The latest revelation of the truth of soilless planting

In Europe, such as the Netherlands, Denmark and other countries and regions, a considerable part of greenhouse vegetables and flowers are produced by soilless cultivation, and in the Netherlands, the use of soil to grow vegetables has been restricted. the reason is that sudden cultivation will pollute groundwater, thus pollute the environment, and at the same time, the soil will in turn pollute plants. Soilless cultivation is a completely closed system, the risk can be controlled, and will not pollute the environment, so it has been strongly advocated, so what is soilless cultivation technology?

What is soilless cultivation

Soilless cultivation method is also called nutrient cultivation method and water tillage method. It is a special cultivation method that does not use soil or manure when planting crops, and generally only uses the nutrient solution made of chemical reagents to supply the nutrients needed by crops. It is not only a method of crop cultivation in the laboratory, but also a research means of crop culture experiment in the laboratory. It is generally carried out in a more closed indoor environment, so the chance of being infected by diseases and insect pests is very small, and pesticides are rarely applied, so pollution-free and pollution-free crops can be planted.

2. the advantages of soilless cultivation

Soilless cultivation has made an outstanding contribution to the development of contemporary agriculture, the main reason is that compared with traditional agriculture, soilless cultivation can effectively break away from the dependence of agriculture on soil, reduce the labor intensity and thus liberate more labor force. At the same time, soilless cultivation can make more adequate use of water and fertilizer, reduce the impact of diseases and insect pests and increase the yield of crops, and promote the development of mechanized agriculture. Here are the specific advantages of soilless cultivation.

The main results are as follows: (1) the most prominent advantage of soilless cultivation is that it is free from the restriction of soil. Soilless cultivation has changed the traditional concept of "living in the soil" that depends on land for survival and soil farming methods, and crops can be cultivated in places that are not suitable for farming, such as sand, barren land, and even spaceships. Windowsills, balconies, corridors, roofs and other free spaces can be used to grow plants in homes and offices. The soilless cultivation technology has been used to produce high-yield and high-quality vegetables on the abandoned site of Shengli Oilfield and the saline-alkali land of Shouguang City, Shandong Province.

(2) soilless cultivation can significantly reduce labor intensity and expand the use efficiency of water and fertilizer at the same time. Soilless cultivation does not need the tedious links of traditional tillage, such as tillage, weeding, soil disinfection, topdressing and so on. The scale of unit labor management can be greatly increased, and the labor intensity can be significantly reduced. The water and fertilizer supply of nutrient solution cultivation generally adopts micro-pipeline irrigation system, which is easy to be fixed and localized, which can obviously reduce the waste of water and fertilizer. The experiment shows that the fertilizer use efficiency can be increased by 20% and 30% compared with soil cultivation by 3% and 7 times.

(3) soilless cultivation reduced the impact of crops by diseases and insect pests. Soilless cultivation can prevent the occurrence of many kinds of malignant diseases transmitted by soil-borne pathogens, and cut off an important transmission channel of diseases and insect pests; in addition, it can artificially improve the rhizosphere microenvironment, promote the plant to grow healthily, enhance its own disease resistance, and avoid soil salinization and continuous cropping yield reduction caused by many years of salt accumulation and continuous cropping in soil cultivation. At the same time, the disinfection of matrix is more economical and convenient than soil disinfection.

(4) soilless cultivation has greatly improved crop yield in countries and regions where soilless cultivation techniques are more mature, and the yield per unit area can be increased by 0.4 to 20 times higher than that of soil cultivation (depending on crops, generally between 2 and 4 times). The experimental demonstration results in our country are also more than 30%.

(5) soilless cultivation helps to improve the automation level of agricultural production. Soilless cultivation fully shows that agriculture can mechanize and automate the production of crops, just like industrial production, and plant growth is completely controlled by manual work. Now there are fully automatic soilless cultivation facilities and three-dimensional soilless cultivation factories in the world.

III. Shortcomings of soilless cultivation

In addition to the advantages and potential of soilless cultivation, it also has some aspects that are not conducive to large-scale application and promotion. For example, the investment in disposable facilities is large, the properties of various substrates are not understood in detail, and the management of nutrient solution is highly technical and difficult.

IV. Application of soilless cultivation

Soilless cultivation organic ecotype soilless cultivation system one-time investment and annual operating costs for every 667 square meters are shown in Table 1 (excluding investment in greenhouse or greenhouse). It can be seen from Table 1 that the one-time investment of organic ecotype soilless cultivation system is about 300yuan / 667m2, and the annual production cost (including labor) is about 4300 yuan / 667m2.

Take tomato as an example, the annual output is 15000 kg per 667m2, according to the average unit price of 1.5yuan / kg in the general market, the total income is 1.5x1.5 = 22500 yuan, after deducting the production cost of 4300 yuan, the net income is about 18200 yuan / year / 667m2. Such as high-end vegetable prices, sold to high-end restaurants, guesthouses or exports. Then the output value and profits should be higher.

Conclusion: soilless cultivation technology provides a new idea for grain cultivation to some extent, but the current technology has not been popularized on a large scale, because its shortcomings are obvious. many detailed characteristics of soilless cultivation are not understood, coupled with the fact that the development time is not as long as that of traditional agriculture, various technologies are far from reaching the level of mass production, and the technical requirements for the management of nutrient solution culture are high. It is not suitable for large-scale promotion in rural areas, and it is still in the experimental stage. However, it is certain that soilless cultivation technology will definitely occupy a place in the future agricultural output, coupled with a more sound market system, will eventually achieve certain economic benefits.