“I want to be better than all my competitors.” This is a declaration I hear a lot from companies I advise on marketing and business strategy. It sounds like a valid and legitimate goal, but deciding to be No. 1 in your marketplace without a clear strategic market position can leave you spinning your wheels — and your cash — without great results.

Do you really want or need to be No. 1 overall, or would being No. 1 specifically at what you do best better serve your bottom line? Just as important, do you really understand who your true competitors are, and why? These are important questions when you are deciding where to invest and drive business. Trying to be all things to everybody can be expensive and does not guarantee you a good ROI. A narrower focus on capturing maximum market share of the things you want to be best known for could be much more profitable. Realizing you might just be your only worthy competitor is equally valuable.

Strategy

Let’s steer back to that strategic market position (SMP) for a moment. Knowing your true SMP is dependent on deciding which pieces of the market — and their scale — generate the most profits and overall value. If selling large heavy pottery is a constant drag on your GMROI and your staff, then it is probably not a growth or SMP category for you. If you aren’t delivering on quality compared to local design and build companies on landscape installation services, you might hurt your brand. You might not be able to compete on price for annual color with the volume-vendor down the street, but your high-margin custom mixed color containers may draw customers from far and wide. I always feel that working to make the most money at what you think you do best — and feel good about doing it — is the best strategy.

Typically, your SMP and ideal customer go hand in hand. Knowing who your ideal customer is and what they value about your business will help you better analyze and segment the market at the product level. Low-price vendors attract low-price customers. Is that the market segment in which you want to be the best? Or would you rather command bigger margins based on a different value proposition?

Perhaps an easier way to think about your SMP is simply how many eggs you want to put in each market segment or category basket. A more clearly strategized SMP usually results in more eggs placed in fewer well-chosen baskets.

Clean house

Too often companies start out trying to be “the best” by looking only outward for opportunities and solutions. More paid advertising and marketing can certainly help you build or retain market share, but your service and customer experiences need to back it up. It is really hard to be the best at what you do if your house isn’t in order. By that I mean if your internal company culture, infrastructure, protocols and products are a mess, then it’s going to be tough to ever be “the best” no matter how you try to market and grow.

When it comes to your SMP, it may also be time to clean house of products or services that are dead weight against your P&L. Too often, garden centers hang on to departments, categories, services or individual SKUs that just don’t turn enough or generate adequate margin. Why? Well, it can be scary to stop selling items you think your customers expect you to sell. Chances are that those poor sales reports are telling you it may be time to dump the bad apples and focus on the good ones. Getting rid of market segments or products that are not serving your brand can be incredibly liberating — and profitable.

Don’t cut corners

Growing smartly always requires that you take care with your cash and control costs, whilst simultaneously forecasting for future opportunities. Unfortunately, I too often see garden centers try to cut costs by excessively understaffing or underpaying staff. Rarely does this help a garden center dominate its chosen SMP. There are many smart ways to control costs via good buying and negotiating practices. But in a customer-facing retail environment, a poor investment in your staff will hurt you more than just about any other decision you make.

A rising tide really lifts all boats — as long as your boat does not have any unplugged holes. Trying to compete directly with all surrounding garden centers or big-box retailers on all things can leave you with more holes than you have fingers to plug them. Ultimately, when all the local garden centers in your area are thriving by “doing their thing,” it creates an engaged and energized consumer community that benefits everyone. If you have not exactly figured out what “your thing” is yet, there is no better time than now to get cracking.

Leslie (CPH) owns Halleck Horticultural, LLC, through which she provides horticultural consulting, business and marketing strategy, product development and branding, and content creation for green industry companies. lesliehalleck.com

Perhaps you have not been following the up-and-down, Bitcoin roller coaster ride as closely as this author has? If that’s the case, you’re probably confused by the headline above.

Allow me to explain.

