Is Hydroponics the solution to the impending global fresh water crisis ?
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Posted by Manjiri Maslekar on 04 May 2012 at 07:09
It is thought the next generation wars will be fought over water, which countries are rapidly running out of. However the bulk of fresh water is used in irrigation where technologies remain outdated.
It takes 11,000 liters to water to produce one kilo of rice using the traditional flood irrigation methods. The same output of rice can be obtained with just 4 liters of water using hydroponics techniques where nutients are directly applied to plant roots. This illustrates the utter wastefulness of present day water consumption habits and indicates an alternate to water use. But want know from the experts that what they think about this? Is Hydroponics the solution to the impending global fresh water crisis?
Research shows that it takes 1100 liters of water to grow one kilo of rice through the traditional flood irrigation methods. The same kilo of rice can be grown with just 5 liters of water with Hydroponics technology. But, hydroponics requires substantial initial investment and a relatively complex technology. This high-tech will require maintence effort and a high skill level, which is simply not available with marginal farmers. The raw materials for hydroponics are also chemical nutrients which themselves will require great amounts of water and energy to produce. Therefore, there is the fundmental issue of scalability, in which hydroponics is not competitive. Therefore, the fresh water crisis will likely be mitigated by technologies that can co-exist with traditional methods.
I'm not sure hydroponic growing is practical on the scale required for growing grain and other bulk commodity crops. Flood irrigation is the most inefficient method of applying water to crops. That amount of water can be relatively easy to reduce by 2/3 or more with the use of modern irrigation techniques and engineered soils. Hydroponics is best used in contained environments such as greenhouses.