Putting this up to crowdsource views on Fogponics, Aeroponics and Hydroponics farming systems. An increasing number of startups who’re trying to do something in this space have been reaching out.
Listing down the pros and cons we’ve gathered from the few exploratory calls in the space. These are preliminary thoughts, please do pitch in with more nuanced views.
Pros:
-Much lesser land required to grow crops;
-Avoids issues of food scarcity as humans cause more & more land to become uncultivable due to issues of soil quality degradation, desertification etc;
-Claims of much more efficient water utilisation, avoids use of herbicides & pesticides;
-Better unit economics, faster growing cycles
-avoids issues of crops being wiped out on account of diseases- may be significant for crops like rubber which are known to suffer from blights;
Cons:
-Feels like a doomer approach to the problem? Moving food production to a lab does not feel right. Feels like eating fake fruits & vegetables (Which is probably the case with commercial farming anyway, but still)
-Social unrest on account of loss of livelihoods for farmers? Indian farmers don’t do well due to structural reasons in any case.
While I am not fully convinced on Hydroponics here are my thoughts.
May be beneficial in special cases like growing Fodder especially for Young calves etc
May be useful in Kitchen Gardens for apartments (have seen a couple of models)
Large scale Farming of Veggies for human consumption is wait and watch. May be a specific case to remove pressure on land once the population becomes unmanageable.
In very specific contexts, it might make sense. Overall though - there’s a bunch of reasons to keep it as the absolute last resort especially in the Indian context.
We have ever increasing landscapes that are not being used, and that have gone barren - Anantpur in Andhra is 65% unfarmed and the 12% forest cover is also down to nearly nothing.
Growing in soil the right way can improve nutrition, soil quality, carbon sequestration, and over a medium term diversity
Hydroponics and other related soilless farming, is best suited for growing greens. However, there are tweaks possible to grow other vegetables as well. I have seen brinjals, tomatos, and even root vegetables like radish getting grown at an aquaponics facility.
From a nutrition perspective: Hydroponics, aeroponics - I would see with huge sense of dicomfiture. We cannot grow good food without relying on our trusted soldiers - microbes. The second concern is around the lack of trace minerals - which find its way to our body from the soil. You take away the soil, and add primarily NPK solutions to water - and grow crops in that - what happens to our nutrition ? Trace minerals are needed in tiny quantities, but if we don’t get them - we are done for.
The only method in the Hydroponics family, that I am comfortable with, from a nutrition perspective - is Aquaponics - growing food using fish excreta using a running system. Seems closer to natural processes - and there are several areas in the world, where some form of aquaponics has been present even in traditional farming.
Second aspect is taste - I have found hydroponics produce quite bland.
Third aspect - whether it’s the right solution for India. IMHO a no - because we have a far better cost-impact curve in regenerative farming.
I have experimented with hydroponics. It is actually a lot of fun because you get to see the growth of the plant and the roots and how the nutrients affects them. It is a good learning opportunity. And people who don’t have access to land and good soil might also love this. There are kits available in Amazon if anyone wants to try. Or you can DIY it, which is what I did and I highly recommend that.
From my experiments I realized my parents have a little bit of stigma on the fact that this is a lot of “chemistry” and doesn’t look very natural even though the nutrients added to the water are pretty much what plants collect from the soil. You can also buy organic nutrients but they are slightly expensive. You can also make organic nutrients from plant waste or by diluting compost tea or Biogas slurry (probably the best organic liquid fertilizer out there).
At the moment I have a Chilli plant growing hydroponically in a bucket, using compost tea as nutrient. I use a method known as “Kratky” which is the easiest and the laziest way to do hydroponics. I also have some 8 O clock flower plants growing in a PVC pipe fixture but uses lab made nutrients. Both are doing great and I haven’t added water to Chilli plant bucket in a month and I added water to flower plants couple of days back after 2 weeks. It is very low maintenance.
On commercial scale I think it will be useful grow crops that are difficult to grow in certain climates and soil.
It is not always lab though. Enclosed systems are usually for crops that are very sensitive to climate, like lettuce that will get bitter if you give it too much sunlight. Some crops can be inside a simple green house. Some crops requires full sunlight. You can’t afford to setup grow lights for these.
If they are grafted then they can produce while being a small tree. And there are methods in between hydroponics and wick irrigation that can facilitate growth of them. I think “Dutch bucket” system is capable of this.
