Microgreens World

If you grow microgreens under LEDs and you're pricing a new fixture, read this before you trust the scale on harvest day.

A team in Russia grew radish microgreens under two 50-watt LED fixtures. One of them raised fresh yield by 68 percent. On a scale, that looks like a clear winner.

Then they dried the plants. Most of the gain was water.

Fresh weight tells you how much water the crop is holding. Dry weight tells you how much plant you grew. A light can move one and barely touch the other.

You can run the same check yourself. Cut a small sample from each tray, weigh it, dry it in a low oven until the weight stops falling, and weigh it again. Compare the dry numbers, not the fresh ones.

Which light won on fresh weight, what happened to the shoots you sell, and three reasons to read the study with care are in this week's Microgreens World digest. Link in the first comment.

First comment: This week's issue: https://microgreensworld.com/microgreens-weekly-digest/september-25-2026

Is it really possible to quadruple the iron in a tray of microgreens without giving anything up?

Penn State put five iron sources against an untreated control, at three rates, on radish and pea. One source did the job. One did nothing at all, and the reason it did nothing is a detail about tray plumbing that will matter to anyone running a shallow reservoir.

Then there is the part almost nobody measures. Something else in the tissue moved while the iron was going up. It moved down, and in one crop it moved down by 62 per cent.

The frame worth keeping even if you never click: biofortification is a trade, not an addition. You are not adding a mineral to a plant. You are changing what the plant takes up, and the plant does not have unlimited room.

Which means if anyone runs an iron panel for you, that panel should not stop at iron.

Which source won, which one failed and why, what fell, and how far it fell in each crop. All in this week's issue: https://microgreensworld.com/microgreens-weekly-digest/september-18-2026/

Sept is the one month a year I spend a couple of dollars a packet for cheap toss them in and wait seeds. They really pay off! Remember not to w**d out the new starts in the spring!

Is it really possible that a red cabbage grown to maturity beats its own microgreens? One trial planted the same seed both ways and measured both, and the answer is not the one this page usually prints.

Most growers answer "are microgreens more nutritious" with a multiple. Six times the vitamin C. Forty times the vitamin E. Those figures come from comparing microgreens against mature vegetables grown somewhere else, by someone else.

This trial removed that problem. One cultivar, one organic farm, one season. Part of the seed was grown as microgreens under supplementary LED, the rest grown on to heads.

The mature cabbage won on four measures. The microgreens won on one. And between the two lamp colors the microgreens were grown under, one beat the other on everything measured.

The usable part, whether or not you click: the honest answer to a customer is never a multiple. It is which compound, compared against what. Say that at the stall and you will sound like the only grower who has read a paper.

Which four measures, which one, which lamp, and the numbers behind each are in this week's issue.

Read it here ==> https://microgreensworld.com/microgreens-weekly-digest/september-11-2026

Is it possible the light setting growing your heaviest trays is the same one costing you the color people buy on?

Most of us set the lights once and leave them. Turn the blue up, the trays come off heavier, the numbers look better, and nobody tells you what you gave up to get there.

A red cabbage trial went looking for the trade. Three blue LED power levels crossed with four selenium doses, thirty-six units, three replications.

Three outcomes. Three different winning settings.

Weight peaked at one combination. Carotenoids at another. Anthocyanin, the red pigment people buy with their eyes, somewhere else again.

Nothing peaked in the same place.

Which means there is no best setting, and there never was. There is only what you are optimizing for on this crop, and what you are willing to give up to get it. Decide that before you set the light, not after you weigh the tray.

The three winning combinations, the wattages and the doses, and the one caution that comes with them are in this week's issue: https://microgreensworld.com/microgreens-weekly-digest/september-4-2026/

Have you seen where the compound actually sits inside a broccoli microgreen? It is not spread evenly through the plant, and that turned out to be the thing that surprised me most.

Guo's team separated broccoli sprouts into cotyledon, hypocotyl, and root, then measured each part on its own.

Ninety-three to ninety-seven percent of the glucoraphanin sat in the cotyledons. The three-day cotyledon carried nearly eighteen times what the stem below it did, and sixty-six times what the root did.

Then they measured the enzyme, and it runs the other way. Myrosinase is what turns glucoraphanin into sulforaphane, and the hypocotyl carried about four times the myrosinase of the cotyledon.

The root makes the point better than either of the others. Rich in the enzyme, with almost no precursor, it produced sulforaphane at just over one percent of its breakdown products. An enzyme with nothing to work on produces nothing at all.

So the compound lives up in the leaves, the machinery that acts on it lives in the stem below, and your harvest cut runs somewhere between them.

