Comparison between growing plants in hydroponic system and soil based system

Abstract

As the world population grows, the demand and need for different products, especially food products, grow as well. Because of this growing demand, there will be an expected food crisis in the coming years. To prevent that crises from happening, other methods-farming methods-and sources of food must be used. This paper studies two farming systems to compare and find the best system that will cover the current and future demand with the least cost and natural resources consumption. The first system is the soil-based system (traditional), and the other is the hydroponic system. Two types of seeds were used, cucumber and Armenian cucumber. Over a period of 30 days, the heights of the plants for both systems were measured. After collecting data, the data were analyzed using Design-Expert and the variance test (ANOVA). The hypothesis of the test is the type of seeds, planting system, and their interaction do have a significant effect on the height of the plant or not. The experiment resulted in that the type of seeds doesn't have a significant effect on the plant growth. However, the planting system has a significant effect on the plant growth, the hydroponic system has a higher growth rate. This result achieves the aim of this paper which is finding a planting system that can increase the productivity to cover the food demand.