Lighting for yearround cultivation

Just a few years ago supplemental lighting began to be used for fruit-vegetable crops, such as tomato and paprika. This supplemental lighting enables the Dutch horticulture sector to harvest tomatoes in January and February - something that was absolutely inconceivable until very recently.

Since these initial supplemental-lighting experiments Lans has become one of the trendsetters in Dutch yearround vegetable-cultivation methods. In as early as 2001 the first glasshouse, with 4 ha of glass, was fully equipped with supplemental lighting. This lighting operated at an intensity of 18,000 lux ('lux' is a unit of visible light, as seen by the human eye, falling on a specific area under the source of light.)

In 2002 a second 4.5 ha glasshouse was fully equipped with 10,000-lux supplemental lighting. The use of supplemental lighting results in greatly-improved yields of tomatoes as compared with unlit glasshouses, whilst glasshouses with supplemental lighting do not use more energy. Consequently the consumption of energy per kilogram tomatoes is also reduced.