{"id":235227,"date":"2025-12-16T05:55:12","date_gmt":"2025-12-16T05:55:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/235227\/"},"modified":"2025-12-16T05:55:12","modified_gmt":"2025-12-16T05:55:12","slug":"u-of-is-new-controlled-environment-research-facility-advances-indoor-farming-with-stakeholder-input","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/235227\/","title":{"rendered":"U of I’s New Controlled Environment Research Facility Advances Indoor Farming with Stakeholder Input"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tBYLINE:<\/strong> Lauren Quinn\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Newswise \u2014 URBANA, Ill. — Bathed in an otherworldly purple glow, James Santiago points to a curled leaf at the base of a spinach plant. \u201cThis is an issue we saw all the time at the vertical farm where I worked in Virginia. We don’t know exactly what’s going on, but I think it has something to do with water stress, which is weird because the plants are growing in water.\u201d<\/p>\n

The spinach is growing in the new Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) facility at the\u00a0University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign<\/a>, a key milestone in Santiago\u2019s plans to continue developing U. of I.\u2019s reputation as a nationally recognized center for CEA and CEA-technology research.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A new assistant professor in the\u00a0Department of Crop Sciences<\/a>, part of the\u00a0College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences<\/a>\u00a0at U. of I.,\u00a0Santiago<\/a>\u00a0brings a real-world understanding of the challenges faced by the indoor farming industry. Prior to joining ACES, Santiago was a senior scientist at\u00a0Soli Organic<\/a>, where he led the Research and Development department\u2019s crop production trials on-farm and in grow rooms.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That\u2019s also where he encountered curled spinach leaves and lettuce leaf tip burns, some of the common specialty crop production issues he plans to solve in his research program at ACES.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of the research I’m doing now is based on my past experiences, but I have also started forging two-way collaborations with leaders in the industry to be aware of current production issues they face, so we can solve their issues together. What I\u00a0don\u2019t\u00a0want is for my research to be confined within the walls of the university,\u201d he said. \u201cI want my work to be translatable, so that growers in the horticulture industry can use my findings to improve the yield and nutritional content of their crops.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now that his CEA facility is operational, Santiago and his students, including doctoral researcher\u00a0Yuta Inoue<\/a>, are running trials to optimize growing conditions \u2014 including light quality, temperature, hydroponic nutrient solution, and more \u2014 for a wide range of crops.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the things we’re looking at is light quality to not only achieve greater biomass, but also to improve the plants\u2019 nutritional content,\u201d he said. \u201cWe know that different light colors contribute to plant yield, but their interaction with many environmental and physiological processes are often overlooked.\u201d<\/p>\n

If his work on the horticultural lighting spectrum works the way Santiago suspects, he will offer his evidence-based recommendations to lighting manufacturers, advocating for more tunable spectra in industry-standard LED lighting arrays. After all, he points out, each crop likely benefits from slightly different ratios of red, blue, far red, and green light.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m excited about the plant physiology-driven approach that James takes to CEA,\u201d said\u00a0Adam Davis<\/a>, professor and head of crop sciences at Illinois. \u201cThe wealth of plant physiology expertise at the University of Illinois can help him build a program that will take CEA to the next level.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Having the option to dial in specific light color ratios is just one way indoor farming can be more efficient, sustainable, and healthier than conventional methods, especially for leafy greens, herbs, and small fruiting plants that typically require repeated pesticide applications and are more susceptible to disease-causing microbes when grown outdoors. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople have become much more aware of where their food is coming from, and are demanding more local production to reduce food mileage and its carbon footprint. And during the pandemic, we saw that the supply chain can really get messed up, causing food shortages. Indoor farming can address all of that, and more,\u201d Santiago said. \u201cIt can enable small-scale growers, including households, to have their own source of healthy local food. And the best thing is that you can grow food indoors the whole year round, even if it’s 11 degrees outside.\u201d<\/p>\n

Using\u00a0Hatch funding<\/a>\u00a0to establish his CEA facility, Santiago is delivering on a fundamental aspect of the university\u2019s land grant promise: Listening to the challenges of public and private stakeholders and responding with unbiased research. ACES researchers and Illinois farmers have worked together for over a century to shape modern agriculture. Today, Santiago is extending that legacy indoors, pioneering solutions that could redefine how we grow food in the Midwest and beyond.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BYLINE: Lauren Quinn Newswise \u2014 URBANA, Ill. — Bathed in an otherworldly purple glow, James Santiago points to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":235228,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[77],"tags":[2567,37720,37721,18,7261,19,124901,17,941,7262,133,37722],"class_list":{"0":"post-235227","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-agriculture","9":"tag-college-of-agricultural","10":"tag-consumer-and-environmental-sciences","11":"tag-eire","12":"tag-environmental-science","13":"tag-ie","14":"tag-indoor-farmingvertical-farmingplant-physiologylettucehydroponicsspinachhorticulture","15":"tag-ireland","16":"tag-newswise","17":"tag-plants","18":"tag-science","19":"tag-university-of-illinois-urbana-champaign"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115727703991814883","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=235227"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235227\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/235228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=235227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=235227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=235227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}