Hydroponic greenhouse gardening
(Page 2 of 7)
Hydroponics!— by Steve Fox of Albuquerque,
New Mexico—is definitely not a big business promotion
for chemical fertilizers. On the contrary, it is the
enlightened vision of a man who sees hydroponic agriculture
as one solution to the coming world famine, and an
alternative to the destruction of our once fertile
soil with chemicals. Fox proposes that extensive use of
hydroponic greenhouses, with their greater yields of
produce, would actually free our cropland for organic
agriculture! In other words, instead of poisoning our soil
with chemical fertilizers which eventually destroy the
micro-organisms that make natural plant growth possible, we
would keep these chemicals in the controlled environment of
a greenhouse where they couldn't "poison" anything more
valuable than the gravel beds which serve as the
root-support medium for hydroponically grown plants.
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"But wait a minute!" you're probably saying. "What about
the plants themselves? I'm not going to eat any vegetables
that were grown in a chemical solution!" A good point, and
one which used to bother me, until I did some research on
the subject. A report in the March 11, 1974
Newsweek on the annual meeting of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science quoted the
following opinions expressed by the nation's top
nutritionists:
. . . the organic nutritionists' basic error is their
assertion that organically grown foods are more nutritious
than others because they receive all their nutrients from
"natural" rather than synthetic inorganic sources. `A basic
fact of plant nutrition is that plant roots absorb the
nutrients elements from the soil only in an inorganic
form,explained plant physiologist Daniel I. Arnon
of the University of California. "Plant nutrients in
organic manures and composts become available to plants
only after they are converted into inorganic form by the
activity of soil microorganisms . . . "
The experts at San Francisco were at pains to point out
that they were not disparaging so-called natural foods. .
.that is, products free of additives,
preservatives, artificial coloring and other chemicals
added after the food has been harvested. "The health food
advocates may be on legitimate ground when they attack a
number of additives found in foods," conceded Allentown,
Pennsylvania psychiatrist Stephen Barret, a prime critic of
the organic-growth industry. "However, they tend to lump
together arguments for organic gardening and against food
additives as though one is naturally linked to the
other—when, in fact, they are entirely different
issues. "
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