Hydroponic_concept
Contents
1 Project Purpose
The purpose of this project is to ensure sustainable local food production units and adresss:
- Common nutritional deficits in food desert areas.
- Rising food prices resulting from food distribution, processing, packaging, and storage, effectively cutting out the middle man.
- The time consuming, intensive nature of more traditional gardening techniques for personal produce production
2 Basic Concept
The Kratky system is a zero power required system which relies on a plant’s root growth down towards a lowering water source to develop oxygen absorbing roots instead of keeping them at the same level of water like other systems.
Note
The following are similar water suspended growing systems and how they compare to the Kratky system
| Systems | Difference from Kratky |
|---|---|
| DWC | -Requires power |
| Aquaponics | - Requires power and fish as nutrient source |
| Wick | - requires wick material for each plant, not vertical, and doesn’t encorage root growth. + just as easy as Kratky, and doesn’t reuiqre energy |
| Ebb and Flow | - expensive to buy, hard to improvise, and requires energy. +: good for large scale production |
| Nutrient Film Technique | The exact same as the Ebb and Flow execpt -: requires an oxygen stone, harder to properly tune. +: distributes more oxygen to plants, making roots much healthier. |
| Continuous Drip | -:requires contstant energy to supply plants with water. +: keeps roots healthier |
|
The closest similar system is a Deep Water Culture (DWC) system. This system requires power to run an air pump to constantly oxygenate a fixed volume of water.