“To the moon” is a popular rallying cry among digital currency enthusiasts. The phrase celebrates the stratospheric projected growth outlooks of the various digital tokens like Ethereum (ETH), Bitcoin (BTC), DOGE (DGE) and Stellar (XLM). There are many, many people who are much, much smarter than I who truly believe that these decentralized, technology-backed currencies are the future of global commerce.

Bitcoin has already had its Neil Armstrong moment. The currency was valued at $580 per coin seven years ago this month. Today, a single bitcoin fetches just shy of $51,000 (as of press time). Do I even need to do the math there? Recent estimates project Bitcoin rocketing through the $100,000 per coin price ceiling by the end of 2021, and some of the most bullish advocates believe that one day a single Bitcoin could potentially be worth over $1 million.

Like an investment vehicle, crypto currency does carry it’s fair share of risk and price volatility. Still, many short-sighted, so-called financial sector “experts” at the time dismissed it as merely another Internet flavor of the month, a tool of internet criminals, hustlers and smugglers. How wrong has history proven those prognostications? Upon review they look pretty cringe-worthy today, no doubt.

Pondering bitcoin’s meteoric rise over the last decade, I keep coming back to the early days of the indoor produce farming space. Back then, there were plenty of skeptics that were outspoken that growing things like lettuce and microgreens under LEDS in climate-controlled warehouses was “not scalable” and “inefficient.” Peruse through the pages of this magazine today, however, and you get a decidedly different outlook.

Vertical farming industry stalwart Gotham Greens (page 12) and hydroponic greenhouse lettuce producer Great Lakes Growers (page 18) are both aggressively expanding to meet increased demand from food retailers. And, once the food service sector rebounds and restaurants and bars are back fully open, you could see a similar growth curve out of these types of vertical farming operations that the crypto enthusiasts have enjoyed so much in their little corner of the internet.

So, as any crypto investor worth his or her salt would say, get ready for another exciting year in the vertical farming world, and #HODL (Hold On for Dear Life). like you’ve never HODL’d before! There are still good times ahead.

(Editor’s Note: Interested in learning more about digital currencies? Coindesk.com is a solid resource for news and pricing information.)

Produce Grower: AeroFarms was recently recognized for sustainability by the EDIE Sustainability Leaders Awards. What does that say about AeroFarms and what does it mean to you that the company was recognized?

David Rosenberg: This is really important to us. This is part of the fabric of why we started the company, to lead on environment. Part of what we did is see what our competitors/colleagues are doing and try to constantly raise the bar and raise the standards so everyone can build up and build better. It’s about trying to show what is possible, so we challenged ourselves and the community. We are a certified B Corp, which is a way of certifying a company’s environmental impact and not just profitability. We achieved that certification without doing anything that we weren’t already doing, and then we decided to see what we could do better.

PG: Do you get positive feedback for being eco-friendly and the like considering how important it is to consumers right now?

Mark Oshima: This is exactly at the crux of what’s exciting about our proposition, which applies not just to our customers, but also to the end consumer who is looking for more transparency, authenticity and looking for companies that are leading the way. Through our lens, we can act faster than even governments can in terms of implementing policy, so we can help be a catalyst. This is really important for us to think about how we push the industry forward, and putting that sustainability information in front of our customers. There’s a lot of education that we’ve invested in and it’s paid off.

PG: Is being a technological, forward-thinking company becoming more important for business, considering what the last year was like?

DR: It’s crucial as our value proposition has become more important. The world has had, essentially, a centralized food manufacturing business model. And now we see through this pandemic the cracks in the system — how if there’s contamination in one facility, it can bring down a whole facility and it sets off a chain reaction of damage. So a lot of the reaction is a more democratized food system and that means increasing local food production. In essence, that’s our business model — local food production at scale. The change is that the value proposition of food safety is more obvious now.

Image courtesy of PL Light Systems

Greenhouse growers, especially those in northern latitudes, often use supplemental (also known as photosynthetic or assimilation) lighting to produce uniform, consistent and high-quality crops year-round.

