Sustainable agriculture / Eco farming

The concept of sustainable agriculture has come because yields from modern farming technique (modern commercial agriculture) reaching a plateau and the environmental problems due to excessive use of chemicals and fertilizers and pesticides residue in food chain.

Sustainable agriculture is that form of farming which produces sufficient food to meet the needs of the present generation without eroding ecological assets and productivity of life supporting systems of future generations. Natural farming is an excellent illustration of sustainable agriculture. It is also known as ecological farming / ecofarming or organic farming or Permaculture. It is called eco-farming because ecological balance is given importance and organic farming because organic matter is the main source of nutrient management. It is a system of cultivation with use of manures, crop rotation and minimal tilling. Sustainable agriculture also involves agroforestry and multilevel cultivation and integrating animal husbandry.

Grow your own wheatgrass for juice

Wheatgrass is:

• High in Nutrients and Antioxidants
• Reduces Cholesterol
• Helps Killing Cancer Cells
• Aid in Blood Sugar Regulation
• Alleviate Inflammation
• Help Promote Weight Loss
• Easy to Add to Your Diet

Wheatgrass can be easily grown at home with handful of wheat from the grocery store. You get lush grass within 10 days and you just need small amount for your juice.

History of hydroponics 2

1860 & 1861 marked the end of a long search for the nutrient source essential for plants' growing when two German botanists, Julius von Sachs and Wilhelm Knop delivered the first standard formula for the nutrient solutions dissolved in water, in which plants could be grown. This is the origin of "nutriculture". Today, it is called the water culture. By this method, plants' roots were totally immersed in a water solution that contained minerals of nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), potassium (K), magnesium (Mg), sulfur (S) and calcium (Ca). They are now seen as the macro elements or macronutrients (elements required in relatively large amounts).

However, surprisingly enough, the method of plants growing in water and nutrient solution was only seen as experiments and merely used in the laboratory for plant research. 

Only when the greenhouse industry appeared that interest in the application of the nutriculture practice was eyed on in 1925. Researchers were caring about the issues of soil cultural methods with soil structure, fertility, and pests. They worked extensively to implement the benefit of nutriculture to large-scale crop production. 

In the early 1930s, W.F. Gericke of the University of California at Berkeley experimented with nutriculture to produce agricultural crops. Initially, he called this process aquaculture but dropped it after learning that this term has been used to describe aquatic organism culturing.
W.A. Setchell recommended the term "hydroponics" to Gericke in 1937. So the name goes.
The word was derived from two Greek words. Hydro (“water”) and Ponos (“labor”)— literally “water working.”

Gericke began publicizing the practice of growing plants in a water solution while he was at the U.C. Berkley.
However, he met up with the skepticism from the public and the university. His colleagues even denied the use of the on-ground greenhouses for his study.
Gericke declared them wrong by successfully growing 25-foot tall tomato plants in nutrient-filled solutions. 

The university still doubted his account of successful cultivation and requested two other students investigate his claim. The two performed the research and reported their findings in an agriculture bulletin 1938, titled "The Water Culture Method for Growing Plants Without Soil"
They confirmed the application of Hydroponics but concluded their research that crops grown with Hydroponics are no better than those grown on quality soils. However, they missed many advantages of agricultural Hydroponics in comparison with the cultural practice. The benefits that nowadays any hydroponic growers know by heart. 

The earliest well-known application of Hydroponic plant cultivation was in the early 1940s when Hydroponic was used on the Wake Island, a soil-less island in the Pacific Ocean. This island was used as a refueling stop for Pan American Airlines. The lack of soil meant that it's impossible to grow with the cultural method and it was incredibly expensive to airlift fresh vegetables. Hydroponics solved the issues excitingly well and provided fresh vegetable for the whole troops on this distant island. 

After World War II, Hydroponic cultivation was still used widely by the military. The U.S. army planted a 22 ha at Chofu, Japan.
In the 1950s, the soil-less method of Hydroponics expanded to a variety of countries including England, France, Italy, Spain, Sweden, the USSR, and Israel.

History of hydroponics

Simply put, hydroponics is the practice of growing plants using only water, nutrients, and a growing medium. The word hydroponics comes from the roots “hydro”, meaning water, and “ponos”, meaning labor, this method of gardening does not use soil.

Sounds high tech and futuristic, right? It’s not.

However, this practice (which is so called Hydroponics) has actually been used for thousands of years.    

The famous Hanging Gardens of Babylon in around 600 B.C. are the earliest record of Hydroponics in use. 

These gardens were built along the Euphrates River in Babylonia. Since the region's climate was dry and rarely saw the rain, people believe that the ancient Babylonians used a chain pull system for watering the garden plants.
In this method, water was pulled from the river and flowed up along the chain system and dropped to the steps or landing of the garden. 

Other records of Hydroponics in the ancient times were found with the floating farms around the island city of Tenochtitlan by the Aztecs in the Mexico in the 10th and 11th century. And in the late 13th century, the explorer, Marco Polo noted in his writing that he saw similar floating gardens during his traveling to China.

It was not until 1600 that there were recorded scientific experiments done on plants growth & constituents. Belgian Jan Van Helmont with his experiment indicated that plants obtained substances from water. However, he failed to know that plants also need carbon dioxide and oxygen from the air.

John Woodward followed to study the growth of plants using water culture in 1699. He found that plants grew best in water that contained the most soil. So, he concluded that it was certain substances in the water derived from soil that led to the plant growth, rather than from the water itself. 

There were several following studies done until 1804 when De Saussure proposed that plants were composed of chemical elements absorbed from water, soil, and air.
Boussignault, a French chemist, went on to verify this proposition in 1851. He did an experiment to grow plants in an insoluble artificial media including sand, quartz, and charcoal without soil. He used only water, media, and chemical nutrients. And he found that plants need water and get hydrogen from it; the dry matter of plants contains hydrogen plus carbon and oxygen which comes from the air; plants consist of nitrogen and other mineral nutrients.