Hydroponic Food Production

The eighth edition of Hydroponic Food Production: A Definitive Guidebook for the Advanced Home Gardener and the Commercial Hydroponic Grower serves as a comprehensive guide to soilless culture (hydroponics) for hobby and commercial growers. Extensively updated from the seventh edition published in 2013, this bestseller is a "methods" book to show the reader how to set up a hydroponic operation with the options of using any of many hydroponic cultures presently used in the industry to grow vegetable crops. Written by Dr Howard M. Resh, a recognized authority worldwide on hydroponics, the book presents detailed information on hydroponic growing systems and features more than 600 photographs (200 in full color), drawings, and tables.

New to this edition:

• Presents greenhouse environmental control systems and examples of sustainable greenhouse technology, and demonstrates uses of automation and robotics in harvesting, grading, and packing.
• Introduces indoor vertical farming, and vertical growing systems, as well as the expansion of tropical hydroponics and rooftop greenhouses.
• Provides information on automation in large-scale raft culture and nutrient film technique (NFT) operations in the growing of lettuce, leafy greens, and herbs.

A new chapter 12 discusses control of environmental factors in greenhouses. It covers information on systems to regulate temperature, relative humidity, carbon dioxide enrichment, lighting, and fertigation with examples of sustainable greenhouse technology. This chapter demonstrates automation in the regulation of the greenhouse environment to crop production methods with emphasis on robotics in harvesting to transporting, grading, and packing equipment. The use of retractable roof structures in tropical, humid climates is an alternative for growing greenhouse crops.

A new chapter 14 describes vertical indoor farming. It presents background information on early vertical greenhouses and sack culture systems to present vertical systems used by greenhouses and existing vertical greenhouses and future concepts. Vertical indoor farming reviews systems of vertical tiers of shelving growing lettuce, leafy greens, and herbs under LED lighting in large warehouses. The chapter exemplifies automation in these vertical farms with each specific system and it contains information on vertical growing in containers and/or modular units.

Chapter 15 contains new information on tropical hydroponics describing hydroponics in Peru. Expansions of rooftop greenhouses with new locations in New York, Chicago, and Montreal display updated facilities and crops.