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| Hydroponics: Growing crops without soil | | | Dr. Parveen Kumar,
Dr. Anil Kumar
One cannot think of
growing plants without soil. This is because soil is an important medium for plant growth. Soil basically provides the nutrients required for healthy growth of plants. It keeps the plants alive. But now, this has been made possible by a new technique. This technique is called 'Hydroponics'. Hydroponics refers to growing of plants without soil. The word Hydroponic comes from Latin and means working water. In more simple words, it is the art of growing plants without soil. The underlying principle of hydroponics is that if you give a plant exactly what it needs, when it needs it, in the amount that it needs, the plant will be as healthy as is genetically possible. With hydroponics this is an easy task; in soil it is far more difficult.
History of Hydroponics:
The earliest published work on Hydroponics is mentioned in Francis Bacon's book Sylva Sylvarum in 1627. It mentioned about growing of terrestrial plants without soil. Water culture became a popular research technique after that. In 1699, John Woodward published his water culture experiments with spearmint. He found that plants in less-pure water sources grew better than plants in distilled water. Growth of terrestrial plants without soil in mineral nutrient solutions was called solution culture. Solution culture is now considered a type of hydroponics where there is no inert medium. In 1929, William Frederick of the University of California at Berkeley began publicly promoting that solution culture be used for agricultural crop production. He first termed it aquaculture but later found that aquaculture was already applied to culture of aquatic organisms. Gericke created a sensation by growing tomato vines twenty-five feet high in his back yard in mineral nutrient solutions rather than soil. He introduced the term hydroponics, water culture, in 1937, proposed to him by W. A. Setchell, a phycologist with an extensive education in the classics.
One of the earliest successes of hydroponics also took place on Wake Island, a rocky atoll in the Pacific Ocean used as a refuelling stop for Pan American Airlines. Hydroponics was used there in the 1930s to grow vegetables for the passengers. Hydroponics was a necessity on Wake Island because there was no soil, and it was prohibitively expensive to airlift in fresh vegetables. With hydroponics the plants are grown in an inert growing medium. The growing medium is the material in which the roots of the plant are growing. The growing medium can vary from substances like Rockwool, perlite, vermiculite, coconut fibre, gravel, sand and many more. The growing medium is an inert substance that doesn't supply any nutrition to the plants. The nutrition comes from the nutrient solution which is a combination of water and different fertilizers. The nutrient solution has a perfectly balanced pH. This nutrient solution is delivered to the roots in a highly soluble form. This allows the plant to uptake its food with very little effort as opposed to soil where the roots have to search out the nutrients and extract them. This is true even when using rich, organic soil and top of the line nutrients. The energy expended by the roots in this process is energy better spent on vegetative growth and fruit and flower production. This does not means that it is a very complicated process. Hydroponics is no way a complicated technique. It is as simple as growing a plant in a hand watered bucket or nursery pot, using any number of inert growing mediums. It does not require any automation, electricity or grow lights. But of course the whole process can be automated. Both hydroponic fertilizers and those intended for use in soil contain the three major nutrients, nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. The major difference in hydroponic fertilizers is that they contain the proper amounts of all the essential micro-nutrients which fertilizers intended for use with soil do not. The plants are expected to find these elements in the soil, assuming that the trace elements are in fact present. Problems arise for the plants if any or all of the micro-nutrients are not present in the soil or are depleted by successive (or excessive) plantings. Hydroponic fertilizers are usually in a more refined form with fewer impurities making them both more stable and soluble for better absorption. Organic fertilizers, in most cases, are very different than either hydroponic or soil fertilizers both in composition and how they deliver the nutrient to the plants. Organic fertilizers rely on the synergistic action of bacteria and microbes to break down nutritional substances for easier uptake by the plants. Hydroponic and soil fertilizers provide nutrients in a ready-to-use form. While once, they were mutually exclusive, in recent years a number of outstanding organic fertilizers have hit the market in formulations refined enough for use in hydroponics. If we grow two genetically identical plants using soil for one and other by hydroponics, the difference is visible. The plants which are raised hydroponically have much better growth and much higher yields than the plants which are raised in soil. That is why hydroponics is being largely adapted all over the world for commercial food production as well as a growing number of home, hobby gardeners.
Hydroponics uses different culture methods. The most common is the tray method where the plants are grown in trays. The trays are filled with growing medium and periodically given nutrient solution. In botanical experiments water culture method is used where glazed porcelain jars are filled with nutrient solutions. Plants are placed on beds made of glass wool or some other similar type of material. Roots of the plants penetrate the beds and remain in the solution. In hydroponics we can control everything the plant receives. The strength and pH of the nutrient solution can be easily adjusted for crop specific growth. The watering/feeding cycles can also be be controlled by an inexpensive timer so that the plants get watered on schedule. The control of pH in Hydroponic solution is very important. It is more important because if the pH varies the plants lose the ability to absorb different nutrients. In the present era when land is shrinking and the soil is getting more degraded and the population is increasing, the use of hydroponics provides us an opportunity to produce even without any soil. It can be practiced not only in fields but also in our homes, terraces, gardens and balconies. For hydroponics to be taken on a large scale it is also necessary to make peoples aware of this technique. |
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