To overcome food shortages in the future Pakistan can use hydroponic farming. Hydroponics can be a futuristic technology for Pakistan to ensure proper supply of vegetable and fruits crops. It uses 70 percent to 90 percent less water than irrigated soil based agriculture. No water was lost in the ground or absorbed by weeds or lost in evaporation, Officials in the ministry of Food, Agriculture and Livestock (MINFAL) told the Daily Times here on Wednesday.
With the collaboration of government, the officials said, a hydroponic pilot project has recently been started in Rawat (Islamabad) under the name BioBlitz over just five acres of land. The state-of-the-art five-acre greenhouse facility is producing hydroponic tomatoes of all varieties including tangy, elegant, cherry and others.
The officials said if the same technology is properly deployed, the country could be a huge power player in the market because nobody else in the region is using high-tech hydroponics.
In the pilot project, a Dutch hydoponic expert was working with the team training Pakistani staff on how to run a hydroponic greenhouse. The project was exactly producing 50,000 kg of tomatoes a week. "If the government built 1,000 acres of greenhouses just for tomatoes, they would get about $500 million of revenue per year only on one crop", they said.
According to them, a high tech hydroponic facility was more expensive to set up than soil farming but once it is set up, operating and maintenance costs were low and the very high and definite yields means that invested money would be recovered in one year.
