The background.
Davì Plant is a nursery specialist based in Lusia, in the province of Rovigo, Italy, active in the plant and flower nursery growing sector. Including several dedicated vegetable growing facilities, Davì Plant covers an area of approximately 20 hectares of which eight set up as greenhouses and one as a nursery. The plants grown indoors are then planted in open fields by special racket-type machinery during the”seedling” stage, i.e. as young plants recently germinated from the seeds and with only a few leaves, before the subsequent maturation and production phases.
Homogeneous, healthy plants.
For its productions requirements, Davì Plant must obtain plants with a very homogeneous aesthetic appearance, with intense colours and a “dwarfed”, compact stem structure – while maintaining the plant healthy and containing processing costs at the same time. “Dwarfing” is a growing technique allowing vegetative growth to be limited in order to obtain sizes as close as possible to those most in demand commercially. To achieve this result, C-LED has developed a special LED light spectrum.
Top-Lighting lamps for fruit and leafy plants.
In Davì Plant’s greenhouse, C-LED has installed its Top-Lighting lamps, with a dedicated spectrum renamed “Acclimatizing” or “Nursery” in the English version, radiating light from above and suitable for all short vertical growth vegetables. To meet customer requests and needs, C-LED researchers and designers created a lamp matrix simulating the amount of light on a given surface, accurately calculating the number of required lighting fixtures and their position.
The right “lighting recipe” – the result of continuous cooperation with the customer.
Tomatoes, melons, basil and celery are some of the fruit and vegetable products on which efforts were focussed for Davì Plant’s greenhouse. These products require a “general purpose” spectrum that complies with the agronomic requirements and expectations of the customer – working in close cooperation with C-LED. From the scientific and agronomic point of view, the lighting recipe must ensure a correct ratio of the blue to red chromatic spectra, for plants to grow to the required standards in terms of size and characteristics (compact, short and with wider and darker leaves). By adding the correct amount of green light, essentially important for the health of plants, researchers have made vegetables more responsive to solar light at the time of planting in open fields and have made plants readier to start their productive growth in a shorter time.
A system of through-cables to lower the energy consumption and financial impact.
For this installation, C-LED has developed a solution with through-cables inside the lamps, so as to reduce the energy consumption and running costs impact for the greenhouse. Only one lamp in the row (consisting of approximately 10-15 lamps) is directly plugged into the greenhouse power line.
In this way, each Top-lighting lamp can interact with the next one in the row, significantly reducing installation costs, which will not weigh on the greenhouse owner, as only one socket must be made available for a whole row of lamps.
