GROW YOUR CROPS BETTER WITHOUT SOIL – HYDROPONICS

Jeffrey Alahira

                                              BY JOSEPH OKPAIRE With climate change, desertification is threatening Nigeria’s north, and shorter rainy seasons are making it more difficult to grow food. In contrast, near the coast in southern Nigeria and the country’s rainforests, rainy seasons are getting longer and more intense. River settlements are flooding, rendering much of the land unfit for […]

                                              BY JOSEPH OKPAIRE

With climate change, desertification is threatening Nigeria’s north, and shorter rainy seasons are making it more difficult to grow food. In contrast, near the coast in southern Nigeria and the country’s rainforests, rainy seasons are getting longer and more intense. River settlements are flooding, rendering much of the land unfit for farming, and destroying stored food.

Nigeria’s population, nearly 200 million people today, is expected to grow to 400 million by 2050. The country must have adequate conditions for crop growth in order to sustain its citizens. “With hydroponics, we use at least 80% less water and 90% less land, and there’s less deforestation,” Onafowora (2013)

Hydroponics is about growing crops without soil. In the place of soil, other medium (nutrient-rich solutions) is used. Plants grow through a process called photosynthesis, in which they use sunlight and a chemical inside their leaves called chlorophyll to convert carbon dioxide (a gas in the air) and water into glucose (a type of sugar) and oxygen. Write that out chemically and you get this equation:

6CO2 + 6H2O → C6H12O6 + 6O2 (photosynthesis)

There’s no mention of “soil” anywhere in there—and that’s all the proof you need that plants can grow without soil. What plants need is water and nutrients, both easily obtained from soil. But if they can get these things somewhere else—say, by standing with their roots in a nutrient-rich solution—they can do without soil altogether. That’s the basic principle behind hydroponics.

 In theory, the word “hydroponics” means growing plants in water (from two Greek words meaning “water” and “toil”), but because you can grow plants without actually standing them in water, most people define the word to mean growing plants without using soil.

(Source: www.venturesafrica.com)

TYPES OF HYDROPONICS

There are four different alternatives to soilless farming.

  1. Soilless culture: which requires other medium other than soil for planting. Nutrient-rich medium such as the outer covering of coconut, rice husk, rock wool, etc. which is processed and used as a medium. It has a high water retention capacity and the cation is good.
  1. Pure hydroponics: This setup uses water as its base. All necessary nutrients are deposited in the water. Plants need more than 15 nutrients to grow. These needed nutrients are mixed in water in their right proportions.
  1. Aeroponics: Here, the root of the plant is allowed to float in the air within the base container of course. The water and nutrients are mixed to touch the roots.

(Source: quora.com)

  1. Aquaponics: This is a combination of fish and vegetables farming. It has to do with re-circulated aquaculture system (RAS). When the fishes defecate, the defecation leads to ammonia build up and this mixes up with the water. The waste water is used as nutrient rich medium for plants to grow.

(Source: taroleharris.com)

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CONVENTIONAL PLANTING AND HYDROPONICS

When a crop is grown on the soil, the roots of the plant need to look for nutrients, but in hydroponics, the required quantity of nutrient is given to the plant. With hydroponics, the farmer can determine the taste, thus, he can make the tomato to be sweeter, the pepper to be hotter, and the cucumber to be more nutritious.

BENEFITS OF HYDROPONICS

  1. With hydroponics, we grow fodder for cows, goats, sheep and even chicken. On soil, growing fodder takes 90 days and with hydroponics, we grow it in 9 days.
  2. With hydroponics, what we need 15 plots for, that is, one hectare of land, we can grow it on a half plot of land.
  3. Hydroponic plants also grow faster. 
  4. Many pests are carried in soil, so doing without it generally gives you a more hygienic growing system with fewer problems of disease.
  5. Since hydroponics is ideal for indoor growing, you can use it to grow plants all year round.
  6. Hydroponically grown crops taste better, stay longer on the shelf, and add more value to the body. This is because the nutrient medium can be adjusted to suit the desired end-product.
  7. The burden of land clearing, land preparation, intensive logistics attached to soil farming is excluded.

(Source: www.explainthatstuff.com)

According to Mr Adebowale Onafowora, an expert in hydroponics farming; “At the hobbyist level, hydroponics can be done with between N50,000 to N100,000. We have a vertical crop system which can grow 60 plants for N52,000. There is another that can do about 150 crops for N100,000, but, it is all at the hobbyists level. At this level, the verandah or compound is all that is required”.  According to him “For commercial purpose that can give an income of at least N20,000 weekly, it will require about N800,000 to N1million. In all, for a half plot of land which is required for the greenhouse and water tank, a total of N1.2 million will be needed or N1.5m at most, depending on the location and cost of acquiring the land”.

Reference:

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroponics
  2. https://venturesafrica.com/nigerias-small-farmers-are-embracing-hydroponics/
  3. https://allafrica.com/stories/201903210305.html
  4. https://www.explainthatstuff.com/hydroponics.html

Jeffrey Alahira