A group of colleagues and I are working on finding ways to generate value from organic waste. Composting is the most usual way to do this, but compost is generally thought of as an input for traditional soil farming practices. Some people say that you can use composting to generate the nutrient solutions needed for hydroponic farming, but I haven't been able to find a detailed description of this process. How is it done? Is it competitive when compared to non-organic nutrient solutions?
You can do a water-based extraction to remove the inorganic nutrients in the compost and then apply that solution to the hydroponic system like a tea. This might work, but it wont remove all the nutrients, especially the phosphorus. Additionally you can try and grind the material up finely and put that material in the water and keep it suspended.
You can make compost-tea and use it as nutrient solution. however this will not provide you all required nutrients in the desired level and some nutrient deficiencies will appear.
Usually compost tea is the used method. This can be done by soaking the compost for a period of one month in water to extract the nutrients. However, as the above colleagues said, not all nutrients will be available ate the desired concentrations and some symptoms of nutrient deficiencies will start to appear. Since you are talking about hydropoinc system, you are talking about high investment. So this type of production will not economically be feasible.
This a very interesting post. You can think about fabricating a composting bin with a perforated bottom. When the decomposition process begins, can add some water from top to drain through the compost. The main problem of using this kind of product for hydroponics may be the difficulty of standardizing the concentration of nutrients to the system
Dear Juan,
Very interesting and important point! Although most of the authors here already answered and covered most of the area. Bin with perforated bottom would be one of the wisest choices but it depends on your scale of operation. Your design will allow you to extract the liquid organic substances and manually pour or mechanised to the hydroponic system. Manually, you can add water in the compost bin and water will wash away organic matters to the hydroponics section. If you use the small-scale hydroponic system, you may not have the test kit for measuring the nutrients to get a standard hydroponic solution to get all the nutrients for the optimum growth and healthy plants.
Regards,
Mohammed
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Physical Sciences
- Materials Science
- Plating