BYLINE: Lauren Quinn

URBANA, Ill. — Bathed in an otherworldly purple glow, James Santiago points to a curled leaf at the base of a spinach plant. “This is an issue we saw all the time at the vertical farm where I worked in Virginia. We don’t know exactly what’s going on, but I think it has something to do with water stress, which is weird because the plants are growing in water.”

The spinach is growing in the new Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) facility at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, a key milestone in Santiago’s plans to continue developing U. of I.’s reputation as a nationally recognized center for CEA and CEA-technology research. 

A new assistant professor in the Department of Crop Sciences, part of the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at U. of I., Santiago brings a real-world understanding of the challenges faced by the indoor farming industry. Prior to joining ACES, Santiago was a senior scientist at Soli Organic, where he led the Research and Development department’s crop production trials on-farm and in grow rooms. 

That’s also where he encountered curled spinach leaves and lettuce leaf tip burns, some of the common specialty crop production issues he plans to solve in his research program at ACES.

“A lot of the research I’m doing now is based on my past experiences, but I have also started forging two-way collaborations with leaders in the industry to be aware of current production issues they face, so we can solve their issues together. What I don’t want is for my research to be confined within the walls of the university,” he said. “I want my work to be translatable, so that growers in the horticulture industry can use my findings to improve the yield and nutritional content of their crops.”

Now that his CEA facility is operational, Santiago and his students, including doctoral researcher Yuta Inoue, are running trials to optimize growing conditions — including light quality, temperature, hydroponic nutrient solution, and more — for a wide range of crops.

“One of the things we’re looking at is light quality to not only achieve greater biomass, but also to improve the plants’ nutritional content,” he said. “We know that different light colors contribute to plant yield, but their interaction with many environmental and physiological processes are often overlooked.”

If his work on the horticultural lighting spectrum works the way Santiago suspects, he will offer his evidence-based recommendations to lighting manufacturers, advocating for more tunable spectra in industry-standard LED lighting arrays. After all, he points out, each crop likely benefits from slightly different ratios of red, blue, far red, and green light. 

“I’m excited about the plant physiology-driven approach that James takes to CEA,” said Adam Davis, professor and head of crop sciences at Illinois. “The wealth of plant physiology expertise at the University of Illinois can help him build a program that will take CEA to the next level.” 

Having the option to dial in specific light color ratios is just one way indoor farming can be more efficient, sustainable, and healthier than conventional methods, especially for leafy greens, herbs, and small fruiting plants that typically require repeated pesticide applications and are more susceptible to disease-causing microbes when grown outdoors.  

“People have become much more aware of where their food is coming from, and are demanding more local production to reduce food mileage and its carbon footprint. And during the pandemic, we saw that the supply chain can really get messed up, causing food shortages. Indoor farming can address all of that, and more,” Santiago said. “It can enable small-scale growers, including households, to have their own source of healthy local food. And the best thing is that you can grow food indoors the whole year round, even if it’s 11 degrees outside.”

Using Hatch funding to establish his CEA facility, Santiago is delivering on a fundamental aspect of the university’s land grant promise: Listening to the challenges of public and private stakeholders and responding with unbiased research. ACES researchers and Illinois farmers have worked together for over a century to shape modern agriculture. Today, Santiago is extending that legacy indoors, pioneering solutions that could redefine how we grow food in the Midwest and beyond.