Agricultural LED Industry Analysis Report

I. Agricultural LED

Compared with traditional agricultural lighting solutions, LEDs have significantly improved energy efficiency, thus helping fruit and vegetable cultivation around the world achieve final breakthroughs.

II. Development Status

Currently, the application of LED in the field of agricultural lighting is still in its initial embryonic stage, but intelligent lighting and precise control of the light environment are the inevitable trends in the development of modern facility agriculture technology. Using LED as an artificial light source to intelligently control crop growth changes the traditional agricultural production mode of relying on the weather and has very good development prospects. According to statistics, there are currently only more than 80 LED agricultural lighting enterprises in China. Guangdong is the main province where LED agricultural lighting enterprises are distributed, accounting for 82% of the national total, followed by Shandong Province, accounting for 9%, and there are also a few enterprises in other provinces (2013 data).

III. Industry Development Drivers

The amount of solar radiation decreases year by year due to the greenhouse effect, and the impact of smog and other severe weather leads to large-scale unpredictable production reductions;
Population increase, reduction of arable land and clean water resources;
The rise of emerging modern urban agricultural forms such as facility agriculture, vertical agriculture, and plant factories;
The rapid improvement of electrical radiation conversion efficiency of the LED semiconductor industry in all possible bands and the sharp decline in prices;
Breakthrough progress in light quality biology, from mechanism and qualitative to quantitative and optimization research on the interrelationship with environmental variables;
Commercialization of mobile Internet and IoT intelligent control technologies;
Distributed solar agricultural greenhouses and plant factories will expand and open up the application of LED agricultural lighting systems.

IV. Advantages of Agricultural LED

In the field of agricultural lighting, compared with traditional light sources, the advantages of LED are shown in:

Monochromatic light: The light emitted by LED is monochromatic light. Emission spectra such as red light and blue light can be freely selected and combined according to the needs of different plants, which can improve the absorption and utilization efficiency of light energy by plants.
Cold light source: LED is a cold light source, which can illuminate close to the plant surface without causing leaf burns. Moreover, its size is small, and the shape of the light source board can be freely designed, greatly improving the light source utilization rate and land use efficiency, which is conducive to forming a multi-segment compact cultivation mode, suitable for the intensive production mode of closed plant factories.
Energy saving, environmental protection, long life: LED light emission is pure, electrical energy conversion efficiency is high, and service life is long, which can reduce labor expenses for light source replacement and maintenance.

V. Application Directions

As a plant lighting source, LED can be widely used in greenhouse supplemental lighting, plant factories, seedling factories, edible fungi factories, plant protection, and livestock and aquaculture fields.

Greenhouse supplemental lighting: In cultivation facilities such as glass greenhouses and plastic greenhouses, LED is a supplement to natural light. Carefully modulated light recipes can stabilize and improve plant quality and increase yield.
Plant factories: As the highest stage of development of facility horticulture, plant factories can be used for large-scale production of vegetables, seedlings (vegetable seedlings, rice, tobacco, etc.), and Chinese herbal medicines. The leaf vegetable production efficiency of artificial light plant factories is 108 times that of open fields, and can achieve annual continuous production, which is the development direction of plant factories, and there is a large demand for new artificial light sources.
Seedling factories: In intensive seedling factories, in order to achieve completely artificially controlled growth, in the germination stage, artificial light sources are needed to control growth. LED lighting can increase plant density, shorten crop growth time, and improve overall plant health.
Edible fungi factories: The degree of industrialization of edible fungi is high. Most edible fungi do not have high requirements for light intensity, but have strict requirements for light quality. The yield and quality effects are large, and light environment control is very important. The industrialization scale of edible fungi factories is large, economic benefits are high, investment in lamps is relatively small, and the demand for lamp upgrades and control systems is large.
Plant protection: LED insect trap lamps are important physical control tools, which can reduce pesticide usage and maintain ecological safety.
Livestock and aquaculture fields: Experiments show that green light, blue light and their combinations can significantly promote the growth and development of broilers. Broiler farms: Continuous lighting can promote broiler growth. Artificial aquaculture: Kill bacteria and reduce the possibility of fish diseases.

