Hydroponics: The Future of Farming

The word hydroponics comes from hydro meaning water, and ponos meaning labour. It is meant to represent the growing of plants in any medium -- sand, gravel, or liquid, with added nutrients.
Most people in India have grown up on the idea that good water, good soil and lots of sunlight translate into good farming.  That may have been true for most farmers, for a great deal of time.  But new research and practice have shown that what healthy plants really require are good seeds, good water and nutrients.

What hydroponics does best is eliminating the need for soil, sunlight and rain.  Since almost 90% of pests come from the soil, there is automatically a dramatic reduction in pests.  Hence fewer pesticides, herbicides and insecticides are used.  Aerial pests that may sneak in are often caught by the insect traps that are there in any hydroponics farm. The plant uses the water that runs below each  tray, and this water is then re-circulated, preventing both evaporation and wastage.  Nutrients that the plants need are carried through the water and caress only the roots of the plants -- each range of trays carries the nutrients specific to each type of plant, depending on its age and the  and the special qualities it is meant to have when it is ready to be sold to customers.

Market size:

Is hydroponics just a fringe movement, primarily found on the shelves of laboratories, or has it become commercially viable?  The truth is that this industry is growing by leaps and bounds.  The hydroponics industry has become huge during the past decade.

If one takes into account the types of plants grown using hydroponics, you will find products like tomato, cucurbits, lettuce, almost all varieties of leafy vegetables, peppers, and other food crops.

Tomato forms the largest market segment and it is likely to account for 30.4% share of the global market, by the end of this year.

As consumers become increasingly aware of the superior quality in greenhouse-grown vegetables, the demand for hydroponics has been growing in Europe and Asia-Pacific. Hydroponics crop production is expected to continue growing when it comes to tomatoes, lettuce and other leafy vegetables. Experiments with creeper plants has also been quite promising, and it won’t be long before we have large scale cultivation of fruit like grapes and plums using hydroponics.

The case for India:

But why should India look at hydroponics?

There could be several reasons why India may have no option but to embrace this method of farming.

The first, this is the closest one can get to fresh food, uncontaminated by pesticides and insecticides.

Second, at a  time when agriculture itself is being buffeted by climate change including unseasonal rain and hail storms, hydroponics is a way of managing to grow plants under controlled conditions.  Thus, you could recreate the atmosphere of say Gangtok in the middle of Maharashtra and actually focus on growing medicinal plants that normally found in the North East parts of India.

You could control all the variables, including the strength of active ingredients which have tended to degenerate and deteriorate over a period of time.

Third, it could be the best solution for the Indian government when it comes to land acquisition.  The government could offer farmers land for land, and work out ways whereby the hydroponics company would handhold the farmer to teach him how to master the technologies involved. That was the strategy Narendra Modi used when he was chief minister of Gujarat.  He allowed micro-irrigation companies to get the subsidy amounts only after another specified government agency certified that they had handheld customer farmers. That way, farmers would be able to stick to farming even if the landholding was very small (you can grow as much as 130 times the conventional amount on any plot of land).

Fourth, with controlled supply of nutrients and with hardly any pesticides being used, the cost for crop management begins to diminish.

Fifth, since consuming markets are close to producing centres, the transport miles shrink, leading to a further reduction in costs.  As farmers learn to strike deals directly with consumers, and as they learn to space out crop production so that a limited supply is available every day, they can move away from rapacious middlemen as well.

And lastly, this is one way to reduce farmer distress.  These new technologies have the power to reduce the germination life of plants from around 30 days (the conventional time span for plants) to just around 11 days. Thus the farmer can rotate his crop more often.  That allows him to keep pace with changing tastes. A higher crop intensity also helps him to better his earnings.  It is also one way to bring farming closer to food processing centres and embrace the cold chain system that agriculture so sorely needs.

There is also one more factor that would endear urban investors to this opportunity. The sale proceeds from the agricultural produce got through hydroponics invites zero taxes.  That could add another dimension to urban incomes altogether.

Hopefully, weather vagaries and farmer distress with soon compel the government to sit up and embrace and promote this method of farming.

BRIO HYDROPONICS (A Unit Of Brio Agri Producer Company Ltd.) is a producer company registered under the companies Act, 1956, having a basic object of development and growth of the Farmers community with the aid of Highest quality of the Agricultural Instruments. Brio Agri Producer Company is a congregation set-up administrated for growing impact on farmers of India. Global warming and climate change are the two most challenging threats against today’s scientist and technocrats. With an intention for betterment of Indians and abstaining the above mentioned challenges we have taken former step to introduce Hydroponics. Hydroponics is the science of growing plants without soil. Nutrients are supplied to plants through water, with or without a growing medium. The produce is higher in nutritional value, healthier and long lasting. With an impulsion to reach each farmer of India and to cognizant them with this “Supreme Technology of Farming”-Hydroponics and also to aware them to do farming with debris and using vertical farming with limited land available to them.

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