Late last year the world welcomed its 7 billionth human inhabitant. In the past, the passing of such a population milestone was cause for wonder and superlatives. But ever since 1987, when the global census exceeded 5 billion people, the occasion has instead been marked with pessimism and foreboding. Even with slowing birth rates across the developing world, we can expect to gain another one billion people in the next 12 years. This means that only greater pressure will be placed on our already-strained resources and food supplies.
We already struggle to feed a world of 7 billion people. How will we accommodate that next billion? How can we insure that our availability of food, water, and other essential resources is not outpaced by our consumption?
These are difficult questions to answer, and many scientists and policymakers will spend their careers searching for feasible solutions. All we can speculate at this point is that there will be a wide range of options considered and approaches taken. And, furthermore, we believe that hydroponics should reflect one of these leading approaches.
Why hydroponics? While the method is still in its scientific infancy, and although it would require greater knowledge and precision than is currently available to implement on a wide scale, there’s no doubt that hydroponics can successfully maximize global crop outputs in a way that few other systems can match. Here’s how:
-Location versatility. Currently, crop-growing requires a certain type of soil and terrain. The soil needs to be rich enough, while terrain generally has to be flat, even, and capable of holding water. This limits the areas of the world where food can be grown. With hydroponics, however, all you need is sun and an artificial water source. A plant grown with hydroponics can just as easily bloom in the Sahara as in the American Breadbasket, making many more areas of the world capable of large-scale production.
-Water. Hydroponics uses less water to grow crops because none of it will evaporate or leach away in the soil. Instead, most water stays in the system and can be reused. This translates into considerable savings, not to mention lower production burdens in places with poor water supplies and the ability to grow food in highly arid regions.
-Large Scale Predictability. When done incorrectly the hydroponics method can be unforgiving; just one incorrect nutrient in the water can immediately kill all of your plants. But, on the flip side, the method is highly predictable and successful when done right. So long as a scientist or a specialist is overlooking a major production site, there is little chance that the harvest will be a disappointing one. This can save the world from many of the numerous crop losses incurred every year.
These are the main ways in which hydroponics can maximize global crop yields and help feed a growing world population, and we hope that research companies such as Huntingdon Life Sciences Inc will embrace it fully in the near future. While hydroponics is not a complete solution to our impending resource crisis, the method can certainly go a long way in boosting our production.