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 facility at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, a key milestone in Santiago’s plans to continue developing the University of Illinois' reputation as a nationally recognized center for controlled environment agriculture and controlled environment agriculture-technology research.
A new assistant professor in the department of crop sciences, which is part of the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois, Santiago brings a real-world understanding of the challenges faced by the indoor farming industry. Prior to joining the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences, 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.
“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.”
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