From my observation there are lot things growing in the nutrient water in my system. In normal hydroponics too there are air circulation systems which add airborne microbes into the nutrient water. Which is why nutrient water has to be recycled. So microbes are not absent. Nature always finds its way. But for sure they are different from what we have in soil. I don’t know how that might affect the produce quality though.
“primarily NPK solutions” yes, but on a hydroponic system usually another set of micro and macro nutrients are added. Plants can’t survive simply on NPK they need these trace nutrients too to stay healthy, just like us.
This is very very likely. The taste is heavily dependent on the quantity and quality of the nutrients and sometimes soil is pure magic. But the chillies I grew were pretty good though. I don’t know if this is scientific enough, but me, my mom and granda - we all love to eat raw chilli with rice and we found no distinguishable difference in taste (or in the kick of the heat) in chillies produced hydroponically.
Great points. One quick anecdote - an aquaponics expert I had spoken to - was very specific in mentioning that aquaponics facilities located inside a real farm performed far better in produce quality, compared to aquaponics facilities inside warehouses in the city. His theory was that it was because there was a richer microbial life in the environs, which found its way into the setup, and helped build a more robust production system.
Hello everyone, I am the Founder of Purple Farms. We have been in the indoor vertical farming sector for over 4 years now. We have developed our own fogponics systems and would like to answer a few of your questions.
Feels like a doomer approach to the problem? Moving food production to a lab does not feel right. Feels like eating fake fruits & vegetables (Which is probably the case with commercial farming anyway, but still)
We grow crops indoors in climate-controlled environments. We give the crops the absolute perfect environment that they need to grow and thrive in. This means controlling everything from the nutrition to the CO2 and humidity levels and the amount of light they receive during the entire day. On the contrary this gives the plant the opportunity to grow as healthy as it can without worrying about pests, unseasonal rains or excessive heat. The cherry tomatoes that we have grown have been some of the tastiest and juiciest fruits that you will ever find in the market. Our systems ensure that the crops absorb the most nutrition that they can since we remove the barrier of soil. Yes, soil actually acts as a barrier between the roots of the crops and the nutrition that they need to grow.
Apologies for the late response, I kept getting an error when trying to post.
Before we started experimenting with building our own indoor farming system, we spoke to a lot of traditional farmers, even had one onboard as an advisor. When we asked them what was the biggest problem that they faced, the answer unanimously was soil quality. In our country the concept of soil re-cooperation is completely missing. Given our growing population, our farmers are forced to grow crops non-stop. This has been leading to over-farming which in-turn leaves the land barren. When we say soil is a barrier, we am not trying to dis-credit soil farming. What we are trying to bring attention to is the fact that soil is our country is running so low on nutrition that the plants that we grow need harmful fertilizers in order to get all the nutrients that they need. Organic traditional farming is not an option as seen in Sri-Lanka. The govt banned the use of fertilizers which dropped their agricultural output by over 50%. Below is the link to an article on this topic.
While one acks the need in specific contexts, it’s not safe to assume or state that “soil is a barrier” when the evolution of the biology we’re trying to mimic happened in the environment rich soil creates. 80% of the soil biome is yet unknown and the functions, roles played by the microbes, the variety of trace elements they interact with and the nutritional benefits from that aren’t fully understood - making replication impossible. In a healthy soil and diverse ecosystems, pests etc are self limiting problem. In comparison with large monocropped systems, with soil health and ecosystem biodiversity destroyed, or where space is a huge constraint or the weather is completely at odds with food production - one can see a need for this. But at scale across the Indian subcontinent, this isn’t a major response.
Social unrest on account of loss of livelihoods for farmers? Indian farmers don’t do well due to structural reasons in any case.
Indoor vertical farming is not meant to take work away from farmers. Our intention is to reduce the stress on our land. Agricultural land needs to be given a break from time to time. American and certain European countries actually pay farmers not to farm on their land during certain years so the land has the opportunity to re-cooperate the lost nutrition.
We are also in the process of developing cost effective vertical fogponics systems that can thrive under poly/green houses. This can give farmers the opportunity to setup low cost fogponics systems on their existing land and multiply their harvests by growing vertically. Please note the Indian govt currently provides subsidies to farmers looking to setup poly/green houses.
We have ever increasing landscapes that are not being used, and that have gone barren - Anantpur in Andhra is 65% unfarmed and the 12% forest cover is also down to nearly nothing.
Our farmers have been suffering for the last few years. Every year we have been losing crops to unseasonal rainfall and excessive heat. Not to mention the fact that 70% of water pollution is caused by agricultural waste. It is not the matter of the amount of land that we have to grow crops. If the average temperatures continue to rise like they already are, it is going to become difficult to farm using traditional methods a few decades from now.
