SolGro Inc. — Department of Agriculture SBIR Phase I: 8.119999999999999

Description

COVID-19 has impacted every sector and controlled environmental agriculture (CEA) is nodifferent. COVID-19 has resulted in a labor shortage changes in demandand affected the supplychain. The small farms with low-profit margins are the ones who find it hard to survive in asituation like COVID-19. Increasing productivity while reducing the cost is key to thesustainability of these small and low profitable greenhouses. The productivity of the greenhouseis influenced by cultivation technology light environment and the regulation of climates. Themost widely used greenhouse coverings are polyethylene glass and polycarbonate which aredesigned to control the environment for extended and improved growing seasons.However thesecoverings do not optimize the light spectra inside the greenhouse which is one of the criticalcomponents for promoting plant growth.SolGro's objective is to develop greenhouse films that help to improve productivity by passivelyimproving the light quality inside the greenhouse. Our greenhouse films utilize phosphors toconvert the photosynthetically unused and less efficient sunlight to photosynthetically efficient redand blue light. Phosphors are the materials that emit light of a particular wavelength uponexcitation by another specific wavelength. Phosphors will be engineered and embedded into thelow-density polyethylene(LDPE) to obtain the light converting film with the desired emissionwhile maintaining light transmission higher than 87%. The effectiveness of light converting filmin promoting the growth of lettuce and cherry tomato plants will be studied in a small greenhousechamber during the phase I research.We believe that the improved light quality inside the greenhouse will increase productivity byincreasing crop yield decreasing the harvest time and improving the nutritional values.As of the USDA's 2017 survey there are about 113 million square feet of greenhouse space thatproduce vegetables and herbs in the United States and 89% of the total farm have growing spacesmaller than 10000 square feet which account for 19% of the total covered growing squarefootage. According to Agrilyst's 2017 survey only 51% of the indoor farms and only 25% of thelow-tech plastic hoop houses are profitable. We aim to provide a low-cost light spectraoptimization technology to help these small unprofitable farms to be profitable by increasing theirproductivity.