Light-emitting diode (LED) fixtures are now about 40% more energy-efficient than the double-ended high-pressure sodium (HPS) fixtures [bulb (or lamp), reflector (or luminaire), and ballast], but per photosynthetic photon, the initial cost of LED fixtures, is approximately 3 to 10 times more than HPS fixtures.

Recent surveys indicated that only 2% to 5% of growers have installed LED fixtures for supplemental lighting. Therefore, most greenhouses that utilize supplemental lighting still rely on HPS fixtures (Figure 1).

In this article, I will focus on the use and maintenance of HPS fixtures.

Where HPS lighting stands today

Traditionally, high-intensity discharge (HID) fixtures including HPS and metal halide (MH) were used for supplemental lighting as they were 25% to 30% efficient at converting electrical energy into photosynthetically active radiation (PAR).

The mogul-base HPS fixtures had electromagnetic ballasts and bulbs were single-ended (lamp attach to a single socket). About 13 years ago, electronic ballasts became available. These fixtures are typically smaller, cooler, quieter, lighter and best of all, they are 10% to 15% more energy-efficient then their magnetic ballast counter parts. Additionally, the efficiency degrades at a slower rate than with magnetic ballasts.

The efficacy of HPS lamps increased considerably (by >65%) about nine years ago with the introduction of 1,000-watt double-ended (attached to the socket at both ends) fixtures.

Research by Bruce Bugbee at Utah State University has reported that the slow start and steady output of electronic ballasts likely contributes to the increased longevity of double-ended HPS fixtures. These fixtures emit a photosynthetic photon flux (PPF) of around 1,840 µmol·s–1 and have an efficacy between 1.7 and 1.8 J·s^–1.

According to manufacturers, the life expectancy of double-ended HPS bulbs is 10,000 to 15,000 hours to 90% initial light output. Therefore, if your fixtures run 2,000 hours per year, the lamps would need to be replaced in 5 to 7.5 years.

Research findings

In 2008 the Light Research Center (LRC) at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) reported that most LED horticultural fixtures could not replace HPS fixtures on a one-for-one basis while still maintaining the original PPF. Therefore, approximately three times as many LED fixtures would be needed to provide the same PPF as one HPS fixture.

It is important to remember that each year, the efficacy of LED fixtures increases, and now some light manufacturers do offer LED fixtures that are 650 watts and are a one-for-one replacement for an HPS fixture.

The LRC also found an increase in shading from some LED fixtures compared with HPS due to the size and quantity of the luminaires needed to provide the same PPFD in a greenhouse as an HPS installation. Across the fixtures tested at RPI-LRC, the shading from LEDs reduced sun light in the greenhouse by 13% to 55% compared with a 5% reduction from HPS fixtures.

When to use HPS lamps

Installing, maintaining and operating HPS lamps are a major investment for greenhouse operations. However, most of the up-front costs associated with the fixtures can be calculated and weighed against the potential benefits (ie. yield gains for vegetables or shorter crop turns for young plants).

Even though you have made a large capital investment in these fixtures, there is typically a four-to-six-month period (April to September) depending on your location when the benefit provided by supplemental lighting is minimal and they should be turned off (this is also a great time for maintenance and replacement).

From October until March, the total quantity of light received per day, the daily light integral (DLI), can be a limiting factor in the production of greenhouse crops in northern latitudes. Therefore, the greatest benefit from supplemental lighting occurs at night or during cloudy days from this time period in the north and November to February in the south.

Keep in mind that supplemental lighting requires much higher light intensities than photoperiodic lighting, which needs 2 to 3 µmol·m^–2·s^–1 (10 to 20 foot-candles) and is usually delivered as a night break of four hours from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. For example, most young plant growers provide supplemental light intensities of 70 to 90 µmol·m^–2·s^–1 at plant height. Much higher intensities of 120 to 200 µmol·m–2·s–1 are recommended for vegetables (Figure 1).

