Hydro in ‘72? I call bullsh*t :D
Dude we were doing a form of hydroponics in 72. Not the traditional beds, or dwc and ebb n flos you see today. At the time I roomed with a Lithuanian dude IQ of about 140 in Berkley who was a master mushroom grower and cannabis farmer. Also ha a degree in botany.He devised a system with rain gutters and fish pumps in the basement of the flat we lived in. Fish pumps were to circulate the nutrient solution thru the rain gutter system. He grew some pretty respectable cannabis with his creation. In spite of the fact that all we had for lighting was fluorescent shop lights. Lots of tubes. :D All in all I would say it was a early form of NFT hydro.
Aquaculture/hydro has been around for a lot longer than some peeps realize. You being one of them apparently. So do your home work and gain knowledge before you call BS on us old timers. :D Oh yea thats right,,,,,,,, pics or it didn't happen right. Well let me see if I can get in the attic and find a faded old polaroid of his system.
The earliest published work on growing terrestrial plants without soil was the 1627 book
Sylva Sylvarum or 'A Natural History' by
Francis Bacon, printed a year after his death. Water culture became a popular research technique after that. In 1699,
John Woodward published his water culture experiments with
spearmint. He found that plants in less-pure water sources grew better than plants in distilled water. By 1842, a list of nine elements believed to be essential for plant growth had been compiled, and the discoveries of German botanists
Julius von Sachs and
Wilhelm Knop, in the years 1859–1875, resulted in a development of the technique of soilless cultivation.
[2] Growth of terrestrial plants without soil in mineral nutrient solutions was called solution culture. It quickly became a standard research and teaching technique and is still widely used. Solution culture is, now considered, a type of hydroponics where there is no inert medium.
In 1929, William Frederick Gericke of the University of California at Berkeley began publicly promoting that solution culture be used for agricultural crop production.
[3][4] He first termed it aquaculture but later found that
aquaculture was already applied to culture of aquatic organisms. Gericke created a sensation by growing tomato vines twenty-five feet (7.6 metres) high in his back yard in mineral nutrient solutions rather than soil.
[5] He introduced the term hydroponics, water culture, in 1937, proposed to him by
W. A. Setchell, a
phycologist with an extensive education in the classics.
[6] Hydroponics is derived from
neologism υδρωπονικά (derived from Greek ύδωρ=water and πονέω=cultivate), constructed in analogy to γεωπονικά (derived from Greek γαία=earth and πονέω=cultivate),
[7] geoponica, that which concerns agriculture, replacing, γεω-, earth, with ὑδρο-, water.
[2]
another link with some info
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroponics
Reports of Gericke's work and his claims that hydroponics would revolutionize plant agriculture prompted a huge number of requests for further information. Gericke had been denied use of the University's greenhouses for his experiments due to the administration's skepticism, and when the University tried to compel him to release his preliminary nutrient recipes developed at home he requested greenhouse space and time to improve them using appropriate research facilities. While he was eventually provided greenhouse space, the University assigned Hoagland and Arnon to re-develop Gericke's formula and show it held no benefit over soil grown plant yields, a view held by Hoagland. In 1940, Gericke published the book,
Complete Guide to Soil less Gardening, after leaving his academic position in a climate that was politically unfavorable.
[8]
Two other plant nutritionists, Dennis R. Hoagland and
Daniel I. Arnon, at the University of California were asked to research Gericke's claims. The two wrote a classic 1938 agricultural bulletin,
The Water Culture Method for Growing Plants Without Soil,[9] which made the claim that hydroponic crop yields were no better than crop yields with good-quality soils. Crop yields were ultimately limited by factors other than mineral nutrients, especially light. This research, however, overlooked the fact that hydroponics has other advantages including the fact that the roots of the plant have constant access to oxygen and that the plants have access to as much or as little water as they need.[
citation needed] This is important as one of the most common errors when growing is over- and under- watering; and hydroponics prevents this from occurring as large amounts of water can be made available to the plant and any water not used, drained away, recirculated, or actively aerated, eliminating anoxic conditions, which drown root systems in soil. In soil, a grower needs to be very experienced to know exactly how much water to feed the plant. Too much and the plant will be unable to access oxygen; too little and the plant will lose the ability to transport nutrients, which are typically moved into the roots while in solution. These two researchers developed several formulas for mineral nutrient solutions, known as
Hoagland solution. Modified Hoagland solutions are still in use.
One of the earliest successes of hydroponics occurred on
Wake Island, a rocky atoll in the Pacific Ocean used as a refueling stop for
Pan American Airlines. Hydroponics was used there in the 1930s to grow vegetables for the passengers. Hydroponics was a necessity on Wake Island because there was no soil, and it was prohibitively expensive to airlift in fresh vegetables.
[10]
In the 1960s, Allen Cooper of England developed the
Nutrient film technique.
[11] The Land Pavilion at Walt Disney World's EPCOT Center opened in 1982 and prominently features a variety of hydroponic techniques.
In recent decades,
NASA has done extensive hydroponic research for its
Controlled Ecological Life Support System (CELSS). Hydroponics research mimicking a Martian environment uses LED lighting to grow in a different color spectrum with much less heat. Ray Wheeler, a plant physiologist at Kennedy Space Center’s Space Life Science Lab, believes that hydroponics will create advances within space travel, as a
bioregenerative life support system.
[12]
In 2007, Eurofresh Farms in Willcox, Arizona, sold more than 200 million pounds of hydroponically grown
tomatoes.
[13] Eurofresh has 318 acres (1.3 km2) under glass and represents about a third of the commercial hydroponic greenhouse area in the U.S.
[14] Eurofresh tomatoes were pesticide-free, grown in
rockwool with top irrigation. Eurofresh declared bankruptcy, and the greenhouses were acquired by NatureSweet Ltd. in 2013.
[15]
As of 2017, Canada had hundreds of acres of large-scale commercial hydroponic greenhouses, producing tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers.
[16]
Due to technological advancements within the industry and numerous
economic factors, the global hydroponics market is forecast to grow from $226.45 million USD in 2016 to $724.87 million USD by 2023.
[17]