What are the most effective lighting options for vertical farming?

LED lights are the gold standard in vertical farming, tailored to emit precise wavelengths that plants require for optimal growth, particularly red and blue spectrums. They outcompete traditional options like HPS lamps by offering sometimes 50% or more in energy savings, contributing to substantial cost reductions over time. LEDs also emit less heat, a big plus for the controlled environments of vertical farms, leading to even more savings by lowering the need for cooling systems. Durable and long-lasting, LEDs can also reduce replacement cycles. The upfront cost is offset by long-term gains, with LEDs potentially boosting crop yields (20-30%), making them pretty much the only sensible choice for commercial vertical farmers.

Fluorescent lights are inefficient for vertical farming: they offer limited spectrum control, waste energy, generate excess heat, and have a shorter lifespan, leading to increased costs and suboptimal plant growth. They are only useful for cheap vertical farming set ups like a school system, hobby system, or small microgreens farm. Their main benefit are that they are cheap and easy to buy but don’t expect a lot of quality plants or efficient energy use from them.

Fluorescent or LED tubes with similar specifications can be useful for tissue culture labs. For other professional vertical farm applications I would advise against it.

Although hybrid lighting can be a good solution for certain greenhouses - depending on crop and location, for vertical farms it is almost certainly not. HPS lights radiate too much heat towards the plant to allow for nearby installation.

Good points. I would like to add that uniformity of the light is also important, to make sure the crops on one bench all grow at the same speed. This needs to be tackled in the lighting design.

Try not to focus too much on the lights for your vertical farm at the start. Yes, they are a massive part of your capex (sometimes 40%) and opex (sometimes 20%) but they are often a distraction to early stage vertical farmers. Remember to focus on business fundamentals: the customer, the market conditions, the competition, etc. and then build your business around solving a meaningful gap in the market. Then, once that is clear, do your research on lighting. Too many times have I seen entrepreneurs choose lights before crops which is not something I would recommend.

What Henry says. However, also make sure not to decide on the lights too late in the process. I have seen several occasions where wrong choices in the farm lay-out resulted in inefficient lighting installations: wasting light and expensive energy.