Hydroponics comes from Latin and means working water. In its simpliest of terms it is growing plants without water, but in reality it is a lot more.  We won’t go into the many methods of hydroponics here — we’ll save that for a later post — but below we’ll take a look at a laundry list of benefits of hydroponics, as well as a few disadvantages.  To an avid hydroponics grower they would use no other technique, but why?

1. The environment is sustained and controlled minimizing the usage of water, green house gasses and does not contaminate the environment.
2. Hydroponics grows more plants and more vegetables and the production quantity directly increases by ten times than the natural environment.
3. Ground water gets saved as you do not have to irrigate large patches of land.
4. Control over nutrient balance.
5. Significant reduction of soil pests and diseases.
6. pH and nutrient levels are simple to measure and maintain.
7. When you use less pesticides the quality of taste of the fruits and vegetables is much higher and is also less harmful to people who eat them.
8. Hydroponics cultivation can be done within city limits and fruits and vegetables can be grown in urban areas — less distance between producer and buyer.

A few disadvantages that have been noted are:

1. The cost of starting a hydroponic garden are greater than soil gardens, but these trends are starting to change.
2. Pumps and other electronics such as Timers susceptible to power outages — but this is easily fixed by having back up pumps and other equipment.
3. Another often noted disadvantage is that hydroponics is more technical — this may be true, you can’t just throw a seed in the ground and water it, but if that was your gardening method you’d probably never get into hydroponics.

Hydroponics has the ability to change the way the world looks at food production.  We can produce much larger yeilds in smaller spaces than traditional soil gardening using less water.  All these things will be very important as populations continue to grow and land, water and food become less readily available.  Let the hydroponics revolution begin!