 Welcome So I'm pleased to introduce a speaker who's come all the way from Sweden. Thank you Alice So she's going to be talking today about automatic systems for making hydroponics, which is going to be awesome And I want to say that she works with sustainable urban Sustainable urban design and also lots of young people in Sweden and she's based in Stockholm. So if anyone is around Stockholm Check her out. Okay So take it away. Thank you. Thank you so much Yeah, it's actually sustainable urban development, which is sort of an important point, but yeah, let's let's do this This is going to be a really dense short talk on hydroponics is 30 minutes I will speak really fast, but the slides are available online and I will absolutely be available for questions Maybe not here, but at our campsite and I will give you the address in just a moment Many of the advances in hydroponics comes from I would also say when you want to hear it in German, then we have Julian and he translated it today on the cover number 8012 So 8 012 when you want to hear it in German. Thank you. Okay A lot of the advances in hydroponics comes from pot growers. So you have this keep this in mind when I talk about it I grow vegetables myself, but just so you know and if there is any problems with my presentation graphically, it's Not only on me because keynote hate human beings. So you have to excuse me for that So, okay Hmm, so Well, why I want to work with hydroponics is because it is some any part really important part of Sustainable development Partly because hydroponics uses about 1% of the water used in conventional growing It uses it does not have any need for for sunlight Which makes it possible to grow it indoors in completely controlled environments It also is not using any of the non non review renewable resource soil Which I think will have to be Looked upon as a non renewable resource since it take about 500 years to renew two centimeter thick layer of of the global soil I also think it's important to help people to be able to grow food to get an Idea of how growing food works and hydroponic systems are simple to set up Even if you living in a small space and have a limited amount of money also So I will give you a short Hydro history hopefully very short and the slides would be really quick But as I said the slides are available online and you can look it up afterwards I will talk a lot about how plants grow in hydroponics as well as normally It's the same thing basically What you need what measurements you need to know about if you want to build automated systems What do you need to measure and what values and so on and I will also show you pictures of some of the more common Systems and tell you a little bit how they work There you see the link for the the slides and there is also Did I put the link in yeah, there is also some resource document with links and some additional info and You can find me in the camp afterwards T10 on the map if you want to ask questions or be with us when we build a little on-site System So, okay, what we're talking about is growing in a manner that does not use soil We can use a lot of other manners of sort of medias to to grow in but no soil that means you have no nutrient You have no nutrients in the medium, but you add all nutrients and most of the case it's in the water That's why it's called working water or hydroponics in Greek It's mostly referred to as soil less growing so that you know So hydroponics is not at all a new field and it's been around for a really long time We can begin at in where is it 600 BC Babylon the hanging gardens of Babylon probably hydroponic We don't know for sure Possibly that they had some mechanical automations, but we don't know there are indications The Aztecs was 1100 AC they used something called the shinampas Which is like floating islands using the roots hanging down into the lake very hydroponic But more like run like traditional agriculture So a little bit Later in time 1627 we have Francis Bacon and Sylva Selvarnum This is as far as we know the first printed mention of growing directly in water or in nutrient solution 1699 a guy called John Woodward's grows Spermint and he can prove that plants grow better in contaminated water than in distilled water This is like the beginning of nutrient solution growing 1860s we have a Saxon Knopp to bottom list, but how do you say button is and they developed the first nutrient solution recipe basically and They had no focus on automation whatsoever as far as I know 1929 Jerry key is Probably the most important guy in Soil less gardening history He got really discredited and ended his career in a bad way, but He's the guy it doesn't get enough credit read his book fantastic, but it's old so 1930s Pan American Airlines wanted to fly from America to China. They needed to stop on the way Wake Island became one of those stops to be able to to give food to the personnel on the planes and First and foremost the passengers they started growing hydroponically because Wake Island has no soil and no fresh water, so Automated probably how much I don't know I have to read up on Wake Island project So 1938 these two guys What are they again Let me see Just a moment This is not right. Ah, okay Hoagland he is known for the Hoagland solution and Humanist colleague were the ones that sort of was a reason why Jerick he goes discredited Jerick. He didn't want to Release his recipe as open source in the university because he was denied Greenhouse time so it ended up with the university assigning to Hoagland and aren't on his colleague to Reshape the recipe and they did and they got all the credit no focus on automations with these guys In the 1960s you can imagine what kind of growing culture was sort of interesting in interested in hydroponics by now There is a guy called Alan Cooper and he develops a technique called a Nutrient film technique and it's still one of the most popular techniques for hydroponics. I Will show you how it sort of system looks like a little later He he was interested in automations. He used control of pumps and in control of lights as far as I know