Growing food with no soil, no toil!

We need land to grow food grains, fruits and vegetables to eat, and flowers to admire. Soil, water and fertilizer in one form or another helps the seeds to grow, with the nutrients (fertilizer) coming from the soil or added as chemicals. The growing plants look like a lush green living carpet. In due time, these green plants grow flowers which ripens into fruits. Later, these fruits dry out and shrink, becoming seeds that fall down on to the soil, and grow again. This cycle of growth from seed to seed plant and again to seed is repeated. Soil is the medium, from where the roots of the plants gather water and nutrients (fertilizer) enabling the seeds to grow and bloom; producing flowers, fruits and vegetables or the sheaf of wheat or paddy. We also use the seeds of some plants, which are dried and cooked or crushed to produce mustard, soya and palm oils, which enrich the preparation and cooking of food! In brief, one can say that soil and toil in plowing the field is what helps to bring our food on the table. Based on this transformation, we have got the popular adage which says: 'as you sow, so you reap'. Science has however made inroads into this natural cycle in the way plants can grow. To reduce the toil of working the soil, the new science of 'hydroponics' has eliminated the need for soil to grow plants and vegetables. Plants can now be sown in water, which provides all the nutrition for the plant's growth! This is an established agro-chemical technology; growing plants in water with no soil. For Bangladesh, where availability of land needed to grow plants is limited, and also there is scarcity of water for flooding the newly grown seedling that produces food grains. Hydroponics is the readily available way out of these limitations! The method is to grow plants with no soil, and only under water, which contains the optimal mix of organic and in-organic materials needed for the plant to grow and bear grains, fruits or vegetables! This water is recycled, and as the organic and inorganic nutrients are taken up by the plant, it is added to the water, to maintain the acceptable concentration of nutrients for optimal and healthy growth of the plant. A hydroponics farm is in the form of a large water tray, which could be built of wood, GI sheet, or bricks and mortar. It can be built in multiple layers, one over the other. Water will be covering all the roots of the plants in its layer containing the minerals needed for growth of that particular plant. Farmers can be trained to recognize from the appearance of the leaves, buds and roots to adjust the nutrients needed to be mixed with the water. For a large farm or a number of farms; a trained chemist can do routine test to ensure that the nutrient supplied to the plant is as required. Water covering the roots, is pumped up to sprinkle down wetting the leaves and branches of the plant. This water is recycled, and only make-up water is added to take care of evaporation or spillage losses. The hydroponics method of farming can be done with only ten to fifteen per cent of the water needed for conventional soil farming. With declining water resources, and decreasing availability of farmland; hydroponics farming can be the salvation for Bangladesh in the days to come, when there will be many more people to feed. The quality of hydroponics fruits, vegetables and even flowers are excellent, and more importantly, disease free. The quality can be easily controlled. It also ensures protection, against plant diseases, since the possibility of contaminates leaching through the soil to infect the plant roots is totally absent. Through controlling and optimizing the nutrient input to the water, we can obtain higher yield per square-foot area of tray available for hydroponics, compared to our usual practice of normal surface farming. This ensures more food from our available farm area. A good hydroponics farm growing tomatoes for example, can produce over 15 times per acre output compared to the best managed conventional farm. However, hydroponics farming needs careful monitoring and supervision. The skill level for this farming requires awareness and capability up to some basic levels in technical discipline (secondary level), similar to simple laboratory work. This can be an interesting opportunity for our unemployed educated youth, who now totally avoid taking up farming as a vocation. Given the agro-chemical process involved and no hard labor required for tilling, dressing and fertilizing the soil; hydroponics farming should attract our educated youth. A hydroponics farm can be set up any where, even on the roof of a house, if needed. A hydroponics farmer is just the opposite of the field labour oriented conventional farmer. By popularizing this profession, we can easily create a revolution in the growing of vegetables, fruits and flowers, heralding a technically based Green Revolution, which will help to improve the quality and diversity of our food intake. Compared to top-soil management in conventional farms, where weather plays a large and uncontrolled variable in quality and quantity of farm output; hydroponics farming in contrast is an agrochemical process. This can be popularised and our idle youth can be trained to a productive and useful profession. We can go for hydroponics farming in a big way, heralding a new dimension to our farm production in quality as well as turnover, which can be easily managed by persons with some simple training. Hydroponics farming can be done round the year, where seasonal and weather effects can be ignored. For Bangladesh it is imperative that our Ministry of Agriculture goes all-out for creating awareness so that the people are motivated to go for hydroponics farming in greater national interest. The writer is a retired engineer