Hydroponics and Water Conservation
If you are in the habit of keeping up on current events and have watched the evening news lately, you cannot have escaped the time that the networks have devoted to the frightening drought in California, its worst in a hundred years of recorded history. This is most noteworthy because the rest of our country is so heavily dependent on them for its produce. This, however, is not the only state facing the problem. From 2007 to 2008, North Carolina suffered the worst drought in its recorded history.
Add to that Montana, Texas, Kansas and Delaware experiencing this sort of trouble as well, and those who are into hydroponics see an answer staring them in the face that, if the news is any indication, the rest of Americans are clueless about. Hydroponics uses 10% of the water consumed by conventional farming. Seeing California farmers digging deeply into the earth to pump up such a precious resource only to waste it terribly by hosing the water wastefully on their crops must appear to be the height of absurdity to the hydroponically minded.
Forget water conservation for a moment. Hydroponically grown produce has its priorities straight. Taste matters and utility irrelevant. That pits it against the powerful agribusiness industry where the priority is the opposite. I am referring to the colossal multinational agrochemical and agricultural biotechnology corporation, “Monsanto.” They bend nature to their will. Consider the tomato. They engineered it to be tough enough to be mechanically harvested where a conventional one would be reduced to mush.
Organic farming and hydroponics are the same in that they are free from unnatural chemicals and genetic engineering which should be our goal as a nation. One would think that a technology so friendly to the environment would be embraced and defended by the organic “slow food” movement. Unfortunately, that is not the case. An article by Barbara Damrosch appeared in the Washington Post a year ago that made the comment that hydroponics is a suitable technology for farming on Mars where there is no “living” soil. The organic farming argument is that there are crucial organisms living in the dirt such as tiny insects, fungi and worms.”
Hydroponics may circumvent these infinitesimal creatures, but there is no evidence to suggest that the produce yielded in this way is inferior to plants grown in soil. Quite the contrary, according to Douglas J. Peckenpaugh, editor of Hydroponic Solutions, hydroponically grown produce drastically reduces the incidence of pests and disease, since many of these “infectious agents” are soil-borne.
Pests or not, beneficial organisms or not, both sides must agree that the staggering benefit of water saved by hydroponics means that this is the answer to our future of dealing with water shortage. Look at Israel sprouting up from the desert. They use one of the six forms of hydroponics, “drip irrigation,” to grow food where it would otherwise be impossible to do so. If we lose arable land in California, perhaps we can learn from Israel and follow suit.