What is Aeroponics?
Aeroponics is a sophisticated plant-growing technique ideally suited to a range of purposes, particularly the growing of disease-free seed crops and high-yield greenhouse growing in the Arctic or in space. Aeroponics uses no soil or liquid medium, just a fine nutritious mist sprayed over roots suspended in a sealed chamber. This growth method is highly efficient in terms of water, nutrients, energy, and space. Sometimes aeroponics is considered a subcategory of hydroponics, because the main nutrient-carrier is water rather than soil. Aeroponics was first developed in 1942 by W. Carter. The purpose was to facilitate the easy examination of roots for research purposes, still a primary application of aeroponics. Throughout the 40s and 50s, scientists used aeroponics to grow citrus, avocado, apple, coffee, and tomato plants and examine their root structures and test their response to varying levels of moisture. Because aeroponics allows the grower to precisely determine water and nutrient
Aeroponics is a growing method where the plant roots are suspended in the air with a fine mist of nutrient solution applied either continually or intermittently over the root surface. While we tend to think of aeroponics as a recent development in the hydroponics field, it has actually been in use since the 1940’s, although largely as a research tool rather than as an economically feasible method of crop production. In the last decade however there has been the development of a number of aeroponics systems both for use commercially and as small ‘hobbyist’ systems. The reasons for the interest in aeroponic technology stem from the fact that using traditional hydroponics systems (media, NFT and flood and drain), has often made controlling conditions in the root zone difficult, particularly where growers are battling a tropical climate. And for this reason much of the large scale commercial development of aeroponics has occurred in countries such as Singapore where temperate crops such as
