Retailers who support the agricultural community provide a vital service. They deliver a range of goods that are key to growing success; the best will often form a consultative relationship with their clients, keeping them advised of key trends and developments in agriculture.
Many growers take a manual approach to water use, irrigating without systems or controls in place to ensure consistency. This can be problematic: Too little water, and plants will wither; too much, and they wallow, with root damage, mold, and other negative effects.
When people talk about agriculture, sunshine and rain seem like basic ingredients. That’s typically true—but only up to a point. Increasing numbers of growers are finding indoor farming to be a powerful and profitable alternative to tilling the soil outdoors.
Growers looking to boost productivity can leverage hydroponics to enhance their operations. Automation can help them take it a step further, improving yields while simplifying operations and adding new levels of efficiency.
To understand how technology can enhance a hydroponic growing system, it’s best to start with the basics: What is hydroponic farming and what advantages does it offer?
For many startup cannabis growers, a grow tent offers an agile and economical way to get a crop under cultivation quickly and easily. To make the most of a grow tent, though, it makes sense to adopt the latest technologies.
In order to understand just how sensors and automation can leverage a grow tent’s inherent advantages, it is important to start with the basics. Let’s take a look at what a grow tent is and why you might want to use one. Then we can dig into the how and why of monitoring technologies and agro-management tools.
The technology media has been enamored with “smart” solutions lately. Smart cities generate data to better manage pollution, crime, and traffic. Smart homes lean on wireless technologies and automation to simplify daily life. Smart cars may soon navigate the highways with minimum human intervention.
Expanding an indoor farm from a single small room to multiple grow rooms can create—for lack of a better expression—some growing pains. Entrepreneurs often find that what works in a small grow room with a few plants doesn’t work in larger grow rooms. The environment is harder to control. Precise nutrient recipes are harder to hand-mix. And it’s harder to do it all with so many things pressing for time and attention.
Even in the best of seasons, profit margins may be slim for commercial greenhouses. Agriculture has never been a get-rich-quick venture; it takes patience and perseverance to come out ahead.