Does cutting lower change what you end up with? Nobody has tested it, and I am not going to claim it. If you want to run it on your own trays, I would like to hear what happens.

https://microgreensworld.com/how-to-grow-broccoli-microgreens/

Guo et al. 2014.

If your grow room ran hot this summer, something changed in the trays.

Not the yield. The chemistry.

A team at the University of Zagreb grew broccoli from the same seed at two temperatures, and the gap they measured was:

28 per cent.

Broccoli sprouts raised at 38°C (100°F) day and 33°C (91°F) night carried 28 percent less total glucosinolate than the same seed raised at 23°C (73°F) and 18°C (64°F). Total phenolic acids fell 40 percent. Total polyphenolics moved the other way and rose 30 percent.

If your room ran warm through July, the trays you sold may not match the profile you describe on your sign. Worth knowing before you write next season's labels.

The full figures, the growing conditions, and the rest of this week's issue are here.

https://microgreensworld.com/microgreens-weekly-digest/august-28-2026

Is it really possible to run vertical farms profitably? One company says all three of its farms now are.

For most of the last decade, this industry has been a story about money going out. Companies raised, built, scaled, and then quietly closed. You have watched the names go. So have I.

GoodLeaf Farms told Retail Insider this week that all three of its Canadian vertical farms have reached profitability, with revenue up another 31 percent in 2026 on demand for its baby greens, microgreens, and salad blends.

The number that matters there is not the 31 percent. It is the words "all three."

Single-site profitability has happened before in controlled environment agriculture. It usually happens at a flagship facility with the best equipment, the best staff, and the most forgiving accounting. Repeating it across a whole network is a different proposition, because it means the unit economics survived being copied. That is the test almost every failed vertical farm did not pass.

There is a structural reason it can work with this crop specifically. Microgreens punish distance harder than almost anything else in the produce aisle. A national footprint means shorter runs to each distribution center, and shorter runs mean less shrink on a product whose entire value proposition is freshness. Building close to the customer is not a nice-to-have. It is the model.

One caution before you borrow anything from the coverage. The company says its microgreens contain up to 166 times more nutrients than mature greens. Multiples like that end up on stall signs within days, and they are almost always doing quiet work inside the phrase "up to." A figure like that typically describes one compound, in one variety, measured per gram of dry weight, against one particular mature counterpart. It is not a claim about the tray in front of your customer.

Be encouraged by the first thing. Stay skeptical of the second. Both are true in the same week.

Full story in this week's issue: https://microgreensworld.com/microgreens-weekly-digest/august-21-2026

Two indoor farms shut down last week. Neither one had a crop failure. The growing worked fine.

One of them was far past a million dollars in revenue. Which tells you something about how little that number actually predicts.

I made this because the climb from zero gets drawn as a smooth line going up and to the right, and that is not how anybody gets there. It is a set of stairs. Every step costs money, time or sleep, and you stand on each one a good while before the next one shows up. The waiting is the part nobody photographs.

The odds are public, and they are not a secret. In 2023 about 1.3 million US business establishments opened and about 1.2 million closed. Close to half of new businesses are gone by year five. That is SBA Advocacy and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Here is the part I most want you to take from it. Twenty trays in a spare room carries almost no fixed cost. That is not a smaller version of a big indoor farm. It is a different business with a different failure point, and it can outlast operations many times its size. Small is not the weak position.

There is also some news at the end about who has joined Microgreens World, and what we are going to do with it over the next few weeks.

Every microgreens guide I've ever read ends at harvest.

Seed density, blackout days, when to pull the dome, how tall to cut. Then the tray hits your kitchen, and the instructions stop.

There's one more step, and I had it wrong for years.

A 2026 review of sulforaphane pharmacokinetics came down on a plain recommendation. Eat broccoli microgreens raw and unprocessed to maximize the delivery of bioavailable sulforaphane (Sikorska-Zimny, 2026).

Meanwhile, I was ladling hot black beans straight onto a bowl of broccoli microgreens. Ten days of careful growing, and I'd pour heat right over the top of it.

The fix costs nothing. Beans go in the bowl first and sit a minute. Greens go on last.

One caveat, because it matters. A second 2026 paper found that how much any one person gets out of broccoli sprouts varies widely, and that the gut microbiome interacts with habitual diet to shape the response (Alexiev et al., 2026). Nobody can tell you what your number is. This is about not throwing away what's already in the tray.

Both papers are written up in this week's digest, along with two vertical farm closures and a $30 million grant deadline that specialty crop growers qualify for. Link in the comments.