and I Haven't read his publications fully In 1982 the Disney World Eptoc Center opened something called a land pavilion where they Have a future of horticulture part and They have some hydroponics there and they do a lot of development in automation of systems as well For how long NASA has been doing their controlled environment support the life support systems We don't know probably for some time lately has been discussed partly because they were eating hydroponic salad on the ISS and It was a few days ago as if I got it correctly and What they're trying to do is basically grow food where it's not possible to grow food space station and also colonization like Mars And if we are lucky by I think it by 10 tonight We can watch the ISS having dinner and if we're lucky they are having hydroponics for dinner. We will see 2009 revolutionary thing happens Brita Riley in New York based I think she's an art student from the beginning She releases a research and develop it yourself community called window farms org This is sort of at the beginning of a lot of home builders in Hydroponics the community still active This is the version 3.0. She released the community with her version 1.0 It's a really large community It's fantastic amount of the solutions and people to talk to it's a good place to start if you want to Build your own system and look at automatic automated systems in the future There are not that many solutions in in the community that solves the whole Automation process like nutrients water pH easy and I will go into them later But there are many that solves the pieces of it so it can be a really nice resource if you want to find facts on how to do it and Last but not least in the aftermath of the tsunami earthquake Thing in Japan a guy called Shima Mura took an old semiconductor factory and turned it into the world's largest indoor farm and They grow only salad and they produce about 10,000 heads of lettuce every day And they are looking at a complete automated process Including looking for deficient nutrient deficiencies in the plants by optical readings of the colors of the leaves So they are like absolute front line of automated systems. I don't think they're open sourced of it So this is yeah, this is the the factory from the inside I guess yeah So we will quickly go with the how plants go in high grow in hydroponics And it does not differ from how plants grow generally. It's the exact same thing but Some parts are more important than in a regular system It does not matter if it is as you I was showing you the mirai factory of salad or if it is the tomato on your balcony The some things are basically exactly the same All plants need light all plants need nutrients and all plants need water including oxygen and If you provide these three plants will grow plants love to grow they always want to grow so Even if you're sloppy, they will probably grow but you won't get an optimized yield or so but I Usually say when I help people to come to the decision to build their own system that it's yeah It's it's hard to optimize, but it's even harder to completely fail. So you should just start doing it and then develop slowly We will start at the roots the roots is in in in any hydroponic system extremely important and the roots is I Mean even more important in a way than if you are growing in soil because you can pay it more attention So it becomes a bigger part of your Involvement in your system most Plants with a few exceptions their roots be sort of become how to say the They're dividing into three parts or the lowest parts drinks water It does not like air actually if it's exposed to air for a too long time. It will suffocate The middle part is How do you say a hybrid and it can drink both water and air to get oxygen and the top part is like you and me it's Drowns in if you if you put it through in a water or two moist environment for too long time But all roots need All parts of the roots need darkness This is what you have to work with when you don't use you when you don't use soil to cover the roots You have to cover the roots in some other way because they need darkness otherwise they burn and you also need to How do you say oxygen saturate your water because all parts of the roots need oxygen as well as the leaves because All parts of a plant exchange gases co2 for oxygens oxygen for co2 all the time. So This is super super important So more about the water It's nothing strange about it except that it's the absolute most important part in a hydroponic system It provides the drinking water for for the plants as in any other manner of growing All plants have different needs more water less water more often less often You have to take a look at what plants you want to grow before you start building your system And especially before you start building automated systems so that you know what measurements you have to work with Always keep your water saturated. You can do it by building a stream like a dripper system But you can also do it by an air stone like the thing you have an aquarium that you push the air into the stone And it gets divided into really small bubbles and yeah, you will have a Yeah, you will have a good oxygen saturation there to speak I can see now that I have very little time left, but I think maybe I was interrupted. So maybe I get a few minutes more Water level you have to measure water level. It's super super crucial No shorter just there are many ways to to measure it the most simple way I guess it's an electrical circuit you can build simply at home There are really expensive professional tools for professional price that continuously measures the water levels Depends on what you want to do The water is also a nutrient agent and we have to measure pH to be able to know If the plants can assimilate Then the nutrients because at the wrong pH level the plants cannot assimilate the Nutrients the nutrients are available as ions in the water in inorganic form of salt salts and For the how should I I will post a link to a really nice table that we show you how the different nutrients get locked out at different Levels of