During peak season, young plant production of ornamentals (January and February), DLIs in the greenhouse can range from 2 to 8 mol·m^–2·d^–1 in the north and 6 to 14 mol·m^–2·d^–1 in the south.

Research at Michigan State University indicates that not only do you produce high-quality young plant with supplemental lighting, but more importantly crop timing can be reduced by up to 50% depending on the species when the DLI is maintained between 10 to 12 mol·m^–2·d^–1 for ornamentals and 12 to 15 mol·m^–2·d^–1 for vegetables.

How many hours should an HPS lamp be on in order to achieve the target DLI of 12 to 15 mol·m^–2·d^–1? The amount of time the bulbs are on is just as important as the amount of supplemental instantaneous light they provide. Table 1 gives some examples of how supplemental DLIs ranging from 3 to 19 mol·m^–2·d^–1 may be achieved.

Photo 4b courtesy of PL Light Systems

HPS fixture and lamp maintenance

What is the life expectancy of an HPS bulb? As stated before, under normal operating conditions, replacing bulbs is recommended after 10,000 hours for mogul-base fixtures and 10,000 to 15,000 hours for double-ended fixtures. The number of times that a lamp is turned on or off will also affect the life of the bulb.

In order to get the highest output form your HPS ballast, reflector, and bulbs, routine maintenance and replacement is essential. Some HPS fixture manufacturers recommend cleaning reflectors (luminaries), while other recommend a complete replacement. All recommend replacing bulbs once they have reached their maximum operating life (Figures 2a and 2b).

However, let’s be honest with ourselves: most growers do not do this. I was pleasantly surprised to see an operation in New York that was cleaning all of their HPS reflectors and bulbs (Figure 4). I often see reflectors that are dusty, have water spots or finger prints (Figure 3), or lamps that have burned out or are dim. It is estimated that light output can be reduced by 8 to 15% due to dirty reflectors alone. Therefore, I asked several HPS manufactures for their recommendations on reflector maintenance.

P.L. Light Systems says that if the HPS installation is in a clean environment, or if the reflectors are 1 to 3 years of age, it is possible to clean them with a solution of vinegar and water mixed at a ratio of 1:100. They also advise cleaning your bulbs and reflectors annually for best performance. (Please note that not all manufactures recommend cleaning reflectors. Therefore, you should contact the manufacture of your HPS fixtures for their specific recommendations. Most manufacture can test your reflectors and tell you if it is time to replace them.)

P.L Light System HPS maintenance and cleaning checklist

1. When cleaning reflectors or replacing bulbs, wear eye and hand protection, unplug the HPS fixture from the main power source and allow it to cool for at least 30 minutes to prevent serious burns or injury (Figure 2).
2. While you wait, check cords for damage and replace damaged cords according to the manufacturer’s instruction.
3. Always use cotton gloves to install or remove bulbs as the oils on your hands can create dark spots and reduce lamp efficiency (Figure 2).
4. Carefully remove the reflector. Flush the reflector with distilled water inside and out to remove environmental contaminates (dust, dirt or water spots) (Figure 3).
5. Fill a bucket with a 1:100 vinegar:distilled water solution. Submerge only the reflector for a few seconds (Figure 4).
6. If necessary, carefully use a very soft brush such as a fine finger nail brush to rub off environmental contaminates on the bulb itself. Do not submerge bulbs.
7. Rinse the reflector in a second bucket filled with distilled water to remove cleaning solution (Figure 4).
8. Rinse reflector in third bucket of distilled water to remove any remaining residue. Otherwise hard water spots may remain. If residue is still present repeat steps 5 to 8. If this does not work, it is time to replace the reflector.
9. Allow the reflectors to air dry before reinstalling them on the fixture.
10. For your safety, when cleaning reflectors always maintain the correct ratio and never add other chemicals to the cleaning solution. For more information on correcting problems with HPS Lamps, click here.

The author is an associate professor and controlled environment/floriculture extension specialist in the Department of Horticulture at Michigan State University.