Aspects of Hydroponics Which 90% of People Get Wrong
From confusion about what this growing method is has arisen unjustified suspicion. Let’s separate the fact from the fiction and take a look at what exactly hydroponics means to the world of gardening and food production.
The term hydroponics is taken from the Latin and means “working water.” Hydroponic growing is the growing of plants without soil. All of the nutrients plants normally get from soil are instead delivered to the plants through water. Hydroponics growers are skilled at adding just the right amounts of the substances plants need at trace levels for their complete health.
Don’t you be like so many other people and see hydroponics as a new invention with more fashionable merits that anything real. The reality is that although we think it new, it isn’t and has been used for crop growing for hundred of years. The Egyptians used hydroponics in ancien times for their food crops. Big advances have been achieved in the subject in the last thirty years since agriculturalists began studying teh idea as an alternate means of food cultivation, which potentially is why such a lot of people think it is a new technique.
Hydroponics has absolutely nothing to do with genetic food modification (GMA) although many people do erroneously ink them in their minds. While genetically modified food has been offered as a solution to solving global hunger, as hydroponics has, it is a completely separate entity. Because genetically modified food is so controversial, hydroponics sometimes gets a bad rap. In truth, hydroponic food is 100% natural food, it is a food which has been modified at all, and no chemicals are added to the plants to make them grow that they would not get in traditional fields. It is just a different method of cultivation and no genetic chages are needed or attempted.
Some people believe hydroponics is bad for the environment and climate change. Nothing could be less a statement of the reality. Hydroponic plants metabolise and use much less water that the soil grown equivalents. Indeed some cite the reduction at one tenth. There is no irrigation water which soaks away into the ground and drains away. In additionally, no discharge of pesticides into the surroundings can take place. Many greenhouse grown crops do consume a lot of energy, but this is the same for both soil grown and water cultivated options.
If you take care, hydroponics start ups can be achieved cheaply although most of the public would not accept that overall. True, nutrient mixtures and growth mediums are expensive, but the field has come a long way in developing reusable materials to balance some of these costs. In the small scale practicing hydroponics should be equivalent in cost to soil based crops.
Nor is hydroponics some little used or understood obscure gardening technique. It is used in nearly every nation of the globe, and in some locations, it is the most frequently used method. For example, in British Columbia, 90% of the greenhouse cultivation that takes place is hydroponic.
One thing people consider a benefit of hydroponics is actually a myth as well. Hydroponics and organic farming are not synonymous. Most hydroponic growers used pesticides on their crops. The best thing is that the water based system is contained, while in the field the fertilizer and pesticides often gets washed into ditches, streams and rivers to cause pollution. We have often seen organic hydroponic crops for sale, but the term does not imply whether organic methods will be used or not.
You would be wrong to think that hydroponics is of little use other than for the illegal drug growing in attics and garden sheds. This is just not true. Some illegal growers do use hydroponics, but many more people use this technique to grow legal crops.
Hydroponics is a big growth area for the near future as it can prodce lots of food and without a big enviromental burden. With more understanding of the field, hydroponic growers will find it easier to convince the public about the viability of their crops.
