Hydroponics

The world’s population is nearing 7.5 billion (Demographics of April 2017)– and global prosperity and the expectancy for more resource-intensive foods rising very fast – it’s clear that farming needs to become more innovative & productive.

One way of meeting future food needs could be hydroponics – growing plants without soil, instead using a nutrient-rich solution to deliver water and minerals to their roots. It’s already being used to increase farming outputs and grow plants in areas/regions that wouldn’t normally sustain them.

Despite sounding like something out of science fiction, it’s nothing new. The Aztecs built floating farms around the island city of Tenochtitlan, and the explorer Marco Polo wrote about seeing floating gardens during his travels through 13^th-century China. By the 1930’s, Pan American Airways had established a hydroponic farm on a remote Pacific island to allow its flights to top up with food on route to Asia.

Today farmers are slowly increasing their use of hydroponics, and researchers are looking more closely at how it could solve future food problems. In the future, some of its applications could be out of this world.

How does it work?

Hydroponics is the practice of growing plants without soil. In conventional agriculture, soil supports a plant’s roots – helping it to remain upright – and provides it with the nutrients it needs to grow. In hydroponics, plants are artificially supported, and a solution of ionic compounds provides nutrients instead (A Soil free Agriculture).

The thinking behind this is simple. Plant growth is often limited by environmental factors. By applying a nutrient solution directly to a plant’s roots in a controlled environment, a farmer can ensure that the plant always has an optimal supply of water and nutrients. This nutritional efficiency makes the plant more productive. Yields of crops can be up to 75% larger than those of soil.

The solution can be delivered in a number of ways. A plant may be:

• placed in an inert substance (such as the volcanic glass perlite or rock wool) and have its roots periodically flooded with solution
• placed in an inert substance and rained on by a solution dripper
• suspended with its roots in the air, with these then sprayed with solution mist
• placed on a slightly sloping film that allows solution to trickle over its roots

All of these systems are mechanised in one way or another, usually using either a pump or a mister to deliver the solution from a separate store. The solution is also usually aerated to ensure that the roots are supplied with adequate oxygen. Mineral absorption requires energy, and is powered by respiration.

Water preservation: Irrigating plants in a garden ecosystem results in less than 10% of the water applied being utilized by the plants, the other evaporates or drains away. When this happens the plant loses nutrients because the water drains them. This produces contamination and more fertilizer is required. When you use a hydroponics system there are no losses to drainage and as long as evaporation is regulated hydroponics utilizes as small as one tenth of the water that a usual developed crop would need. Hydroponics can be greatly effective in areas where water resources are restricted. In the Middle East in places like Israel and the Gulf States and desert areas in other places in the world or in urban areas hydroponics represents the only method to produced and developed crops.

Natural conservation: A lot of characteristics of traditional organic do not apply to hydroponics. For example preserving soil fertility, arrangement and controlling weeds in an authorized method. Hydroponics farmers don’t sustain the soil. They don’t control weeds because there is no soil. Even though, the nutrients in a hydroponic system are typically created synthetically they are chemically the same to those the plants would get in a soil

Nutrient preservation: This is also a benefit of hydroponics farming. When grown on soil, nutrients which have not yet been utilized by the plant finish up in the ground water and pollute the rivers and lakes leading to algal blossom and deoxygenation, which eventually is lethal to water life and other animals. In addition, salt can accumulate in the ground water reserves creating then to saline to use for beverage or irrigation. Organic techniques of soil organization help to diminish leaching but in a recirculating hydroponic garden, there is no loss of nutrients to the atmosphere every nutrient placed into the system is consumed by the plants. This results in a very effective non-polluted technique of production that needs fewer nutrients than a usual method.

Maintenance: Hydroponics can supply a sustainable answer for cultivators with hard soil and climate circumstances. Restricting intake to strictly organically grown crops would result in having to import more food. Growing food and crops locally with the use of hydroponics is more maintainable than to depend on imported organic production.

How To Build A Hydroponics Garden

Building a hydroponic garden is not as complicated as it sounds. Not only having a hydroponic garden in your home will bring you great benefits it will also help you save money on groceries. It doesn’t matter if you live in a big city or in a farm, anyone can use this method of gardening because it does not need soil and it can be done inside or indoors. Just to name some of the benefits it will bring you; it will help your lifestyle because you know what your eating and it will be healthy, it also helps you relax you don’t have to worried about food or the weather affecting your crops, etc.

A Step-by-step guide for building your own Hydroponic Garden -

1.      The first thing you have to do before starting your own hydroponic garden has to be deciding which vegetables or plants you want to produce in your garden and the quantity of every plant you want to produce.

2.      Calculate the size of the area you will use.

3.      Uniformly, mark and space 4 inch holes for each 4 inch pots to be placed in them. For the first 3-4 weeks and in hot climates, shade cloth is helpful if used under these conditions.

4.      Then make up a hydroponic solution of fertilizers and water to a strength of an average of 20-24 Conductivity Factor (CF) with an end pH of 5.5 to 6.5.

5.      Plant yourself-raised or bought seeds by taking seedlings out of their pots and carefully washing away most of the soil from the roots.

6.      Place the clean seedlings in the growing medium, be it Rockwool coir clay balls or coco peat and into the hydroponic solution.

7.      Carefully control the chemical balance of nutrients to water (check daily) by adding mostly water, since the water will mostly evaporate.

8.      Watch your plants grow for about 12 - 18 weeks.

9.      Help them by keeping pests away and watching for root-rot (when roots go slimy, turn brown and die).

10.  Harvest when needed.

11.  Flush the entire system after harvest, and sterilize using peroxide and copper solutions to kill bacteria and mold.

Additional Information You Should Read Before Starting Your Garden:

• 2 items of importance are a digital pH tester and CF meter, needed to check pH and nutrient strength. Guessing is not enough.
• Make sure you have good time and energy.
• Hydroponic gardening can be done inside or outside.
• Just as with regular gardens, provide lots of natural light, like a greenhouse or sun room.
• Gently rinse (don't scrub) "seedlings" roots to remove and loosen the dirt before putting into the hydroponic solution. (Plants and roots at this stage are fragile and are not needing every speck of dirt off of them.)