoes requires a lot of artificial light. Therefore the growers at Sven Sigg Ab have chosen for supplemental lighting with no less than 440 mmol. Hortilux will begin installation early next year.

The Finnish greenhouse operation Sven Sigg is run by brothers Patrik and Tommy Sigg and is the largest tomato nursery in Finland. In total, the brothers have over 6.8 hectares of greenhouses spread over several locations. They grow tomatoes and peppers.

The lighting will be installed on 3 hectares. Patrik decided to go with a complete solution provided by Hortilux. "The wiring will be installed in January 2017, the lamps in July 2017," says Paul van der Valk of Hortilux. For Hortilux this is their first complete project in Finland.

The greenhouse will feature more than 7,600 HSE NXT2 lamps with BETA reflectors. The lamp has cooling fins and the reflector ensures a deeper light penetration into the crop. This way the 440 mmol/m2 is optimally used. And this is needed because there is only about five hours of daylight on the shortest days of the year in Western Finland.

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