Hydroponics a Sustainable Agriculture Production System

Abstract

Agriculture stands as a center-piece in Indian economy. In spite of being important, it faces challenges from production to financial incompetence’s. Indian agriculture is raged by several problems such as meager farm equipment’s, lack in quality toolsets, unusual monsoons or outbreaks of pest. Our present day world emerges with innovative technologies in farming such as soil and moisture sensors devices, meteorological tracking systems, remote sensing through satellite imagery, autonomous rovers and drones, agri-genetics, RFID tracking devices and finally vertical farming technology to help us transform our challenges into opportunities. These technologies can help us to transform our Indian agriculture farming systems into be a sustainable one. Sustainability in agriculture is possible only, when we have a constant supply of natural resource such as sunlight, water, moist-air, soil, and organic manures rich in nutrients in its proportion. To achieve this system, we must develop a controlled environment to check all the parameters of natural resources and use them according to their needs and quantity. Hydroponics is promise ably one such sustainable method of cultivating plants comparing to traditional farming techniques. The uniqueness of the system is utilization of water to less than 10 %. Secondly, the hydroponic system yields more veggies and fruits in a short span of time. This is achieved by selecting proper grow bed such as alluvial soil balls, rock wool, charcoal and gravels. The medium is selected based on nutrient retention rate in the grow bed with respect to cultivation of veggies. Hence, hydroponics agriculture production system gives promising yield round the year. And also, this system is commercially scalable and adaptable by all sectors of people. We can either start as small green house system in home or to a highly productive industrial scale. The paper proposes one such home based hydroponics system for tomato plants. The system follows ebb-flow method in hydroponics cultivation with fine grained gravel stones as grow bed medium. To monitor the growth of tomato plants, the system is equipped with sensors. These sensors measure the growth rate with respect to nutrient supplies for tomato plants. It is done in a controlled physical environment through IoT enabled devices. Thus, ensuring its yield for a sustainable productivity.