Agriculture Soil-less cultivation at Agri Intex 2015Home

COIMBATORE: Coimbatore based Nagendhiran, an expert in this form of cultivation, has been doing just this for the past six years. At the Agri Intex 2015, which began on Friday, he has on display, several rows of tomato plants growing out of small holes along a pipe.

Once an electronics professor at Amrita University, Nagendhiran said he wanted to get into the field of agriculture where people were still using primitive techniques. "The forms of protected cultivation that earlier used to exist were just a greenhouse with drip irrigation.
People who experimented with soil-less agriculture were doing it with coir mats," said Nagendhiran. Taking a huge risk, Nagendhiran quit his job and began setting up his own terrace vegetable garden experimenting with soil-less agriculture. "I had 500sqft of space and was looking to set up a hydroponics garden. Due to problems with light diffusion, cultivation with coir mats did not seem viable. It was at this point that I decided to try aeroponics and I used diffused light poly-sheets to ensure all plants received the same amount of sunlight," he said.

Aeroponics is the process of growing plants in an air or moist environment without soil or any other medium. "We have a big set of pipelines, where a small amount of water is sprayed from the top for a few seconds," explains Nagendhiran. "This water wets the plant roofs, and as it lines the pipes' inner walls, it causes some evaporation due to the outside temperature. This increases the humidity within the pipeline which makes the roots absorb the nutrients more efficiently," he said. The plants could also be fertilized by mixing fertilizers with the water on certain days, he added. This is called fertigation.

Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com