Large-Scale Hydroponics? How About REALLY-LARGE-SCALE Hydroponics??

Are you tired of the same ho-hum types of posts about indoor gardening? Do you already know what a grow box looks like? Here's something new -- take a look at some of the biggest projects that are set to start producing amazing amounts of food around the world.

One example is this UK Daily Mail story looking at a brand-new facility near New York City. The headline brags that this Aerofarms indoor farming space, which is actually in Newark, New Jersey, will produce up to 2,000,000 pounds of food a year in a 70,000 square foot space.

If that doesn't astound you, take a look at the pictures. You have something that looks like a massive warehouse or server farm, where the stacks of plants power over the humans who are tasked with getting in there and doing all of the necessary labor and maintenance. In some ways, these amazing gardens are the descendents of the first skyscrapers that amazed crowds in the 1900s. They’re truly mind boggling types of facilities that are aimed at innovation and solutions for the problems that we'll face in the 21st century and beyond.

For instance, you can see in the story that the Aerofarms facility is set to produce 75% more yield then a corresponding outdoor farm, and use 95% less water. That might not sound like a big deal to you, unless you understand the coming storm water rights and scarcities that already exist in Western states, and are due to visit the East Coast rather soon. So in terms of water and space, the Aerofarms facility is going to be a game-changer in how people get the vital green foods they need to eat healthy. That's not to mention the water and space savings that you get from promoting vegetarianism or a vegetable diet and switching over from resource-intensive livestock cultivation.

So the impact of reading something like this is really twofold -- you're seeing the visual designs that are so unprecedented, and you are reading about benefits, which are also very new to us. Just a few decades ago, hydroponics was really an outlier -- people really weren’t talking about what was possible. They were still growing plants in small outdoor spaces.

By contrast, when you go back and look at the pictures of the Aerofarms facility, you might think of Amazon, or a government cold storage center, or some other massive government or business project. It's just that big.

With that said, hydroponics doesn't have to be some kind of corporate or large-scale undertaking. You can do it right in your own home or business space, in a corner of the kitchen or living room, in the hallway, or on the roof. You can experiment with growing several dozen plants in a small closed system, and see where it goes from there. To a lot of people who are really interested in this kind of new way of growing food, this is the real attraction to hydroponics -- not the vast warehouses used by commercial firms, the small systems that can feed a family directly from their own living spaces. You can eliminate all of the cost of getting your produce shipped in from overseas, as well as some of the health threats that happened when food companies try to preserve these foods beyond their natural lifespan. Think about getting involved in hydroponics now, to experience some of these benefits while some of the biggest agricultural businesses around are getting in on the game, too.