pH, I guess you know what pH is and how it works You won't you you don't want to go below five and you don't want to go above seven most plans dwell between 5.8 and 6.5 so if you keep it there you can maybe you're not optimizing, but you won't fail basically To measure pH you use a meter or a sensor if you want to build your own system Preferably you will use a sensor and you will get Relative pH is relative to temperature and this is a problem generally when you measure some things there are Really expensive measure tools that compensate for temperature, but as I said as before said to a professional price You can also correct the pH by using chemicals pH up pH down kind of chemicals You can also flush your system if you're looking at building an automated system that automatically corrects the pH I know of a one or two projects who is Semi-successful and the links are in the resource text file online, so I won't say anything more about it, but yeah So easy electrical conductivity is super important when you work with hydroponics and this is the the presence of ions in the water and You can say a lot about it, but That you can measure it in easy you can measure it with what's it called the TDS I think it's an American way and American they measure it in PPMs and easy measures it in Siemens millisiemens or micro Siemens There are sensors you can use sensors you can use use meters They're basically the same, but the difference between TDS and part in parts for million or easy. I don't have time to explain it, but there are good links in the text file And Over to the nutrients. This is of course really important This is what you add to the water. The water is supposed to be Non-nutrient no nutrients in the water to begin with that's why you measure easy in the water before you add the nutrients and During your growing period So which are the nutrients we have the micronutrients and nitrogen phosphorus and potassium We have the secondary micro and the mic the secondary micro and the micronutrients. They are Super important all of them, but they are divided like this because of the sort of the amount that they are needed in in the solution Nitrogen stimulates growth of biomass It's really important at the beginning of a growth period of a plant It's said to be the most important nutrient, but strictly speaking. They're all equally important with Total deficiency of one nutrient. It won't work at all. So Phosphorus for fruit set and Energy plants need to bind the energy and chemical bindings so from Sun or from any other light source or heat source and Phosphorus is really important in this process and The potassium this also stimulates fruit set the bud set, but it also really important for plants to build resistance to a lot of diseases This is actually something that we don't know exactly how it works, but a really important thing. I Think I will have to jump some here This is something on the light as far as we know you don't need any natural light you can grow on completely Artificial light when you grow food Or whatever you're growing What you need to remember also it's Recent research has shown that you can treat your plants with 24 hour 24 7 light and it doesn't seem to be in a disadvantage But this is at an early stage of research What you need to remember is what color temperature your light has and the You all you all you also need to remember to check the the heat radiation from your lights and the strength of the light The heat radiation is an issue even with LEDs Because of the amount of LEDs that you will use in a small area to To produce the light that you need so keep it in mind There's some tips on artificial light and it's the the redder Spectra is for flower and fruit Stimulates flower set and fruit set and the bluer part is For biomass growth. So this is a good sort of pointer to have Temp and humidity also really important to To measure you don't want temperature above 12. I've had problems with this in Sweden this summer. I Notice you haven't had that problem here Most plants won't set fruit under 12 degrees temperature humidity which is also very dependent on temperature you want to go between 30 and 70 percent and you measure this with sensors and there are sensors available for all These measurements. I don't have as much time to go into them as I would like but yeah We can have questions at the camp later If you build a greenhouse for your plants or sort of closed environment You really really have to look out for the heat and and and the humidity and what they do to each other It's extremely important that you have an airflow because both the leaves and the roots need To have oxygen to be able to exchange gases. So make sure that you have some airflow in your system. Whatever you do Oxygen yeah, so What you have to think of sort of What you should sort of take with you from here is like where do you place it? What do you want to grow? What do you want to measure and how automated do you want your system to be? I will go really fast through a couple of systems This is the NFT the natural and the nutrient film technique. It's really popular. It's It's a fantastic for home growing. It's Small but serious growing it's perfect for small but serious. It's easy to set up. It's kind of cheap It takes a little kind of little space. It's simple to exchange the water without displacing your plants, which is a really good thing It's very popular but has two pumps makes it bit noisier if the pumps fail your plants will die extremely quick So it's sort of yeah Susceptible to problems and the roots can clog the the systems. So make sure to always check the roots Ebb and flow. I will show you two pictures Up and down pump It's easily maintained a same reason as NFT simple to flash You can control basically anything around the nutrients very precisely and also the the water as With any closed system. There is a problem with disease control since the all plants share the same water and the water isn't flowing But standing more still and just going up and down so Aeroponics are really popular amongst pot growers and industrial sites