To avert this, we want to take the stress off the land and decrease the amount of pollution caused by agricultural waste and stubble burning so we can continue farming outdoors using traditional methods for the foreseeable future.
From a nutrition perspective: Hydroponics, aeroponics - I would see with huge sense of dicomfiture. We cannot grow good food without relying on our trusted soldiers - microbes. The second concern is around the lack of trace minerals - which find its way to our body from the soil. You take away the soil, and add primarily NPK solutions to water - and grow crops in that - what happens to our nutrition ?
We don’t use just standard NPK. Along with NPK we also add other micro and macro nutrients to the water which helps our crops to grow healthier and tastier than field grown or even hydroponically grow produce. The nutritional solution is also aerated continuously so as to add microbes and oxygen into the solution.
Please find below the 2021 Global CEA (Controlled Environment Agriculture) census report.
Do you have a lifecycle analysis in terms of energy and materials, for an acre? In N Europe, vertical farms have made food production very energy intensive, and thus non resilient.
For the heat/water stress, methods of growing food that align with diversity offer resilience. The failure rate in even somewhat diverse millet fields around Bangalore was a lot lesser than those that were monocropped, as an example. At scale, the best, lowest footprint and resilient adaptation will come from local biology.
It is important to nurture the soils for carbon sequestration. More humus, more carbon sequestered. Neglect of soils could lead to devastation and further adverse impact of climate change.
Secondly, soils have various micro-organisms that have specific roles. The biodiversity in the soils need to be nurtured as well for a balanced ecosystem.
The plants also derive micronutrients from the soil. It is not just NPK. These absorbed micronutrients are made available for human consumption through the plants. There is acute micronutrient deficiency (“hidden hunger”) among the Indian population. The deficiencies in calcium, vitamin A, B12, and folate, with more localized deficiencies in iron, zinc, and vitamin B6 is common. The prevalence of serum zinc deficiency is also observed.
The above is only from the ecological and nutrition perspective. Widespread promotion of hydroponics, aeroponics, et al., could have social consequences as well.
Oh… yes, there is one more important point here. More the humus, the more the water absorbed and conserved. Neglect of soils could lead to deprivation of ground water as well.
In nature, plants coevolve with microbes that live in their rooting zones, on their leaves, and even inside their cells. Plants provide microbes with food in the form of carbon, and microbes make nutrients available to the plants and help prevent disease. But as we started adding more and more chemicals to our fields and tilling soils, we broke the close connection between plants and microbes by killing many of these beneficial organisms.
Three mechanisms are usually put forward to explain how microbial activity can boost plant growth
(1) manipulating the hormonal signaling of plants
(2) repelling or outcompeting pathogenic microbial (3) increasing the bioavailability of soil-borne nutrients
New research suggests that by fostering an efficient and active soil microbiome, we can accelerate soil regeneration far beyond typical rates seen in nature.
Just as our new understanding of the human microbiome is revolutionizing medicine and spawning a new probiotic industry, agriculture may be poised for a similar revolution. The world’s biggest agriculture companies are also investing heavily in biological solutions.
Beneficial microbial activity in the soil is never comparable to hydroponics as the content of colony-forming units (CFU) in hydroponics is significantly less.
A rich soil acts as a chelation substrate and that is how plants are able to thrive. The chelation holds the micronutrients in close proximity to the cells in the root system that then take those up. Good soil has humic acid which consists of an atom of “Nitrogen” that provides the chelation to cations (eg Fe, Mg, Ca and others). The reason why we speak about “dead soil” is because the production of humic acid is via the soil microbiome (in plain terms, these are the bugs in the soil). These bugs die after prolonged usage of artificial fertilizers. However, given enough time they recover and organic farms are able to heal and produce effectively over time. Thus, it is incorrect to state that the soil acts as a barrier between roots and nutrients. A dead soil definitely does, but not a living one. Lastly, one has to create a system where the soil can be (over time) converted back to the nutrient rich mass that it once was. Allowing time for the ecosystem (pests and their hunters) to grow and thrive is essential. Sri Lanka took the extreme step of an overnight conversion and that did not work in their favor. A stepwise plan would have worked and not created this (in my words) “unwanted negative publicity” around the futility of organic farming. In fact, I would do away with the word “organic farming” and call it “natural farming”. Human brains are sharp, but not sharp enough to be able to replicate and do better than the billions of years of learning and corrections that nature uses.
