AgTech Drought Solutions

#Aeroponics & #Hydroponics for #Food #Cultivation

#water #foodcrisis #agriculture #drought

California’s Central Valley normally supplies half of the nation’s produce, and it is running out of water. The Public Policy Institute of California estimates that California farmers fallowed more than 395,000 acres of California cropland in 2021 and couldn’t harvest thousands more acres of growing crops damaged by the lack of water. The U.S. Drought Monitor, operated by the University of Nebraska, shows that more than a dozen states in the U.S. West face the same problem, and consumers all over the country are finding the effects in their local supermarkets and restaurants.?

Agriculture technology is capable of solving the drought-imposed cultivation problems by using controlled environment agriculture (CEA). This approach grows plants using water-conserving methods, such as hydroponics or aeroponics, in huge greenhouses or entirely indoors under LED lighting. These indoor facilities often take the form of vertical stacks of cultivation chambers that rise a dozen feet in large warehouses. A good example of one of the newest entries in this sector is AeroBloom, a developer of aeroponic cultivation systems and food production facilities.

Hydroponics is now the most popular method of sustainable cultivation because it uses approximately half the amount of water used in field agriculture. However, aeroponics is rapidly proving to be a better choice because its water requirement is less than half that used in hydroponics and approximately five percent of the water used in field cultivation. According to Dale Devore, inventor of the AeroBloom system, nearly all of the water in the aeroponic process goes into the plant without runoff or evaporation. However, since all nutrients are carried in the water, hydroponic cultivation presents the additional problem of toxic water runoff into local water supply.

Hydroponics

The needs of urban farming have resulted in the development of large hydroponic growing facilities in the form of greenhouses and CEA facilities inside and near urban centers.?

A typical hydroponic system suspends plant roots in a container of nutrient fortified water.? Some systems introduce air bubbles into the water because plant roots need oxygen as well as nutrients. In other hydroponic systems, the water flows over the roots growing in long pipe arrays. The water is then run through filters and reused, but some is discarded into local water systems.

Aeroponics

Plant roots are suspended in a nutrient-fortified mist in aeroponic systems. This allows the air to flow through root balls, which encourages the plentiful growth of microbiomes among the root hairs. These are extremely important because they give the plant its characteristics such as terpenes, which account for flavor and bouquet. The development of plentiful microbiomes is part of what separates aeroponics from hydroponics.

Aeroponic cultivation systems also produce many more roots than hydroponic systems, thereby resulting in fuller plants with as much as four to six times as many fruits. As an old farmers’ saying goes, “Roots equal fruits.” Hydroponic systems typically produce long taproots with fewer root hairs, so they don’t encourage as many microbiomes and as much leaf and fruit production.

NASA developed an aeroponic cultivation system to grow greens for harvest by the astronauts in the international space station. This has encouraged the development of systems that can scale to large cultivation facilities. The newest systems, like AeroBloom’s, will be managed by computers and artificial intelligence programs that will allow multi-acre greenhouse complexes and controlled environment cultivation buildings.

Aeroponics and hybrid hydro/aero systems are likely to be the way food crops are produced in the future. Currently, the expense of erecting these facilities, combined with resistance from traditional farming interests, poses significant hurdles to overcome. However, as climate change results in more years of drought in key food production states, these types of agriculture technology will eventually be common.