Plant factories: a novel industry for high-value plant production

With the development of LED-lighting, producing plants in closed environments, “plant factories”, have become feasible. In such a facility, all climatic factors can be controlled. As the end product equals genotype × climate, plants produced in a plant factory can be “designed” to possess certain qualities. Especially modulation of light quality (spectrum) is of interest in this context. This opens great possibilities to produce for example “functional foods” or technical products in plant factories.

The present project is focusing on improvement of the nutritional value of edible crops (contents of sugars, fatty acids, proteins, and carotenoids). Preliminary studies indicated that short-waveband light (blue-green spectrum incl. UV) has great impact of the synthetization of these compounds in plants. End-of-production treatments with spectra high in blue-green light will therefore be a central theme in the project.