Hi, I'm Phnam.
Hi, I'm Mardis.
And we're the hosts of Future Future, where two designers talk about the future of everything.
We're in the business of turning science fiction into reality for a better future.
And today, we're going to talk about hydroponics.
Remember the last time you were in nature, walking barefoot in the grass.
Touching the moss and trees. Listening to birds chirping.
It felt good, right? It felt very relaxing.
It felt like your blood pressure was coming down and you were focused on whatever you were looking at.
Another thing that we do every day can do that.
It is eating nutritious, beautiful, colorful, organic food.
But the problem today is that there are a lot of people on this planet.
We are 7.7 billion people.
And by 2050, we'll add 2 billion people to that.
And all of the farms in the world are not going to be able to grow that kind of food.
What we need to do is take those outdoor farms that are dependent on weathering climate change,
and access to the sun, and bring them indoors.
And the way we're going to do that is by utilizing hydroponics.
In current agricultural systems, we grow things outdoors.
We grow it in the soil as we have done for tens of thousands of years.
We manage this. We wait for the seasons to come and go.
And occasionally, we're hit with inclement weather. We're hit with natural disasters.
And that might be everything from a flood to locusts. And we are really dependent on this.
And so it's sort of a food security issue.
If we look at hydroponics, we ask ourselves, "what is hydroponics? What does it do for us?"
Hydroponics is moving that growing system (plants and nutrients) out of the natural environment
and moving it into an environment where it's very controlled.
So, for instance we could turn our farm into a small growing facility inside of a building.
Or inside of a room. Or something as small as a shipping container.
And the beautiful part of this is we are no longer dependent on the natural climate.
We can grow throughout the entire season.
We can grow without having to worry about pesticides and pests potentially damaging our food source.
When we get down to the nitty gritty, what it is is: you're growing plants in a water-based solution with nutrients.
So generally there is never soil, there is never really a natural component that is grown out in the fields.
Because it's indoors, you can take advantage of vertical farming, which is the stacking of multiple layers of plants.
Because you're not so dependent on the sun on the outside to cast its light on the plant itself,
since you can have LEDs that are strategically placed in the containers to do that.
That allows you to have access to food 24/7.
You don't have to wait for workers to go outside and pick up the food for you, transport it to the city center,
and sell it to the farmers market.
We are cutting out a lot of the middle man time and energy and cost to give you the freshest food as quickly as possible.
Some examples of this might be...
in New York, they've started using empty skyscrapers as an opportunity to have vertical farms.
We've seen experiments where they're integrating vertical farming into these skyscrapers with people living in them.
So literally, your farm fresh green food is just down the hallway.
So imagine yourself as a child growing up in a city where you see hydroponic farms everywhere.
You know where the food comes from. How it grows. How fresh it is. What organic food tastes like.
You will be more inclined to spend the rest of your life eating healthily and influencing others to do so.
Whereas if you live like today where the farms are very far away
and are very dependent on the climate or the season,
you might be very disconnected from the food that comes to your plate.
Another variation on hydroponics is called, "aquaponics."
What's exciting about this is that not only does it have plants growing in a water-based solution,
but now it has an even closer connection to nature.
In that water-based solution, they might have fish or other natural ingredients in plants
that normally grow and they die and they waste.
And they create a natural, living system that then feeds the plants to help them grow.
One way we've been using aquaponics for a very long time is rice paddies.
These people picking up rice are walking in water that is filled with an ecosystem around fish
that makes growing rice even possible.
Another variation on hydroponics is using plants to actually remove toxins from the air.
So instead of growing fruit and vegetables from the plant,
they're just growing the plants themselves for their natural ability to remove toxins.
They remove all kinds of organic compounds like bleaches and formaldehydes from the air naturally.
And then by using this as a natural filter, we can improve our air quality.
Solving a lot of the problems with the future of food
is going to have a lot of implications on the way the rest of the world works.
If you look at the 17 sustainable development goals put together by the United Nations,
it would help with equality, access to clean water.
It would help with the way we treat nature that we surround ourselves with.
To improve these goals, we need to advance the technologies that aquaponics and hydroponics are built upon.
And the reason being is, we can grow leafy greens and small fruits and vegetables easily.
But we really have a hard time meeting all the dietary needs of humans.
So we have to expand upon this.
And we ask you to put in the comments below: how can we grow things better?
What kinds of foods would you want to grow better?
Do you have an idea about how we can advance this technology for all of our benefit?
And with that, we thank you for joining us on this journey today,
and we look forward to chatting with you next time.
Bye.
Bye!