Indoor Farming Near Urban Areas With Low Cost Green Houses

From the very beginning, agriculture has been the backbone of all economic activities taking place in India. The strong connection between economic richness and agricultural growth has led experts to come up with methods and strategies that can improve the overall agricultural output for a given year. The current agricultural scenario in India is a combination of missed opportunities and outstanding achievements. While the overall agricultural output has certainly increased in India, but so had the overall population of the country. This has naturally increased the number of mouths to feed for all the families living in this country. In order for India to emerge as a major economic power, it is necessary that its agricultural productivity must be equal to those countries that currently stand as the best of economic power in this world. To achieve such goals, effective technological measures must be implemented that can continuously improve the productivity, sustainability and profitability of the major farming systems in this country.

One of the ways in which this can be carried out is by investing in greenhouse technology. Even though the green house technology has been in use in the west for a long time, it is relatively new to India. One of the rising challenges of modern times is the reduction of arable lands that can produce crops for an ever increasing population. Many of the lands that were present in the rural areas have been transformed into roads for communal usage. In other cultivable lands, houses and industries have been built which have made it impossible to grow crops on such lands, in such cases, carrying out indoor farming near the urban areas with low cost green houses can be a great way to fill in the void that has been caused by the reduction of rural arable lands.

Traditionally most of the food crops and cash crops are cultivated in open fields since the optimum conditions for growing those crops have been provided by nature itself. However, there have also been times when the external climatic conditions have been adverse to the purpose of growing crops. In such cases, green house technology has been the most effective method of artificially creating stable and favorable environmental conditions to grow plants. It is used mainly to protect plants from adverse climatic conditions like cold, wind, precipitation, extreme temperature, excessive radiation, insects and diseases. The greenhouse allows farmers to create the ideal micro climate for the plants. The best advantage of using greenhouse technology is that it allows a person to grow any kind of plant at any time in any place simply by providing the best environmental conditions with only minimum labor.

Here are some benefits of green house cultivation:

  • The overall production maybe about ten to twelve times higher compared to outdoor cultivation, depending on the type of crop, type of greenhouse and the ecological control facilities

  • It is possible to obtain year-round production of all floricultural crops

  • The reliability of crops increase naturally under greenhouse cultivation
  • With greenhouse, it is possible to produce off-season vegetables and fruit crops

  • It is perfectly suited for flower crops and vegetables

  • Genetically superior and disease-free transplants can be continuously produced with greenhouse

  • Requirement of water for the crops is very limited and rather easy to control

  • It allows efficient utilization of pesticides and chemicals to control diseases and pests

  • Greenhouse facilitates cultivation of micro propagated plant-lets and grafted plant-lets

  • Maintaining stock plants becomes easy with greenhouse

  • Greenhouse yields quality produce that is free of blemishes

  • Greenhouse production allows hardening of the tissue cultured plants

  • Modern techniques of production like Hydroponic (soilless culture) cultivation, Nutrient film techniques and Aeroponics are possible only with greenhouse cultivation

  • Greenhouse production is most useful in controlling and monitoring instability of different types of ecological systems

 

Since arable lands in rural areas have been reduced to a significant degree, making use of green house technology can help in producing different types of plants and crops in the urban regions. It is due to this reason that most farming experts recommend use of green house technology in urban areas across India.