Last week, I attended a talk about hydroponics, specifically about the vast amount of hydroponic research that is going on here at Cornell. Sadly, I was not able to taste the hydroponically grown lettuce, but I will take everyone’s word that it was excellent.

Before this Rose Cafe, I had only heard of the term hydroponics once, and it was in my AP Environment Science Course back in high school. We had briefly discussed it as a new technology for growing certain crops which could be seen as more environmentally-friendly considering it does not contribute to soil erosion of farmland. The Rose Cafe was structured extremely well, and I think that the visuals in the presentation helped me learn about the different methods that hydroponically grown crops can be made. I enjoyed the question-answer session that we had because it brought up different perspectives that I had never even thought about before.

In our world today, we face many issues involving deforestation and the degradation of our soils and cropland as a result of over-farming. Furthermore, the world’s population is continuously growing, and we are constantly trying to meet this demand for food. As a result, food shortages are inevitable. I believe that hydroponics could be the technology of the future. It does not require soil, so there would not be the issues of soil erosion. Furthermore, you do not need to constantly be finding new plots of land because hydroponics only requires water, which can be changed each time a new set of plants is grown. Overall, what I took away from the presentation is that I think that hydroponics is a good environmentally friendly technology, but I would like to learn more about how efficient it is economically as well.