Print PageA new industry is emerging in response to the challenges of current agriculture. It is an industry that reforms technology, transforms location and distribution, and disintermediates and revises the members of our current food system. Hydroponic methods typically export nutrients only in the products grown and offer opportunities to recapture nutrients from other nutrient exporting technologies such as aquaculture and composting.
Results/Conclusions
Our government spends large sums on subsidizing non-sustainable practices by an industry that spurns change and ignores persistent deleterious impact. Under pressure from the agricultural community, the government has added organic and specialty crops to its portfolio. There must be a more significant shift of government resources toward research and incentives for adoption of distributed and protected agriculture. One specific area of research is nutrient conservation to enhance hydroponic crop production and must include developing sensing, monitoring, and dosing technologies for specific nutrients , optimizing energy to yield conversion, and determining specifications of the environment to optimize water, mineral and related energy utilization.
