courtesy :  soilless 

hyperphonic agriculture

Traditional agriculture is cultivation of crops/plants in soil. The plants, in fact, do not need soil to grow but for its nutrients. If the plants are grown in nutrient solutions or any other substrate (other than soil) containing essential nutrients, the practice is known as soilless gardening/ dirt free farming.

In a traditional soil-based garden, a plant wastes most of its energy developing a huge root system for it has to search far and wide in the soil for its food and water. In soilless gardening, these are directly available to the plant roots. The plant gets everything it needs, in all the right proportions, at just the right time and utilising it most efficiently. Here the plant shows its full genetic potential.  They just bypass the soil and the plant’s requirements are met by nutrient rich water. It is known as Hydroponic cultivation.

The word hydroponics comes from two Greek words ‘hydro’ meaning water and ‘ponos’ meaning labor. This word was first used in 1929 by Dr Gericke, a California professor who began to develop what previously had been a laboratory technique into a commercial means of growing plants. The U.S. Army used hydroponic culture to grow fresh food for troops stationed on infertile Pacific islands during World War II. By the 1950s, there were viable commercial farms in America, Europe, Africa and Asia.

Hydroponics is a system of agriculture that utilizes nutrient-laden water rather than soil for plant nourishment. Such a technology, in fact, has been in operation since 2004 at the South Pole Food Growth Chamber. Hydroponics was indeed chosen as the food-production technology at the South Pole, due to the terms of the 1978 Antarctic Conservation Act which prohibits the ingress of soils to the continent’.

In space also, hydroponic vegetable cultivation is being used that would not only supplement a healthy diet, but also remove toxic carbon dioxide from the air inside their spacecraft and create life-sustaining oxygen. “If you continually resupply and deliver commodities like food, that will become much more costly than producing your own food,” says Ray Wheeler, Plant Physiologist at Kennedy Space Center’s Space Life Sciences Lab.

The popularity of hydroponics has increased dramatically in a short period of time leading to an increase in experimentation and research in the area of indoor and outdoor hydroponic farming.