growing. It's very efficient It's like making the absolute most of your hydroponics it's a more expensive to set up and It's difficult to maintain if their mist nozzles gets Clogged you will have instant problems. Also, it's susceptible to some specific diseases Because of the high moisture level in the air. I think Salmonella is a problem. So pros and cons fish aquaponics I Mean it's a lovely idea But maybe if you want to farm your own vegetables, you don't want to have an aquarium or a fish farm as well So it's like another thing, but it's it's popular and it's being developed in several big universities around the world So it could be fun to try The deep water culture, this is one of my absolute favorite. I have one at home I will build one in our camp later tonight or maybe tomorrow It takes like one or two hours to build yourself. It's really really cheap Easy to take care of this is absolutely Something that I would like to recommend you to try as a first thing and we have the dripper system Which was made really famous by Brita Riley and the window farm project It's a very simple. It's not the most efficient It's kind of silent and most of all it's super super cheap to set up and also kind of easy to maintain When it comes to automation The problem is that the the water flow is difficult to see how much water is actually take being taken up by the plants. Oh Shit the time I Have mentioned growing media here is some Examples of what you can use basically anything that doesn't hold too much nutrients from the beginning This is a list of parts you can use if you want to build your first dripper system All this information is online and you can come and talk to me at the camp and I will tell you everything I know The current status on automate automation I will not go into this because there is one project a billy bricks hydroponic controller built with Arduino. It's a fantastic source of Information you should absolutely look it up There are other projects some of them have copied his project basically just as its whole and Just rewritten the descriptions So I really recommend you to if you want to start working with automated hydroponic system First of all look at the billy bricks bricks project and see what is possible because it's done a really really good job And the the code is available the the the discussion is really Thrive a lot of people Continuously work or so far is involved in the discussion and it's it's lively. So you should really take a look at it Since I sort of stressed a little I have a few minutes left You if you have any questions or want me to go back to an older slide, it's It's possible He was asking about the fish thing. It's called the aquaponics and The I can give you a short explanation the fish you give the fish food The fish poop in the water the water is pumped up to the plants The plant make use of the nutrients and they also clean the water and the water goes back to the fish in a state Where they can keep pooping in it? I saw something very interesting So people make some so something called earthship. So they take the water they use for showering and then the then the This is water gets to moisture the plants and People also get the moist of the plants because they have half size of the house is a greenhouse And so they get the whole western warm of the of the greenhouse and so they can heat their dwellings And also they can close the windows they have in between so they can say it's enough warm enough moist I want to have some other air But I'm interested to make a roll system. So you have your fish You have your plants and you don't have to pay utility bills and things like that and you'll be self sufficient Yeah, that would be fantastic. That would be it's one thing that if I'm away that the system still flushes the toilet Because otherwise the flowers will die. Yeah But that's a Grand project is fantastic. Yeah, we come come over to my camp and talk to me later I Will show you I will go back to the slide. Okay. Is there another question as well? I'd like to take it over to the other side and the green please. Please go ahead Hello, I wanted to ask How much more efficiently if any does an automatic system gives to an hydroponic system Depends so much on where you're putting your effort in if you I don't have any numbers on how Efficient it's possible to make it quite some I guess what you what you What you don't have when you automate or if you if you make an automation that actually works is that you have you can have continuous Availability of nutrients for the plants you have no water shortage and you can prolong the The time of the light exposure to your plans I also have some interesting things about measuring light with With power values, we will have to discuss this later, but I Don't have a number for the efficiency. I mean we already have more and half How do you say like more than then you can have half the size where you grow your crops in hydroponics and get more than More yield than you would in a hundred percent area of Traditionally grown so already there you have a huge advantage In yield, but the efficiency depends on how you want it to work. You want to go away five weeks or one week or you know But they continuously attending to plants is is the key why hydroponics is so efficient I'm one last question. We've got time for one last You mentioned the different plants need different have different requirements for the nutrients and so on Is there something like a public catalog for there where I can look this up for different species and strains? Yeah, I haven't found a collected catalog with this, but there is huge amount of info online Unfortunately as I said unfortunately a lot of it. It's it's directed at pot-growing, but there are also other Sources of information, but it's a good way to a good place to start because they are really serious people when it comes to growing So start there, but there are of course. I mean when it comes to all these measurements, of course there is info Yeah, of course. Thank you very much for your talk. Can you all please put your hands together? Thank you