Urban Gardening: A Closer Look at Hydroponic Gardening

Since my recent encounter with hydroponic gardening I have been very interested and thus searching everywhere for more information, especially because it seems like there is money here in New York ready to support such projects. However, the more I look at it, the more it seems like the new twisted--but organic--version of GMOs, pesticides and fertilizers.

What??

Hydroponic garden will produce healthy food. It’s great. However, it is a plan meant to fit into our everyday more so consumptive lifestyles, utilizing a current mentality to address a problem, overlooking how our problems are a product of that mentality to begin with.

NY Sunworks' website provides a “do it yourself at home” guide, including a list of products you will need to purchase in order to make a hydroponic system successfully. Alice’s Garden Nutrient Formula, Hydroton, CocoTek, and Rapid Rooter among the products, the instructions bring me back to a scene of Wayne and Garth bemoaning people who bow to sponsors, all the while sporting the sponsor’s logos. The point: in order to create your own “at home” version of this great sustainable system, you’ll have to purchase the magical and mysterious products from our sponsors in order to make it work. And in addition to the necessary chemicals you need to purchase, video footage and blueprints of the larger gardens show giant, shiny electronic metal structures “necessary” to do the work if your system will grow. In my last post I presented the concern of whether this is accessible to a school in the Bronx as it is to a school on the Upper West Side. Whether that school in the Bronx can find funding or not, the problem is also that the purveyors want to cash in on the rewards of the system's growth. They see no problem with our current lifestyles, or at least do not connect our food to our current lifestyles beyond a basic environmentalist point of view. “If only we can still live our lives unchanged but pat ourselves on the back for producing food close to home and not transporting it long distances.” This ignores the socio-economic problems that are inherent in our current system and exemplified in the question of which school—the one on the Upper West Side or the school in the Bronx—can afford this garden.

A food system built around the necessity of commercial inputs and not inputs found in nature is built around the desire for profit for whatever company is providing those inputs. The overall goals of both partners are different: the consumer wants fresh food, presumably at the lowest cost, and the producer of the goods wants to find a way to make the most profit and thus make sure that the supply and creation of its products remain solely in its hands.

This means that the people earning profits from a future in successful hydroponic gardening will be high up top; the people in the center will be comfortable, affording to constantly pay for the necessary inputs in their hydronic gardens and also benefiting from fresh food; and the people at the bottom will benefit from neither.

Next problem: Columbia University Professor Dickson Despommier, a giant proponent of hydroponic agriculture, celebrates that we can define the nutrients that go into the food, so we no longer need to worry about toxins. In essence, we think we know exactly what a plant needs to survive and thrive and we know exactly what it does not need. Up until a few decades ago, we thought that nitrogen was the only real instrumental factor in agriculture and that if you had enough nitrogen, anything could grow healthily. We also thought ourselves gods when we uncovered that the human body needed fats, proteins, and carbohydrates to live, now assuring the populace that with manipulating the intake of these three macronutrients we could perfectly nourish our bodies. Slowly, science has uncovered other important nutrients and factors. Nonetheless, as we come to each new discovery, we never content ourselves to say, “Wow. This Mother Nature is pretty complex. Imagine how much more there must be to know!” Instead we say, “Wow—this is great! With this new information I now know everything that I need to in order to manipulate nature to my benefit!” We have always had the hubris to think that we can discover in the matter of years or decades of research exactly what is needed to replicate or change the natural world successfully, and in the long run we are pretty much always greatly mistaken.

The Take Away: Anybody needs a constant input of money to grow their own food hydroponically, not just labor or not just a few up-front costs, so it can never be part of a subsistance lifestyle or something that can be used by economically poor people to take care of themselves. In the case of this elementary school on the Upper West Side, the garden is being spearheaded by a few well-meaning mothers. They probably have nothing but the best and most genuine interests in mind, but living rather comfortably on the husbands’ Upper West Side income, they do not realize that the long-term implications of the project that they are supporting.