Hydroponic smart farming gains momentum in South Africa

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In a world where no seed touches soil to germinate, hydroponic smart farming is gaining momentum and revolutionising South Africa’s agricultural landscape. This innovative method produces high yields while reusing water.

Tebogo Masobe from Lomanyaneng, outside Mahikeng in the North West, is passionate about innovating and using smart farming to grow vegetables without using soil. Masobe says the soilless method of planting is working for him.

“The specific crops that I grow, your leafy plants, are either your herbs or your edible flowers, lettuce, spinach, cabbage, green pepper and all your leafy plants. There are actually more advanced systems that actually grow potatoes under water but that is on an advanced level. Right now we are only dealing with leafy plants and herbs.”

Masobe says even with limited space and other challenges, farmers can still increase their yield using this farming method.

“The unique advantage of operating hydroponics farming is that the system is solar powered, so we are not affected by load shedding, we do not solely depend on electricity. We are actually creating our own energy source; it is fully automated. With this system, we can actually make use of small spaces. With hydroponics, I can grow more produce in the smaller space as compared to your conventional farming whereby you would need a hector of land to actually produce a certain number of crops. We are taking advantage of vertical farming instead of planting these crops horizontally; we are making use of our space.”

Masobe also uses organic fertilisers. “In developing this hydroponics smart farm, we notice that for us to actually give our people the best quality, we have to produce organic meaning. We don’t have to give our people genetically modified crops or crops that are grown using dangerous chemicals. So, we opted to actually grow our produce using organic fertilizer.”

Given the present water and climate change concerns, hydroponic farming holds great potential for reshaping the South African farming sector.

North West University Faculty of Agricultural Sciences’ Professor Nomali Ngobese says; “There is great potential for hydroponics farming in South Africa, considering the country water’s scarcity challenges. This potential has to do with the fact that hydroponic systems have high water use efficiency. This is because the water that is used within the system is recycled in the closed-loop systems. So, basically, a hydroponics system will have few components that are necessary to make sure water is not lost and is actually cycled throughout and enough nutrients are provided to the plants.”

According to Ngobese, installing more of these hydroponic farming systems would help conserve South Africa’s limited water supply.