Is all light created equal? When growing muscadines, red light prevails

At Union Grove, our vineyards double as laboratories. We’re always looking for the newest agricultural innovations that maximize resource efficiency and that are aligned with our mission to harness the power of regenerative farming to make a better muscadine grape. When we heard about Opti-Harvest technology, we knew we had to put it to the test in our fields.

Opti-Harvest manufactures bright red chambers that wrap around the base of grape vines. These chambers work by capturing sunlight and converting it into scattered red light. Concentrating the optimal wavelength of light directly onto the vines can help them grow faster while reducing their water footprint. By creating a microclimate near the vine roots, crops with Opti-Harvest chambers have been shown to have:

• Stronger root system development with increased carbohydrate storage for the following year

• Increased fruit size and more fruit per tree and vine - with the same irrigation

• More active and viable, and productive canopy

• Increased uptake of CO2 from the atmosphere

(Source: https://opti-harvest.com)

If you’ve visited us in the past year, you’ve likely seen our experiment in action. We purchased 70 Opti-Harvest chambers for the 2022 growing season to see what they could do for our vines. We compared the performance of these chambers with blue ‘Grow Tubes” that capture and concentrate blue light and with our control section without any chambers. We quickly saw what the right kind of light can do for vine growth. By optimizing photosynthesis of the vines, our crops with the Opti-Harvest chambers showed 50% more vine growth than the controls. In addition to increasing vine yield, we noted an increase in disease and pest resistance.

We will continue to track the year-to-year progress of our chambers and expand our usage of them. As we prepare for Spring 2023 – our biggest planting yet – expect to see some of our fields turn into seas of red!