Hydroponics

Hydroponics is the growing of plants without soil. A variety of techniques exist. more...

Researchers of plant metabolism have discovered that plants absorb nutrients as simple ions in water. In natural conditions, soil acts as a nutrient reservoir but the soil itself is not essential to plant growth. When the nutrients in the soil dissolve in water, plant roots are able to absorb them. When the required nutrients are introduced into a plant's water supply artificially, soil is no longer required for the plant to thrive. Almost any plant will grow with hydroponics, but some will do better than others. It is also very easy to do; the activity is often undertaken by very young children with such plants as watercress.

Uses

Hydroponics is useful to us in two main ways. First, it provides a more controlled environment for plant growth than soil thereby removing many unknowns from experiments. Second, many plant species produce more in less time and sometimes of higher quality, which under certain economic and environmental conditions, makes hydroponics growing more profitable to the farmer. With hydroponics there are no soil-borne diseases, weeds to pull, or soil to till, and plants can be placed very close to one another. This allows a large amount of food to be produced in a small amount of space. Hydroponics is also very water-efficient as it uses containers or closed loop systems that recirculate the water, and therefore requires only a small fraction of the water used in traditional farming.

These qualities combine to make hydroponics useful wherever people wish to grow plants in a non-traditional manner. Science fiction writers have long speculated that hydroponics would allow space stations or spaceships to grow their own food (see e.g. generation ships). The same qualities make hydroponics ideal for those who wish to grow plants with maximum control over conditions, and maximum density.

History

Some examples of earlier attempts in hydroponics are the Hanging Gardens of Babylon around 600 BC and the Floating Gardens of the Aztecs during the 11th century.

The first researcher of hydroponics was John Woodward of England, who, in 1699, grew plants in water to which he had added various soils. This demonstrated that the earth contained various substances which the plants needed besides water. In the mid-19th century, the German plant physiologists Sachs and Knop grew plants in simple solutions of inorganic salts.

In 1929, Professor Gericke of the University of California, Davis demonstrated that plants could be grown soil-free all the way to maturity, growing tomato plants in water to a quite remarkable size. By analogy with the ancient Greek term for agriculture, geoponics, the science of cultivating the earth, Gericke coined the name hydroponics for the culture of plants in water (from the Greek hydros, water, and ponos, labour).

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