An experienced cultivator’s perspective.

Ryley Leech is a seasoned cannabis professional who brings more than 10 years of experience in medical and recreational markets to Fluence. Ryley now uses his intimate knowledge of the cannabis space to assist new companies in forming their business plans and go-to-market strategies, while advising growers on facility design, cultivation strategies, equipment vetting and extraction SOPs. Ryley is also an experienced cultivator in indoor, greenhouse and broad-scale outdoor settings, with a focus on extracted end products. Here, he shares what growers need to know when retrofitting their facilities with LED lighting.

Retrofitting legacy lighting technology with high-performance LED fixtures is one of the biggest positive impacts you can make on your company’s revenue stream. Concretely, LED lighting improves plant growth and performance while decreasing your energy investment. The ability to take existing wattage and allocate it through more efficient technology immediately changes your plant’s performance metrics by providing better light and more of it. When Fluence helps growers conduct wattage matches, we consistently find that a 1% increase in light leads to about a 1% increase in cannabis yield, especially when transitioning from lower light levels (that you would get from legacy or HPS lighting) to higher intensities (through quality LEDs). Typically, we’ll see growers increase yields 20-30% after an LED retrofit while simultaneously reducing energy consumption by about 20-30%.

When legacy high-pressure sodium (HPS) units are removed from the growing environment, growers can expect to lose a significant amount of radiant heat previously emitted by those fixtures. When Fluence is helping a grower make the change to LEDs, we recommend running environmental controls higher (typically in the 78 to 84 degree Fahrenheit range) to help offset the loss of direct heat from their legacy HPS system. We also work with growers to assess dehumidification capacity, ensuring that additional plant transportation is adequately accounted for and managed. A high relative humidity and strong CO2 levels are also critical factors to maximize the plant’s photosynthetic rate. Each grower’s environment is different. Fluence’s horticulture services team helps individual growers develop a unique plan to ensure environmental conditions are optimized as lighting conditions are improved.

There’s no “one-size-fits-all” approach to light intensity—or PPFD (photosynthetic photon flux density). Depending on what market you’re in and what costs you’re facing, there’s a sweet spot of quality and yield for each grower. The Fluence team has carefully tested plant responses at as high as 2,500 µmol/m2/s, and there’s certainly a point of diminishing returns on crop growth. Finding a light intensity that will work in your production environment is what’s most important. Rather than recommending the highest-powered lights possible for each grower, Fluence helps growers select a lighting solution that maximizes their controlled environment based on their budget and production conditions as well as their overall cultivation goals. Fluence’s holistic approach to a grower’s facility, including helping growers trial different PPFD levels in a facility, helps ensure that the light intensity you deploy will be the right one for your environment and investment.

Learn more: www.fluence.science

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