Crop steering is a sophisticated technique transforming how cannabis growers manage plant growth by manipulating irrigation, fertigation, and climate. But what about lighting?
Crop steering with lighting is yet another lever cultivators can use to move plants into and out of vegetative and generative growth phases. With the right grow room technology stack, lighting cues not only control the photoperiod but also fine-tune plant stress levels for enhanced growth, yield, and flower quality. Here are the strategies to get there.
What Is Crop Steering?
Crop steering is a growth management tactic that manipulates grow room factors like irrigation, lighting, and climate to direct a plant's growth toward vegetative or generative states.
By adjusting light, humidity, watering, and nutrients, crop steering alternates plants between low and high stress to control growth outcomes. In cannabis, that means controlling height, bud size, and cannabinoid content. When implemented successfully, crop steering enhances plant growth, yield, and flower quality.
Using Lighting in Crop Steering for Cannabis Cultivation
In indoor cannabis cultivation, growers have long used lighting to control the plant's photoperiod. Moving crops from veg into flower in cannabis means an extended 18-hour light and six-hour dark schedule during veg and a 12-hour light and 12-hour dark during flower.
However, crop steering gives growers additional leverage within these distinct phases to manipulate growth patterns further. Turning the dial, playing with intensity and spectrum (maintaining the relevant light schedule), can trigger specific growth patterns as plants respond to higher or lower stress conditions.
For example, lowering the intensity of the lights during weeks five to seven in flower could help reduce plant stress to encourage larger bud development. Then, flipping back into higher environmental stressors and greater light intensity for the final weeks helps limit vertical growth and increase bud volume.
Lighting Cues for Vegetative Growth
What's the best way to apply lighting to refine your crop steering strategy further?
First, it starts with increasing water levels, minimizing EC (electrical conductivity), and lowering VPD (vapor pressure deficit). Reducing the light intensity will further encourage plants to enter a low-stress, vegetative growth phase.
All these minute adjustments aim to convince the plant to focus its energy on leaf and stem growth, increased foliage, and root system development. Yet, interestingly, these levers can also be applied during flowering to increase bud volume.
Lighting Cues for Generative Growth
The flip side to vegetative cues is generative cues. Instead of lowering environmental stressors, generative cues aim to increase them, convincing the plant to divert energy into reproductive growth patterns like increasing the number of flower sites and shortening internodal spaces.
Like vegetative, generative means applying several levers simultaneously: larger drybacks, increased substrate EC, higher VPD, and, yes — higher light intensity. The goal here is to limit vertical growth and shorten internodal spacing, even if the plants are still technically in veg. If applied to flowers, it keeps stretching to a minimum and increases flower production.
Crop Steering with Light in a Multi-Strain Grow Room
A typical commercial grow room in today's industry grows several strains simultaneously in the same space. With advances in automation, sensors, and environmental controls, multi-strain rooms are feasible but frequently not as efficient as they could be.
Although irrigation and other crop steering cues may be precisely controlled down to the second, until recently, it hasn't been possible to further refine the environment with higher or lower-intensity lighting within these large-scale multi-strain rooms. The light fixture technology and grow room controls couldn't manage that level of zone management.
TSRgrow Zone Control & GROWHub
TSRgrow has developed advanced Zone Control with their LED grow room lighting. With unlimited lighting zone configurations possible, growers can develop strain-specific recipes for each strain bench or rack. It's a tailor-made crop steering solution.
Zachary Taylor, GM of Cultivation, Bountiful Farms, shares his experience on the TSRgrow system:
"I am able to be at home and look at my interface and see everything, not only from an ampere standpoint and a µmol standpoint, but I can also mimic things from nature, such as sunrise and sunset. With 12 strains in each room, I'm able to give every strain the exact amount of light it needs. That's unheard of!"
This newfound flexibility and control are delivered through TSRgrow's award-winning GROWHub software. The system's touchscreen interface allows for precise adjustments to suit every microclimate and strain.
It's a remotely accessible platform designed to support this heightened zone-by-zone customization. It's an unprecedented level of control, giving growers unparalleled power to manage the indoor environment.
Crop Steering with Lighting: The Future of Cultivation
Irrigation, fertigation, and climate have always been the primary drivers for cultivators' efforts to move plants between vegetative and generative growth phases.
Although lighting is a foundational requirement for indoor cultivation, it was typically an afterthought for crop steering. Yet, crop steering with lighting gives facilities added precision over the harvest. It's another tool to drive specific growth patterns and optimize yield and quality.
Our Zone Control LED lighting, part of the TOTALgrow Solution approach to cultivation, offers growers unmatched control and understanding of their indoor cultivation environment, tailored for each specific zone. No matter how many strains are under production in the same room, the zone-by-zone control makes the precision required for crop steering possible.
- Precise control over individual zones tailored to each strain
- Seamless integration with CO2, ventilation, and nutrient delivery systems
- Comprehensive environmental monitoring capabilities
- Compatibility with tracking, tracing, and recording technologies for regulatory compliance
- The ability to create and apply master recipes for every strain in your collection
Contact us today to learn more about crop steering with lighting. Let us help you grow smarter, not harder!
