Hydroponics
1/20/2021
Hello everyone!
So, this post is a sort of informative post about Hydroponics, elaborating more on it. So if you want, read this post, and then read my other post on Aquaponics. Now, back to why you're here!
Hydroponics in a nutshell is growing plants, usually crops, in water. And you may be thinking that it sounds like it requires super high technology, but really, it doesn't! Actually, the earliest known records of hydroponics date back to the Neo-Babylonian Empire at around 600 BCE. It was the great, beautiful Hanging Garden of Babylon:
According to the picture, it's a beautiful tower with multiple levels of plants in water (Some parts had dirt but a large portion had water with them). This picture alone showed how advanced humans were back then, even compared now! In the modern-day, it's a different story, making hydroponics better! Let me show you what I mean
Hydroponics mixed with technology enables us to change the minuscule details of the plant's media. Media means in this case what the plants use to survive, for example, soil. In hydroponics, they use nutrient-rich water which goes into the plant, out of it, and then sent back into the reservoir to be revitalized with nutrients, and then reused again. The plants are in these rows the water stays not completely up at the root ball (The main hub where all roots originate) but a little bit farther below it so the longer roots can pick it up. The reason why hydroponic plants don't have a large percentage of their roots in water is because of root rot. Root rot is where bacteria go into the roots and turns them into this black-brown color, killing it, and making a horrible smell in the process. So to avoid this, the water is going between a small margin of a high, then low to avoid root rot.
Yet, it's not just that. In more advanced systems, people can change anything and everything about how the plants grow. Such as pH level in the water, water temperature, air temperature, etc. It's highly customizable in a controlled environment, and in turn, increases the growth rate of the plants, giving them everything that they could ever need.
But then again, you may be asking, "why can't you use soil instead of water?" Soil is very stagnant and heavy. Which in a way is true and not true. It isn't true because water is denser than soil, but water is constantly moving, which allows change and many different gaps between it. Soil is "stagnant" as it's a solid, compared to water being a liquid. And to top it off, water is the universal solvent, as anything can be dissolved into it. So it allows for more customizability than soil, which is what we need. To elaborate more, soil, to us, is very random. Many risk factors and obstacles are in soil. These could include soil-borne diseases, pests, animals, locusts, deadly fungus, etc. But hydroponic systems eliminate those problems and allow plants to grow without any random variables. And because these variables are eliminated, we can remove the usage of things like pesticides which are toxic. There's been a steady increase in pesticide usage and we can eliminate them by using hydroponics.
Then again, there's more. In the picture above, do you see how much space is used? A lot smaller than your typical farm. Not only that, do you see how they're being suspended off the ground? Yup, that's right, we can stack hydroponically grown plants. This opens up a world of opportunities, as we can exponentially decrease the amount of land that we use to grow crops. By stacking it, we can grow bigger, healthier, and more nutritious plants in a smaller space! This could be useful in the future, where we can feed a larger number of people with healthier food.
Hydroponics in the end could be used to effectively replace soil farming for good!
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