Today’s protected cropping systems have become astonishingly effective at extracting optimum potential from nutrients, water and plant genetics, while minimising harm from farming’s ancient adversaries, like insect pests.
There is a variable still to be fully optimised, though: light and energy from the sun. Australian researchers are developing films that can be fitted to greenhouses and glasshouses to modify sunlight in ways that aid energy efficiency and plant growth. Sunlight – its intensity, duration and spectrum – exerts a primary influence on plant productivity, and on the profitability of glasshouse operations. The characteristics of sunlight are influenced by location. Other countries are more advanced in this field, but Australia has specific climatic conditions best addressed by locally-developed technology. Increasing climate variability and the Russia-Ukraine war are contributing urgency to the quest. In Europe, soaring energy costs have, in some cases, tripled the input cost of glasshouse vegetables, forcing some growers out of business. In the Netherlands, which has used protected cropping technologies to build the world’s second-largest agricultural export sector in a country less than half the size of Tasmania, the challenges are limited sunlight and cold. Here in Australia, the challenges are reversed. In an Australian summer, there is more sunlight than plants can use, and in glasshouses it produces a surplus of heat that is even more costly to mitigate than it is to warm a structure against cold.Media coverageApril, 2023