Greenhouse growing plays a huge role in the production of localized crops, allowing for enhanced yields per acre compared to outdoor farming and reduced trucking needs. These controlled environments have been operating for decades using HPS (High Pressure Sodium) grow lights for supplementation when daylight hours get week in the fall/winter, or to boost high intensity crops such as cucumbers or trellised tomatoes.
President of Hydro Grow the world's leading LED Grow Light manufacturer, Cammie Mckenzie sees a new approach for commercial greenhouse growers that will not only reduce operational expenses, but will supercharge greenhouse yields to levels their owners had never previously imagined.
Cammie Mckenzie is the leading scientist and engineer behind the popular line of Hydro Grow Extreme LED Grow Lights. Over the past 4.5 years her company has perfected LED Grow Light technology to the point where their output in the PAR (photosynthetic active radiation) range is now exceeding HPS while using less than half the watts.
What makes Cammie Mckenzie unique in her industry is that she claims she is able to manipulate the way a crop can grow in regards to height, rate, end yield, and overall growth time simply by tweaking the output of the LEDs in Hydro Grow's lights. "Through working with Universities and carrying out numerous studies on our own, we have been able to develop custom lights specific to widely grown commercial crops such as tomatoes and cucumbers. Each plant has vastly different needs in regards to the ratios and wavelengths of light it requires to grow at its most optimal point, and dialing those spectra in is our specialty," stated Mrs. Mckenzie.
A recent Press Release on Hydro Grow gives substantial evidence that Cammie Mckenzie is not just confident in her own abilities, but that her theories turn into real-life results. A high school teacher in Canada who runs a class on agriculture recently uploaded a video to YouTube showing a light Hydro Grow had custom-developed for cucumbers. Amazingly with only 130W of power his class yielded 191 full-sized cucumbers which helped raise money for his program. Cammie Mckenzie had this to say, "When you balance a light for cucumbers it has been documented by both Hydro Grow and Nasa that you can speed up growth rates as much as 30% while improving yields by up to double compared to imbalanced spectra. We did this in this test where our custom-developed cucumber light produced double the yield of our standard LED Grow Light. Since HPS uses only 1 output that is unable to be tuned, commercial farmers presently using this technology are missing out on reduced crop cycles and up to twice the yields they are achieving now."
According to Mrs. Mckenzie controlled environment agriculture in greenhouses around the world would benefit tremendously by making the switch to LED Grow Light technology. The largest light offered by her company is called the 336X-PRO, which consumes 520W of electricity and replaces a 1000W HPS. Based on scientific graphing and spectroradiometer analysis, Mckenzie has proven that their LED Grow Light surpasses the output of a 1000W HPS while covering the same sized area and penetrating over a foot deeper into leaf tissues. Those who are already making the switch to Hydro Grow LED Grow Lights are seeing energy bills cut as much as 60% with yields increasing over previous lighting systems. "The future is LED and I think everyone can already sense that" said Mckenzie, "now it's just getting the key individuals to try LED and see for themselves to see the amazing potential of our technology."
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