Hydroponics as an advanced technique for vegetable production: An overview

TLDR

Hydroponics is gaining global popularity as a resource‑efficient alternative to soil agriculture, which faces challenges from urbanization, climate change, and chemical use, with leading adoption in countries such as the Netherlands, Australia, France, England, Israel, Canada, and the USA. The article reviews common hydroponic systems and emphasizes developing low‑cost, user‑friendly commercial solutions. The authors describe wick, ebb‑and‑flow, drip, deep‑water culture, and Nutrient Film Technique systems, detailing their operations, benefits, limitations, crop performance (tomato, cucumber, pepper, leafy greens), and water‑conservation potential. Hydroponics shortens crop growth time, enables year‑round production, reduces disease and pest incidence, eliminates weeding, spraying, and watering, and, particularly with NFT, can achieve 70–90 % water savings.

Abstract

Currently hydroponic cultivation is gaining popularity all over the world because of efficient resources management and quality food production. Soil based agriculture is now facing various challenges such as urbanization, natural disaster, climate change, indiscriminate use of chemicals and pesticides which is depleting the land fertility. In this article various hydroponic structures viz. wick, ebb and flow, drip, deep water culture and Nutrient Film Technique (NFT) system; their operations; benefits and limitations; performance of different crops like tomato, cucumber, pepper and leafy greens and water conservation by this technique have been discussed. Several benefits of this technique are less growing time of crops than conventional growing; round the year production; minimal disease and pest incidence and weeding, spraying, watering etc can be eliminated. Commercially NFT technique has been used throughout the world for successful production of leafy as well as other vegetables with 70 to 90% savings of water. Leading countries in hydroponic technology are Netherland, Australia, France, England, Israel, Canada and USA. For successful implementation of commercial hydroponic technology, it is important to develop low cost techniques which are easy to operate and maintain; requires less labour and lower overall setup and operational cost.