VI. LED Agricultural Lighting Development Process

LED plant lighting needs to be adapted to local conditions and formulate personalized solutions for each project. The workflow is as follows:

Understand customer needs: Does the customer need to increase yield, reduce energy consumption, or achieve annual continuous production;
Provide light recipe: According to the effect the customer needs to achieve, plant experts customize the light recipe for the customer and create ideal growth conditions;
Product production, installation and application: Provide customers with ideal lighting solutions and design plans;
Follow-up: Regular maintenance by plant experts and account managers.

VII. Development Bottlenecks

Technology and cost are the two major limiting factors restricting the large-scale application of LED light sources in agriculture.

Technical level: Adjusting the light recipe is the technical core of agricultural lighting. Adjusting the light recipe mainly faces the following problems:

(1) Multidisciplinary nature of agricultural lighting: If plant lighting and animal lighting are included in the scope of agricultural lighting, the disciplines involved include botany, zoology, biostatistics, lighting technology, and control technology, etc. Among them, knowledge in the field of biology is the most important part of agricultural lighting.

(2) Complexity of agricultural lighting: The complexity of agricultural lighting includes two aspects: agriculture and lighting. The former studies a very large number of species, and for each species, there are also many influencing condition factors. Such as several basic elements of plant growth, sunlight, air, water, in addition, seeds, soil, surrounding environment such as temperature, humidity, climate changes, etc. also affect plant growth. In terms of lighting, there are also multiple variables, including lighting spectrum, intensity, time and cycle, light form (steady state or pulse), etc.

(3) Difficulty of agricultural lighting experiments: Factors affecting plant growth include temperature, humidity, air, moisture, nutritional components, seeds, light, etc. Among them, light includes irradiation intensity, spectrum, irradiation time, irradiation cycle, irradiation method, etc. There are very many test samples, the test time span is very long, and agricultural lighting has become a time-consuming, laborious, and space-consuming research. In a previously reported Dendrobium officinale supplemental lighting experiment, in one greenhouse with a total of 6 seedbeds (covering an area of one mu), 153 LED lamps and 8 fluorescent lamps were installed and debugged, and 644 samples were marked. Data collection was carried out for 7 months, completing 3 batches of nearly 200,000 data, and the best lighting conditions were obtained through analysis.

(4) Diversity of evaluation indicators: The life indicators that agricultural lighting focuses on include plant growth, content of certain components, etc. Further refinement can be plant leaf area, rhizome, total height, color, etc., and components include sugar, chlorophyll and other multiple indicators. The complexity in evaluation indicators increases the difficulty of agricultural lighting research.

(5) In short, LED agricultural lighting is an integrated optimized system engineering, a cross-industry subject, not just a simple product of red light plus blue light chips plus lamps. Crop growth under continuous spectrum can obtain the energy of the spectral band required for growth and development according to its own growth stage and environment, and if it only grows under two bands, it is impossible to achieve the improvement of food quality, the increase of yield per unit area, the most economical energy and material consumption, and achieve the maximum return on investment and social benefits.

Cost factor: The cost of LED is currently also a bottleneck restricting its large-scale application in agricultural production. Because the usage cost is too high, not only in China, but even in countries like the Netherlands, Israel, and Japan that vigorously promote LED lighting agricultural applications, LED lighting is still limited to high value-added crops such as flowers, herbs, and leafy vegetables.

VIII. National Scientific Research Support Projects

Japan | The Japanese government proposed “Sixth Industrialization” in 2009, the core of which is to apply technologies such as LED and solar power generation to build “plant factories”.
South Korea | South Korea invested 3 billion won (about 16 million RMB) in 2010 to research and develop IT-LED cultivation core accessories and technologies, and one of the core components of the system is the LED plant artificial light source.
USA | The US Department of Agriculture funded Purdue University 4.88 million US dollars for a 4-year research project to evaluate and improve the application of LED in greenhouses.
Netherlands | The Netherlands is currently the country with the best development of plant factories. New crop sustainable energy-saving greenhouses, combining LED light sources, and remote automatic monitoring, etc.
Taiwan | Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute led the establishment of the “Taiwan Plant Factory Industry Development Association” in 2011, and giants such as Epistar, Everlight, and Foxconn jointly developed LED plant factories.
China | In 2013, the total funding for the National 863 Program “Intelligent Plant Factory Production Technology Research” was 46.11 million yuan, including seven topics, involving plant factory LED energy-saving light sources, light-temperature coupling energy-saving environment control, artificial light plant factories, and natural light plant factory integrated demonstration.

Published at: Jun 7, 2016 · Modified at: Jan 14, 2026