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How remote control capabilities are advancing crop yield research

Food production isn't often the first sector that comes to mind when we think of technology. To remedy that, third year PhD student at the University of Reading, Emily Johnstone, explains how tuneable LED lighting is advancing research into fruit crop growth.

The current focuses of the Soft Fruit Technology Group at the University of Reading are out-of-season strawberry production to decrease UK reliance on imports during winter, speed growing, multi-tiered production systems, and optimizing the spectral composition of LED lights during fruit production of strawberries. Emily Johnstone's research sits within the latter, focusing on using LED lighting to propagate high-flowering strawberry plants which could produce up to 50% more fruit compared to plants propagated under standard conditions.

The move to LEDs
In the UK, Junebearer strawberry plants (or those that fruit in June) are widely grown both commercially and domestically. Many of us know that the number of flowers produced indicates how much fruit a plant can be expected to bear in the summer; that number is determined during 'flower initiation', which occurs during propagation the previous autumn.

Previous research at the University of Reading showed that propagating plants in heated glasshouses with supplementary high-pressure sodium (HPS) lighting at the beginning of autumn resulted in better flowering potential and consequentially, a higher berry yield (Twitchen, 2018) — however, a large proportion of the berries were below marketable size required for commercial companies, which has since increased even further.

Read more at bcs.org

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