Hydroponics and vertical farming in Morocco and the world

Our agriculture system as we know it needs to change. We see an enormous amount of waste in current practices through using up too much water, using too many pesticides that hurt the neighboring environment as well as waste of produce through imperfection or being pest ridden. This, combined with flagging and in some cases stagnant yield increases in soil systems across the world will soon require sweeping and rapid changes in growing methods. As our population continues to grow, food production will grow and our methods of growing should change as well.

There are methods available to us today to not only change the way we grow produce for the better, but also increase yields in a smaller space. Vertical farming through hydroponics or aeroponics gives us the opportunity to grow larger amounts of produce in seemingly unavailable spaces. Rooftops, indoors, in older warehouses—you can grow plants and stack them on top of each other to farm a consistent crop that produces year-round and quickly, uses less water and energy, is more pest resistant, and can help alleviate some of the logistical trouble of transporting produce to and from farms to cities everywhere.

Cherry tomatoes being grown vertically and hydroponically in a greenhouse in Morocco.
Hydroponics and aeroponics are increasingly popular cultivation methods among both commercial growers and research scientists. They confer several advantages with the foremost of these being their water use efficiency, with some studies suggesting up to 70% and 95% less water usage for hydroponics and aeroponics, respectively. In one 2015 study conducted in Arizona, an extremely dry state in the United States, it was found that hydroponically grown lettuce required 10 times less water as a system than soil-based lettuce crops. This is particularly important based on the similarities between the climates of Arizona and Marrakech. While this study found that energy usage of a hydroponic farm was significantly higher than soil-based farms, this could be nearly completely offset by reducing the amount of supplemental lighting used in favor of currently available solar power technologies.

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Source: Maravi Post