Building indigenous smart hydroponic farm as lessons from an academic experiment--A review article

Abstract

Growing population is creating seriously concerns regarding availability of adequate food supplies. There is continuous pressure on agricultural technology stake holders to come up with cheaper and more efficient techniques that can be applied at scale. Hydroponics is one of the advanced plants growing techniques.  This is an alternate agricultural technique based on soil-less methods with the promise of solving food shortage problem. There is needed to create expertise in modern farming methods. Hydroponic technology is gaining traction in Pakistan. Several farms have been developed in different areas of Pakistan. However, such systems suffer from different problems. The primary problem with contemporary efforts to build such farms is used the imported materials. This makes the cost prohibitively high. These farms are devoided any modern control and communicated the mechanism thus completely relied on manual methods. This paper describes our efforts to design and develop a smart Hydroponic system using only locally available materials, and also explains the lessons learned to provide a new guideines for farmers/researchers interested in this domain