Food production is an issue that affects everyone. With a constantly growing world population and climate change, the key challenges of the future are access to water and the efficient production of healthy food.
However, plants also play an important role in terms of social benefits in the greening of urban areas and in crop production as animal feed.
Dr Harvey Harbach's research group at the Institute for Sustainable Water Systems at Hof University of Applied Sciences is conducting research into hydroponic (soilless) food production. This can provide safe and healthy food despite increasingly scarce resources in the context of climate and environmental protection. The solution is to decouple production from land; in other words, edible plants can be grown almost anywhere in location-independent, water- and nutrient-efficient systems - in principle, even in space!
A further development of hydroponics is the supply of water to the plant root in the form of vapour. This is known as "aeroponics", which offers new opportunities in terms of stand space and resource efficiency. In the model systems used, this vapour is generated using an ultrasonic nebuliser.
We want to prove that aeroponics can be a practicable building block in the future of our food production. A public science project is being carried out to familiarise the public with these topics and get them interested in the research work. This means that the public can participate in the research question.
In concrete terms, this is done by students from Hof University of Applied Sciences and children from Krötenbruck primary school working together to carry out experiments in their own aeroponics systems. This gives the schoolchildren access to STEM subjects and the students to active research. The interested public can also participate; either actively by building a hydroponic planting system using the published instructions, or by following the project using the video clips on the blog.
The results of the project regarding plant growth in aeroponic systems can be analysed similarly to a larger field study with n ≈ 100.
The research here is tough.
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