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Continuous Lighting and High Daily Light Integral Enhance Yield and Quality of Mass-Produced Nasturtium (Tropaeolum majus L.) in Plant Factories.

ABSTRACT: Nasturtium (Tropaeolum majus L.), as a medicinal plant, has a high phenolic content in its leaves and flowers. It is often used in salads as a dietary vegetable. Attracting strong demand, it could be a good candidate crop for a plant factory with artificial lighting (PFAL) that can achieve the mass production of high-quality crops with high productivity by regulating environmental conditions such as light. In this study, two experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of continuous lighting (CL) and different daily light integrals (DLIs) under CL on the growth, secondary metabolites, and light use efficiency (LUE) of nasturtium, all of which are essential in the successful cultivation in PFALs. In Experiment 1, two lighting models, the same DLI of 17.3 mol m^-2 d^-1 but different light periods (24 and 16 h) with different light intensities (200 and 300 µmol m^-2 s^-1, respectively), were applied to nasturtium. The results showed that leaf production, secondary metabolites, and LUE were higher under the 24-h CL treatment than under the 16-h non-CL treatment. In Experiment 2, three DLI levels (17.3, 25.9, and 34.6 mol m^-2 d^-1) under the CL condition were applied. The results showed that the growth parameters were positively correlated with the DLI levels under CL. The lowest DLI had the highest LUE. We conclude that the mass production of nasturtium under CL in PFALs is feasible, and the yield increases as DLI increases from 17.3 to 34.6 mol m^-2 d^-1 under CL without causing physiological stress on plants.

SUBMITTER: Xu W

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8231634 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:Since the introduction of LED lamps a decade ago, the plant factory with artificial lighting (PFAL) has been expected to be a savior that overcomes the food crisis, brings food safety, and enhances environmental friendliness. Despite such high expectations, the diffusion of commercial crop production in PFALs has been slow. It has been said that the main reason for this is the huge initial investment required to construct PFALs. This situation has attracted studies to access the economic feasibility of the crop production in PFALs. One thing strange in these studies is that they pay little attention to the scale of their PFALs. PFALs are factories so that they would be subject to economies of scale. If so, the scale of PFALs is an important factor that determines the economic feasibility of plant production in PFALs. However, no study has thus far attempted to examine whether economies of scale exist in the construction of PFALs. To fill this gap, this paper tries to examine, based on the data on the investment cost of PFAL construction collected from various countries and regions in the world, whether economies of scale exist in PFAL construction and, if yes, how it affects the economic viability of the plant production in PFALs by searching for the minimum scale that ensures PFAL crop production economically viable. The results show that economies of scale exist in PFAL construction, and that the production of lettuce, PFALs' most popular crop, is now well on a commercial basis with the technology level of the most advanced PFAL operators, but strawberries has not reached that stage yet. It is also shown that crop production in PFALs is highly sensitive to changes in the yield and the price of the crops: A 30% decline either in the yield or the price of lettuce would easily bring PFALs bankruptcy. It is discussed that the optimum scale of PFALs would depend not only on the economies of scale but also on the transaction costs, such as the costs of searching and keeping a sufficient number of buyers who offer good and stable crop prices.

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Continuous Lighting and High Daily Light Integral Enhance Yield and Quality of Mass-Produced Nasturtium (Tropaeolum majus L.) in Plant Factories.

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