Increased productivity / off-seasonal crops
Through usage of nutrient solutions, artificial grow lights and all in a controlled environment plants can be made to grow faster, produce larger yields and can be grown all the year round with no effect of seasons, this enables to produce off-seasonal vegetables also when much higher market price can be obtained.
Reduced water/fertilisers consumption
As the water used for growing farm products remains in circulation in a closed system, it drastically reduces the water requirements which is hardly 10% of irrigation water required in traditional farming.
Because it’s a closed system, nutrients just sufficient as per the requirement of crops are directly fed to the roots, therefore there is zero loss or spillage of nutrients. An efficient hydroponic farm may only use 25% of the fertiliser against that for a regular farm usage.
As the disease to the plants are transmitted through soil and Hydroponic based farms are soil-less, therefore the crops so produced are disease free. Therefore the technique doesn’t require any fertilizers, pesticides or insecticides.
Space efficient
The multilayer farming with 3 to 6 layers at one time makes it highly space efficient, the space requirement reduces to merely 20 to 25% as compared to that in traditional farming. The plants can be grown within a room or a terrace or roof-top of a house or apartment for domestic usage where small scale production is required. For large scale commercial applications the crops can be grown in barren land also.
Reduced transportation
As the crops through this technique are grown within a house or in areas which are closer to the residential localities where the produce are consumed directly, it considerable reduces the transportation cost as well as the fresh vegetables are provided in a shorter periods of times extending to 2 hrs. to one day max.
Monoculture not a problem
Farmers don’t need to worry about exhausting their fields of certain nutrients through growing the same crop over and over – there is no need for crop rotation, so in-demand crops can be focused on.