Recent Advancements in Prevalent Practices for Plant Cultivation by Hydroponics

Abstract

Many plant-derived products are well known to possess therapeutic properties along with minimum side effects and relatively competitive efficacies as compared to other chemical counterparts/analogs. Herbal drugs are therefore now widely accepted owing to their long-lasting impact. However, the role of cultivation conditions and associated biotic and abiotic parameters are paramount in affecting the yield of phytocompounds among cultivated plants. Moreover, with the increasing burden on cultivable land available for the production of cash crops, medicinal plants require alternative techniques of propagation for meeting commercial demands without adversely affecting their yield of phytocompounds and their therapeutic potential. Regulating the biotic and abiotic parameters using several methods of propagation (viz. vegetative and plant tissue culture) is instrumental in attaining the desired yield in the harvest. The major drawbacks of these techniques are lack of skilled labour and high monetary expense. Alternative techniques, such as hydroponics and aeroponics are pivotal to overcoming these disadvantages. The ‘Hydroponics’ technique involves plant cultivation in a soil-less nutrient medium. This method offers major advantages over the conventional techniques being more economical and independent of seasonal variations besides eliminating the influence of soil-microbe interactions on the development of plants. This technique is under continuous investigation and improvement with recent advances being made in the inter-disciplinary approaches for improving the technique by the addition of IoT and cloud computing along with other conventional techniques such as vertical farming for hydroponic systems and the development of hybrid models.