Far-red: The great pretender that can help your crops

Added on 04 January 2024

Tags

Far-red: The great pretender that can help your crops

Fluence notes that “FR” can trick fruits and vegetables into thinking they are in the shade and thus encourage them to stretch toward sunlight.

There’s an impostor creeping around in horticultural lighting circles. And according to Fluence Bioengineering, this shadowy pretender is a force for good that could lead to greater yields and quality in crops such as tomatoes, cucumbers, strawberries, peppers, and lettuce, among others.

The masked intruder is none other than far-red light — light at the longest end of the red spectrum that is still visible to the human eye, albeit barely.

In a recent blog post, Austin, Texas–based Fluence points out that far red can trick plants into thinking they are in the shade, and thus encourage them to stretch toward areas of more light.

“As light penetrates a canopy, the plants at the top typically receive more white light, while plants on the ground or in the shade receive more far-red light,” notes blog author David Hawley, who is lead scientist at Fluence, a division of Signify. “This red/far-red shift triggers a complex response that tells plants to grow and stretch beyond the shade to receive more direct sunlight. Growers can use this understanding of far-red light to trick plants into growing and stretching as if they were in the shade.”

Take peppers, for example.

“Pepper is a slow-growing crop with blocky fruits,” Hawley notes of the vine crop. “These plants need sufficient space between the fruits as they develop. When crowding occurs, the fruits bump into each other and result in misshapen or bruised produce, which is bad for business. Far-red light induces vine stretch and provides more space for peppers to develop on the vine.”