الفِلاَحَة في الماء .. كتاب في سبيل موسوعة علمية .. الدكتور أحمد ذكي

Farming in water

A new science, they sometimes call it “soilless agriculture.”

- Justify the name

The French name “Hydroponics” is similar to Geoponics. Both are Greek in origin.

As for geoponics, it is the well-known ordinary agriculture, and the word is composed of two syllables: geo, which means land, and ponex, which means work. So it is working the land or cultivating the land.

As for hydroponics, it is also composed of two parts: hydro, which means water, and ponex, which means work. Therefore, it is the cultivation of water, just as the first word was the cultivation of the land.

What is meant by water cultivation:

What is meant, of course, is to dispense with soil for planting, and be satisfied with water. If we use gravel or pure sand. This is only to support the stems of the plant when it comes out and to straighten them. Sand is not then called soil, as soil undoubtedly supports plants, but it has other important functions other than that.

(A green lettuce that had never seen agricultural soil. Its seeds were placed on the surface of glass wool, then the wool was covered, then the plant was watered with solutions suitable for its food, and it grew and flourished like the best that grows in good land.)

Soil functions:

One of the functions of the soil is that it supports the trunks of plants and the branches and leaves they bear, through the roots that emerge and branch out in the soil and hold them firmly.

This bond is provided by pure sand. And what sand?
With agricultural soil.

Agricultural soil stores this water and preserves it for the clay and humus in it. Agricultural soil is also a source of many salts needed to feed plants. Agricultural soil is a reservoir for bacteria that decompose the organic materials in it and make from them the nitrogenous salts necessary for plant food. Bacteria also make humus.

If we look at all of these carefully, we find that these functions end with preparing food for the plant.

So why don't we dispense with the soil and provide the plant with the salts it needs for food, especially on the surface? The earth does not always have that good soil that can fully perform these functions.

Much of the earth's surface is sand, and much of the earth's surface is desert, so why not use sand, which is not agricultural soil, as a support and provide plants, in this industrial age, with all the food they need?

- In the middle of the last century:

This idea began to be implemented in the middle of the last century after man understood the functions of plant organs that had been unknown to him for a long time.

The idea was not the idea of ​​dispensing with soil, nor did the vast deserts cross his mind.

The idea was pure scientific research. The scientists wanted to be satisfied with water so that plant roots would grow in it. It was waste water, to which some of the salts that they claimed were present in agricultural soil were added. Then they looked at their effect, individually and in combination, on plant growth.

When the plant grew in the water, they supported its stems with various supports. Then it occurred to them that this support could be made of gravel, made of anything, even glass. It is an inanimate object that stands neutral and does not interact with plants or water.

In doing so, they took useful steps and learned what food means
Beneficial, for any plant, and in any amount.

An undoubted fact has become apparent to scholars, which is that it is permissible to plant in pure water, or with gravel.

- In 1936:

However, the experience of this hydroponic cultivation in large areas did not begin until 1936. This year, scientists began researching the method to be followed in conducting experiments, from a small experimental amount to a large commercial amount.

Newspapers caught the news and reported that scientists were on the way to replacing water with soil, and that it would not be a long time until the people of the earth would be dispensed with it.

With the spread of this ridiculous rumor, the project lost many incentives and motivations.
Then work started again.

- Salts in water are all food:

As for water, it is pure water, in which every salt that the plant needs for food is dissolved. They are salts that contain the following necessary elements: nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, calcium, and magnesium, in appropriate amounts, totaling between 0.7 and 2.5 grams per liter. The solution is slightly acidic.

The solution also contains amounts of salts whose required elements are known as trace elements for the few trace elements that plants need. It requires only a few effects.

Among them are salts of iron, boron, copper, zinc, and manganese, and their percentages are about a hundred or a thousand times lower than the percentages of the aforementioned salts.

- In the Sahara Desert:

Experiments have recently been conducted in the Sahara Desert, in which pure sand was used as a support for the plant and nourished with food from these solutions that flows through the layer of sand, which is in its basins, at the bottom, so that it does not reach its surface so that it does not evaporate, and the roots of the plant and the solutions it contains feed from it, so it grows and flourishes. .

They found that this cultivation, as such, requires an amount ranging from a third to a tenth of what such a plant would need if it were planted in oases in normal fertile soil.

- the cost :

The results they obtained from hydroponic farming, in terms of quality, are no less than the quality of plants grown with educational farming, if not better.

The issue of cost remains.

It is, of course, higher than the cost of ordinary agriculture. For this reason, hydroponics is limited to some vegetables, tomatoes, flowers, and sometimes types of fruits, that is, to those things that have a high price, especially in places far from agricultural soil, those places where these things are transported and they cost a great expense in transportation.

It is for arid lands anyway.