Hydroponics

Hydroponics is a term derived from Greek, which literally means "working water". These days, people often use the term Hydroponics in order to define methods of plant growing that does not utilize or make use of soil. Since the start of civilization, the peoples of the ancient times such as the Babylonians, Aztecs and other ancient people made use of a form of hydroponics in the sense that they used crude growing techniques without soil. The mineral nutrient solutions they used then were not simliar to today's as they had utilized other sources to enhance the nutrients in their growing process, and from their on systems Hydroponics became a part of the culture.

Recorded or published words about growing plants without soil was the book by Sir Francis Bacon (although he had died in 1626) entitled "Sylva Sylvarum in 1927, and thereafter the term "water culture" became a popular research technique. Further on, John Woodward in 1699 would publish his reports on his water culture experiments using spearmint. He had published his discovery that plants grown in less than pure water actually grew better than plants that had been grown in distilled water. Such is that methods of water culture using mineral nutrients were later perfected the German botanists Julius von Sachs and Wilhelm Knop in the 1860s. Their method of growing terrestrial plants without soil and instead using mineral nutrient solutions would eventually be called solution culture, which rapidly became a standard research and teaching technique that would still be widely used today in the filed of Hydroponics.

Towards the early twentieth century, it was first suggested by professor William Frederick Gericke of the University of California Berkeley, that solution culture could be used for agricultural crop production. He had coined the term "aquiculture" but had later found that Aquaculture was already applied to culture of aquatic organisms. Gericke then created a stir in the local community by growing tomato's and other plants to remarkable sizes in his backyard through the use of mineral nutrient solutions rather than soil. Gericke then using the analogy with the ancient Greek term for agriculture, geoponics, the science of cultivating the earth, introduced the term hydroponics in 1937 (although he asserts that the term was suggested by by Dr. W. A. Setchell, from the University of California) for the culture of plants using water (from the Greek hydros meaning water, and ponos meaning labor).

Coupled with his results, Gericke's work and claims that hydroponics would eventually revolutionize plant agriculture promoted a massive number of requests for information on his research and results. His refusal to reveal his secrets due to his personal feeling that this had been done at home and on his own time would eventually lead to his leaving the University of California and further lead to him writing his book "Complete Guide to Soilless Gardnening".

With Gericke's departure from University of California at Berkeley, two other plant nutritionists in the same university were then instructed to research Gericke's claims. Following their research, Dennis R. Hoagland and Daniel I. Arnon would write a classic 1938 agricultural bulletin " The Water Culture Method for Growing Plants without Soil", strongly downplaying the exaggerated claims made about hydroponics. In particular their research claimed that hydroponic crop yields were no better than crop yields that utilized good quality soil. Their research however had failed to look at the fact that hydroponics had indeed other advantages such as the fact that the roots of the plants have constant access to oxygen and had access to as much or as little water as they needed. This was clearly important as with hydroponics the plants would not suffer the effects of over or under watering as water in sufficient quantities would be supplied to the plants and unused water would simply be drained away or be recirculated. With soil growing, inexperience of the grower would actually damage the plants as too much water would prevent sufficient access to oxygen and too little would dry up the plants.

Further research and development went into hydroponics and in the 1960s, Allen Cooper of England then developed the Nutrient Film Technique. The Land Pavilion at Walt Disney World's EPCOT Center opened in 1982 and prominently features a variety of hydroponic techniques. In the succeeding decades, NASA had accomplished extensive hydroponic research for their Controlled Ecological Life Support System or CELSS, primarily as alternative growing systems for their objectives of growing plant life in extra terrestrial environments and hydroponics has since played and important role the their research program. Other research industries have also begun their funding on the research of hydroponics and are likely to continue as its viability as a commercial product due to the growing consumer market of the world and in particular the united states.

Towards the end of the century and by 1983, Superior Growers Supply became one of the first hydroponic merchants in the United States that would introduce gardening techniques utilizing all the different methods of hydroponics and making them available to the public. Currently there are now hundred's of Hydroponic gardening centers throughout the United States keen on building up Hydroponics as an alternative gardening method. The success of these ventures are coupled with the research that the past century has provided along with the availability of Capital resources to fund the Hydroponic industry as a whole. It is quite a remarkable feat that the plants growing industry has now started to spend millions of dollars in the field of hydroponics as indeed the local consumer market has taken a liking to hydroponics.