Pioneering the way food is perceived
From the Director’s Desk
Lano AgriTech was launched with the innate desire of homo sapiens to innovate. In the 21st Century our little blue planet is trying it’s best to keep us alive. Our relationship with convenience has caused our planet a great deal of Damage. It is our duty as the Alpha Species to make life easier for every other species on earth, that’s why we don’t see penguins working in corporate.
Agriculture is the first form of controlled manufacturing that humans established. And since the last 11,000 years even though we have had significant advancements, the fundamentals of farming are still the same. It is the only industry that has not gone through any radical change and it is the most important Industry there can be.
Here are some numbers-
Out of total Land Area in the world only 38 percent is Arable.
Out of that 38 percent only a third is used for humans and the rest is for feeding Livestock.
Nearly 800 Crore people are dependent on that land so that they can survive, this population is projected to reach 1000 Crore before 2050.
About 1 crore people die of hunger every year.
About 66 crore people are Malnourished.
About 20 lakh new people get cancer every year.
The point is our land is overburdened our soil has lost all fertility and can barely support organic life with all the poison we are spraying on it.
What is the point of being the most advanced species when we are just as mindless as we can get when it comes to the bare necessities?
This is where the symbiosis of human innovation and nature comes into play.
What is Hydroponics?
Hydroponics is the technique of growing food without soil in Nutrient rich water. This allows us to indefinitely circulate the water in the root zone of the plant until it is harvested. So the only water that escapes the pipes is through transpiration and the mass of the plant. This technique of giving nutrients and water at the same time is known as Fertigation.
It takes about 200 Liters of water to grow a plant of lettuce in 2 months in soil. In hydroponics you can grow 304 plants of lettuce in 220 liters of water in about 25 days! This is something that we have personally grown in our R&D setups and locally sold that produce.
Because the plants do not have to compete for nutrient hot zones like there are in soil, we can grow plants much closer to each other. On top of that(literally) We can grow plants in multiple layers which increases the efficiency further. So with the increased speed of growth and density, Hydroponics can be up to 250x more efficient than conventional farming methods.
A little history….
Hydroponics is a technique of farming that dates back to the Ancient Babylonian Times where the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were the first ever Hydroponic Farm, that grew fig trees plum trees all of them grew hydroponically in huge reservoirs carved out of stone, without any fancy automation equipment and sensors the garden was the most beautiful man made garden to have ever existed. It was Irrigated by the Euphrates in now present day Iraq.
Due to the higher capital costs and basically the lack of justification for the complex setup when soil was much easier to grow in, humans pretty much forgot about hydroponics. Hydroponics then had a major emergence in the Cold War era.
When Israel was aggressively ambitious like a recent college graduate (still is) and it’s neighbors being jealous older countries. The little Country about the size of Kerala was surrounded by salty neighbors and even saltier waters. Israelis started pioneering in some major technologies to quench their dry throats, they made nuclear bombs(hello MOSSAD) and Desalination plants. Technologies such as Desalination, Drip irrigation and Hydroponics were all pioneered by the Israelis.
Simultaneously, in the land of freedom where the screeching bald eagle is the ringtone of every orange tinged guy. The Americans(White People) got insecure and thought of getting extremely prejudiced against a plant fondly and popularly known as Ganja. I will not be getting into the psychological breakdown of the insecurities of the white male. But when Mr. Reagan went ballistic against Cannabis even though it had already been criminalized back in the 1930s. The Cannabis growers were all being raided by the full force of the Federal Government. Their farms would be aerially spotted and then burnt. This got our beloved stoners to look towards hydroponics. I mean how could you grow acres worth of produce indoors and provide an even more potent product to your clientele. Hydroponics made a major reemergence.
Coming to Present Day..
We are 20+ years into the 2000s and all that we have done to make the Earth a better place is, that we know Earth is going to shit there are some of us who still don’t believe it because “if winters are getting colder and shorter then it does not mean that global warming is real.”
Keeping life alive on the planet for the next few thousands of years at least, is now becoming the biggest priority. Just feeding people is getting tougher with all the strain on the land.
Hydroponics is now slowly becoming the main source of agriculture for a lot of places such as Israel, The Line project in Saudi Arabia, UAE based Emirates having invested more than 200 million dollars in Hydroponic Farms just for their hotels and their airline.
Since I started working in this field I have dealt personally with over 4000+ clientele that has bought a hydroponic system from me. There is a lot of scope for hydroponics but it is in its nascent stages in India. Our aim is to design products that allow people to easily fulfill a decent amount of their needs in their own homes and to setup community farms in close vicinities in the urban landscape.