If you're thinking about starting a hydroponics garage farm and are curious how much you might potentially spend on farm lights (an important component in growing your own food - if you're set-up is inside), or are just interested in how much money you're spending on electricity for a given widget in your home, here's how you can figure it out: 

Watts * Hours Ran / 1000 * Kilowatt Hour Cost * Days In month = Cost per month

Example:

My electric company is run by thieves and so they charge me $0.10678 per kilowatt hour of usage.  Your own exact rate can be found on your electric bill somewhere.  If not, you can call the company and ask.

Let's say I want to know how much that 80 watt bulb is costing me if I leave it burning for 12 hours a day, every day of the month which has 30 days this time.  The substitution of values for the above formula would be as follows (just punch it into your calculator in the exact order it's written here):

80 * 12 / 1000 * 0.1678 * 30 = $4.83

To run a 80 watt bulb 12 hours a day every day for 30 days, using the daylight robbery electric rates in my city, will run me $4.83 cents per month.

Neat.  Not really, actually.  That really sucks.

Once you do this for a few of your appliances (for a real soul crushing experiment, try it with your Air Conditioner or your Washer), you will soon realize that supplementing your power consumption with renewable energy like solar and wind becomes much more appealing than you might have originally thought.

Soil-less vegetation production methods are not only viable for legitimate food growing purposes but are also much more efficient than other methods.  Hydroponic techniques are viable for Vegetables, Fruits and Herbs.   Some of the most significant advantages of Hydroponic (soil-less) food production are noted below (chart taken from Hydroponic Food Production):

Let's start with yield comparison for soil-less (hydroponic) vs soil cultures for one acre of grow space (you can extrapolate for larger/smaller areas - most people that grow for personal consumption, for instance will work with areas much smaller - i.e. their garage or back yards):

Wow.  How is hydroponic production able to provide such vast output on the same surface area?  Here are some major points...

• Plant nutrition is completely controlled.  Grow-medium can be easily sampled, tested and adjusted - this can even be automated.
• Plant spacing is limited only by available light therefore closer spacing is possible giving you an increased number of plants per unit area.  Plants can also be arranged in the vertical dimension, provided you can pump the nutrient solution to the plant roots and the foliage can get sufficient light (take a look at the strawberry picture at the end of this post).
• There are no weeds and no ongoing cultivation requirements
• There are no soil-borne diseases, insects or animals in the grow medium.  Crop rotation is no longer applicable.
• There is no water stress due to poor soil-water relationship.  You can also use relatively high saline waters.  Water is used efficiently to the point where no loss is incurred beyond surface evaporation.  If managed properly, water loss should equal transpirational loss.
• Fruit bodies are firm with especially long shelf life.  Probably due to increased cellular integrity.
• Only small amounts of fertilizers are necessary.
• No biological agents are added to the plant nutrients, eliminating the possibility of human disease organisms (no more e-coli spinach!)
• With adequate light control, plants will mature faster and will generate larger fruit bodies.
• At most, depending on the type of food being grown, the growing medium needs to be changed out once every few years.  At best, it never needs to be changed.   No need to Fallow.

A simple, efficient and sustainable soil-less food growing operation can be run right out of your garage or even your backyard.  Nothing beats home-grown vegetables and herbs. For example, if you want two pounds of potatoes every day, you need about eight plants which is no more than a few square feet of space. The hydroponic potatoes are free from musty flavor/smells and will probably be the best you have ever eaten.

• If you want a supply of carrots every day you should have about six to eight square feet of carrots in production. Then plant two square feet every two months, and have three crops going. That should supply about half a pound of carrots every day.
• If you wish to have two medium sized onions every day, it will require about four square feet of growing space.
• An average 2 car garage is around 500 square feet.

Now that I have hopefully wet your appetite, I'll get into specific techniques in later posts.  Enjoy.

Yes, these are hydroponically grown strawberries.  DELICIOUS!

Eventually, you realize that the current model of resource allocation in most of the world is not only unsustainable but is also deeply flawed and clunky at best.  The resources I'm talking include everything you consume such as food stuffs, clothing, utilities service like electricity, water, and anything else that you might want or need.

Most of "the grid" is currently structured is some sort of monolithic fashion.  Essentially, it's one big pipe with several  choke points.  Why do food prices go up because oil prices rise?  Because your food is grown manufactured somewhere in east-bum-#&*$-egypt and then shipped to you via boats, airplanes and trucks.  If more food was produced locally, oil prices wouldn't affect food prices nearly as much. 

Remember, when recently you couldn't get tomatoes anywhere because of some contaminant? That happened because all the food comes from the same suppliers and when there's a contamination in one part of the chain, all the links become suspect.

That's just one example of how all resources are dependant on all other resources under the current system of production/distribution.  Without getting into the many absurd details, suffice it to say that when one part of the big chain breaks down, the whole system breaks down all over the place (most often in the entire country and sometimes, like in the case of the financial system, the entire world). 

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