Pros and Cons of Hydroponic Farming
When it comes to farming, many people would think of a big land, soil, and lots of crops. While this is the traditional method of farming, there are many other ways of going about growing crops. One of the ways that has received interests among homeowners are hydroponic farming, which is a method of growing plants in water rich in essential plant nutrients, instead of soil. Hydroponic farming has several pros and cons to its technique.
Some of the pros are as such. When you compare to vegetables grown in soil, you would need to remove the roots before you sell it off. However, with hydroponic, you can actually sell the plant with the roots still intact in the nutrients. This allows the vegetable to stay fresher for a longer period of time. Apart from that, as the plant is grown in a watery environment, the plant will not be short of water, as both water and nutrients are already provided. Even disposing of the hydroponic water is much simpler than disposing of traditional soil. Furthermore, in countries or areas with little land to grow crops or have soil with little nutrients, growing crops in soil would be difficult as only few crops can be grown at a time, and soil has to be used wisely to prevent nutrients from drying up. Hydroponics is a solution to this as the water it grows would provide enough nutrients, plus it can be stacked on top of each other, using minimal space. One of the biggest advantages of using the hydroponic farming technique is that the plants are environmentally-controlled, so soil-related diseases can be avoided, and use of pesticide can be reduced.
The cons of hydroponic farming are few, but one would need to consider these when deciding on which farming technique to use. For one, the quality of the crop produced through hydroponic will not be as good as the one produced through those planted in good soil. Even the taste and appearance of the fruits would not be as nice in comparison to the soil-based method. Another big problem is that hydroponic crops are susceptible to power outage, unlike soil-based crops. As the nutrients in the water require the machine to work, it can easily die off when the power gets cut. Do consider the pros and cons on which method will work best for you.
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