Abhay Thosar, chief horticultural specialist at Sollum Technologies, recently spoke at Cultivate 2025 about the “new era” of LEDs for horticulture. Thosar shared some of his thoughts about the presentation with The Packer.
Thosar says in the nearly 13 years that LEDs have been a part of the horticulture industry, there’s been exponential growth in adoption as well as new technologies.
Cost, he says, was an initial hangup for growers to adopt static LED fixtures, with the industry primarily using high-pressure sodium fixtures. But, he says, LED lights offered significant energy savings.
“To compare it with the high-pressure sodium, you switch a 1,000-watt high-pressure sodium with a 1,000-watt LED, and right off the bat, the grower was able to get get 30 % more PPFD or micromoles/m2/sec at the plant canopy,” he says. “You change it from a 1,000-watt to a 1,000-watt LED, then they would get almost 50% more light intensity. Or they could switch 1,000-watt high-pressure sodium with a 700-watt LED and still get the same light intensity.”
Thosar says high-pressure sodium lights were never designed for photosynthetic activity. And while static LED spectrum lights offered growers a fixture that was designed for plant photosynthesis, it still had only a fixed percentage of red, blue, green and infrared light. Which is what helped inspire the next generation of dynamic LED horticulture lights.
“What is driving the innovation or the research towards the dynamic spectrum where the growers are able to have the same fixture, but still able to fine-tune the different wavelengths — whether it is the red, the blue, green and infrared — to the liking of the crop that they are growing underneath,” he says. “And not the other way around, where you have a fixed light and the crop is forced to grow and adapt itself to the light. The light is adapting to the needs of the crop.”
As dynamic lighting became more commercially viable, he says, the industry was able to understand the benefits and energy savings that could be realized with a dynamic light fixture.
“Now you can automatically dim the fixtures,” he says. “You can change the spectrum based on the natural sunlight. The energy-saving portion is definitely important.”
Thosar says on top of the roughly 35% energy savings a grower would realize from converting from high-pressure sodium lights to LEDs, there is an additional savings growers would see with a tunable spectrum. He says comparing a static spectrum to a dynamic spectrum setup in a greenhouse in Leamington, Ontario, showed an increase of 19% in tomato yield, 15% in pepper production and about 16% in cucumber production in two bays during the winter.
“The only thing that was different was the tunable spectrum,” he says. “The climate was the same, irrigation was the same, grower was the same, everything was the same.”
Thosar says this increase in production can help growers better forecast and predict production.
“Most of these growers, whether it is tomato, cucumber, pepper, strawberry or lettuce, they have a commitment to their customers on a weekly basis that they have to deliver a certain amount of kilos every week or certain pounds every week,” he says. “Because with the increased production, what they could do is now they can forecast their production much better, and they can have a consistent production.”
He says being able to tailor lighting solutions to the types of crops grown also helps growers be more flexible with crops grown, whether that’s to respond to a viral trend or a retailer that wants to carry more of a crop.
“That’s the new era of horticulture LEDs, when we are talking more about the LED lighting being more flexible and adapting to the crop that you grow,” he says. “You can future-proof your growing operation, because now, if I have that flexibility, with dynamic LED lighting sitting in my greenhouse as a grower, I don’t need to worry about what crop I’m growing, because I know I have the ability to fine-tune the spectrum. And then, of course, I have the ability to fine-tune my climate, because then I can change my set points, my irrigation, so now I’m in a better spot to succeed and less chances to fail.”
He says he sees more prescriptive lighting recipes as being the future of the industry, where tweaking the wavelengths and moles and adjusting the other inputs can help the grower save energy but also give the plant exactly what it needs.
And for those growers who might be concerned about cost, he says upgrading to an adjustable LED lighting isn’t a significant increase.
“If you would have asked is dynamic lighting a valid solution five years back, I would have probably said, ‘It’s not there yet,’ because it wasn’t a commercial, reliable solution at that time in terms of application efficacy, as well as the cost,” he says. “Now we are seeing that it is pretty much comparable, and there’s not a big difference, maybe a 10% difference, which is the growers can understand.”
And when paired with software and climate systems in greenhouses, there’s more benefits beyond just energy savings. These climate systems can look at weather forecasts and adjust the lighting spectrum to help provide similar lighting levels.
“The growers don’t need to ask ‘What kind light strategy do I need for my tomatoes now?’” he says. “We already have done the trials. We have worked with different growers across the globe. We share that knowledge, so they hit the ground running, and they don’t need to reinvent the wheel.”
