Welcome to the LEDs Magazine News & Insights newsletter for Apr. 15, 2020. Here in southern California, we have now been sheltering in place for more than a month. I’ll never complain these days, however, that our Governor Gavin Newsom was the first mover. It seemed overly restrictive at the time, but boy, speaking of time — I wish we could turn it back and as a society we would have distanced sooner.
My workdays are mostly unchanged from before shelter in place. I was on the frontier of working remotely starting back in 1983 when I first took a job in the trade press. My friends and family did think that someone was crazy for paying me to work from home back then. And sometimes I have missed the companionship an office offers. But mostly it has worked well for me.
Back to now, this is the first time since 1983 in which I haven’t been on a plane in months. I have missed the interaction with you in the audience. But I’m happy to stay home for now. We will get back to Uber-ing to catch planes and complaining about the experience soon enough. Of course, thinking back to the 1983 timeframe, air travel really was a different experience then — even in coach. The air travel experience would become yet another example of a condition I’ve lamented previously — the new normal.
We have a couple of horticultural lighting stories for you today. A UK-based grower and LED module developer called LettUs Grow is trying to rush more LED technology into the application, presuming that the ongoing pandemic will leave the globe even more in need of vertical farms. I’ll give the company some credit for creativity in the name. And I agree the world is going to need more vertical farmers. I’m not sure, however, that anyone can have a short-term impact on the food supply.
We also learned that the Wageningen University & Research LightLab has been accredited to characterize greenhouse materials based on the new NEN2675 standard. Such characterization will be important going forward to optimize controlled environment agriculture (CEA) yield.
Remember when it comes to the horticultural application that our HortiCann Light + Tech event will take place Oct. 20 in San Jose, CA.
Characterization, of course, is ultimately tied to the test and measurement (T&M) sector. We had a news mashup about several recent T&M announcements headlined by the Gigahertz-Optik handheld instrument for measuring ultraviolet (UV) radiation. Such stories are of great interest right now with the potential of UV-C energy to kill pathogens such as the coronavirus. We also have announcements from Vektrex and Gamma Scientific in other T&M technologies.
You will find many more stories of interest in the body of today’s newsletter. And always feel free to contact me to discuss content we post or to pitch a contributed article.
- Maury Wright, (858) 748-6785, [email protected]