Over the past couple months, I have covered a lot of new material on hydroponics and a lot of the research that is currently going on in this industry. I have also presented a lot of the pros and cons of this emerging technology. For this last post, I will recap these main points that I have made and then transition to discussing the most potential applications for hydroponics.

My first post on hydroponics was an introduction post and laid out the general idea of what hydroponics is and some of reasons why I am personally interested in this area. Namely, we are going to have to increase food production over the next couple decades, and traditional agriculture is putting too large of a strain on the environment.

The first main pro of hydroponics that I covered was that it is climate proof! This is probably the biggest advantage of hydroponics because it means that you can start the next growing season the day after the first one finishes, you don’t have to wait for the weather to go from fall to winter to spring when you can plant again. This also means that you can stagger growing seasons so that fresh crops are always available, no longer dependent on when they are “in season.”

For my third post, I explained the new developments that are occurring in new growing seasons. Since these crops are isolated from the rest of the environment, it means that no pesticides are needed.

Next, I explained the benefits of growing crops locally and how vertical farming allows that much more! The one statistic that I remember from this week was that hydroponics can produce 11 times more output per unit area. This was the week that I did a deeper dive into the main disadvantage of hydroponics – energy use.

For blog #5, showed the infographic of how much water each different type of crop takes to grow and then showing how hydroponics has a huge potential to reduce this water use. It takes 70-90% less water to produce the same crops in a hydroponics system compared to traditional agriculture.

My most recent blog was very similar to blog #5, but instead of discussing water usage, I focused on fertilizer usage and how that in a hydroponics system there is no wasted fertilizer and there is no possibility that it leaks out into the environment and causes more damage. Additionally, there is the huge advantage that hydroponics has in shorter growing times because essentially plants have to work less hard and so they can grow at their maximum rate, which is about 1.5 times faster than traditional agriculture!

Overall, I do believe that the benefits of hydroponics are extremely promising, however this technology will never be implemented until the energy costs are offset by these advantages. I can totally see this happening in a couple places though! The main one being the middle east where the water and the heat make it incredibly difficult to grow food traditionally, so hydroponics has a great shot at being implemented on a large scale there! After this happens, I predict that companies in the middle east will find ways to reduce the costs significantly and it will begin to become cheap enough to be considered in multiple other places. Over the next ten years I think the world will see hydroponics implemented in major cities, the middle east, and the arctic. We’ll see where we go though!

In almost every sector of business today, there is the demand to increase output and production in a shorter and shorter amount of time. In the agriculture sector, this has been a big push as well because people don’t want to have to clear more land to dedicate to growing food, but at the same time, they’re limited by how fast plants can grow. This is the reason that fertilizers were invented.

Fertilizers speed up growth rates of the plants and essentially increase the speed at which the biological cycles happen. This happens because fertilizers provide the plant with almost everything it needs to grow. (The main product being nitrogen). If the plant doesn’t have to wait on getting any other nutrients (like from the soil), then it can keep performing its biological cycles as long as there’s enough food/nutrients for it and enough sunlight and water. However, farmers have applied too much of a good thing over their fields before, and the result is excessive runoff, which is harmful to the environment and can cause unregulated algae growth and other similar problems. Therefore, farmers have been working on maintaining the right balance of how much they should use this really useful tool without having it cause too much harm to the environment. With all of these factors considered, I think that farmers have reached a good point where the growth rates are about as fast as they can be given the circumstances, and so their focus has been instead on decreasing the time it takes to harvest and plant a new round of crops.

Hydroponics offers a different approach. It has the unique opportunity where the environmental consequence of fertilizer runoff just doesn’t exist in a closed environment. The benefit of this is that there is no need to worry about using too much fertilizer. This may sound like hydroponics just pump fertilizer throughout the farm system, but in actuality, that is not the case. Each individual plant is receiving more nutrients from the fertilizer than they are if they were on farmland. You can think of it this way: instead of dumping out a large bucket of fertilizer over a batch of seedlings, you are carefully applying the exact amount of fertilizer to each individual plant. This may sound like a difficult and energy intensive process, but the plants do it for us. In a hydroponics system, all you have to do is dip all the plant roots in a fertilizer rich solution and they will naturally pull out all the nutrients with minimal effort and they can then grow as fast as possible.

In turn, hydroponically grown plants grow on average 50% faster than soil rooted plants. This fact alone should be enough to make businessmen stop for a second and consider the profit that can be found in hydroponics under the right situations. Hydroponics do a great job of maximizing the output for the space that they are given. Next week I will talk about the different applications that I see hydroponics succeeding the most in over the next couple years!