How much money can you save by growing your own food?

We've heard this question over and over again -- and lots of growers answer it in their own ways. There is often somewhat of an abstraction when it comes to the real profits but you can get from a small compact grow box or some other type of hydroponics system.

Here's one easy way to really get into how much money you can save by generating some of your own fresh produce in your home or business space.

First, go to the supermarket and look at produce prices. No, not the bottom-denominator prices of generic pieces of produce, the ones you can get for maybe $.50 when they're old, or those somewhat strange looking waxy type of vegetables that come on a generic label.

To really look at your value for cost, you have to look at the prices of organic produce. Why? Because your hydroponic produce is going to be completely organic and fresh and clean -- because it's controlled by you. It's going to be the very highest caliber of food, not run through any dirty assembly-line processes or possibly tainted with salmonella in some factory. So you'll want to look at the supermarket prices that elite shoppers pay for the highest quality produce in the store.

Take a look. A pint of grape tomatoes can run you five dollars. Ditto for a couple of green or red peppers. A single cabbage can be three dollars instead of one dollar. An organic cucumber will run you probably $2-$3, instead of maybe $.75.

With that in mind, take a look at what one plant can produce during a given crop cycle. If you have any experience gardening in the past, you know that one plant can generate quite a lot over time. If it's cultivated well and harvested properly, the plant will keep bearing fruit for a significant season, which means that you may get maybe a dozen or two dozen units of produce or more out of one plant. So you need to multiply the supermarket prices that you saw by the number of units you can expect out of your plant -- and then multiply that by the number of plants you can grow in your system.

We’ll let you do the math -- but in general, you'll see that these numbers quickly add up to something like maybe $100 or more per plant. That's $100 that you will save on grocery bills, not to mention the time spent driving from wherever you go to wherever you shop, scouring the grocery racks, going through the checkout line and generally just walking that treadmill between your job, your dinner table and your bed.

In today's day and age, with our family practice doctors telling us to cut down on the meat, and health experts touting the health-boosting power of whole foods, it just makes sense to cut out the middleman and raise more of what you at home. Many of us can do this in the summer when we cultivate little plots of land in our backyards, but with hydroponics, it can be a year-round thing, and that can save you a whole lot of money every year.

For more about hydroponics and everything attached to it, keep looking at the stuff that's coming out from manufacturers and retailers to help you to be in starting one of these exciting projects today.