LIVE Shop Talk 2: Talking Hydroponics and High Tech, Sustainable Farming

hello guys this is palma porter from top tech boy calm and we are here today with a live chopped talk to talk about hydroponics on our last shop talk there were a lot of questions about hydroponics so I just wanted to kind of share with you today a video on high-tech gardening and so I'll be taking you on a quick tour of our hydroponic greenhouse so come on in it's a little bit of a mess in here right now because my focus is on producing food and my focus is not on keeping things really really neat but I want to go through some of my hydroponic systems this is a thin nutrient film system and this system is what we grow our greens on and you can see that we are having exceptionally strong results in growing greens now I grow things where I'm planting in stages so that I'm harvesting every day and with this system we are able to harvest 6 heads of Breed each day and we're growing bok choy these are very large bok choy we're blowing purple bok choy and then we're doing two different types of lettuce and so each day we will we will be will harvest three heads of lettuce two heads of this large green bok choy in one head of the park purple bok choy so everything at six large pull is and I'll kind of take you this is the pop coin this is the purple bok choy this is the bit of lettuce obtained the Bibb lettuce and then this down here is romaine lettuce and you can see that we are planting in stages and so if you want to come here closer and kind of look down the road this row of twelve is ready to harvest this row of twelve is ready to harvest this robe was printed up planting a week earlier this one a week earlier this one a week earlier this one is two weeks old and then this row here is the seedlings that we've just planted and so these are the youngest ones well also we have a little tray where we have just the seeds and so you can see that we're on a seven week cycle these are one week old two weeks old three weeks old four weeks old five weeks old and here at six weeks we're ready to harvest and see you can see that we have these zones let's come back over here and see how this system works as far as I guess I can show you that there is no there is no soil or no growing media these things just grow in a little trickle of nutrient solution they go down in the tray there's no growing medium that's right but everything is fed through this tank here okay in this tank has basically I create par low water because I want to control the nutrients very very carefully and so this starts with RO water very very pure reverse osmosis water and then we put nutrients in it the nutrients are mixed from a powder I've created two very very highly concentrated BAPS of nutrient this is one part this is the second part you can't mix high concentrations of multiple different chemicals or the chemicals begin to precipitate out so the high concentration I have to have one set of chemicals here one set of chemicals here then when I filled this tank when I fill the tank then I just get a scoop of nutrient of a scoop of nutrient D and put it in there and then I that system and I monitor the nutrient solution in the nutrient solution we should see an electrical conductivity about 1.8 would be ideal and so I would drop this down in there [Music] okay it's coming up again 1.8 would be ideal and it looks like we're not quite there about 1.2 so what I'm seeing is what the conditions right now I should add poly a half a cup of the two things to bring the nutrient concentration up a little bit it's not critical the things would be very happy at this level but a little bit higher similarly I've got a pH probe and I can probe the pH so once a day I will fill the tank adjust the nutrients so what happens down in this tank we have a pump the pump comes up right here it's filtered okay then it goes down this pipe alright it comes up this pipe and then it goes into these two black hoses and then the black hose has kept smaller hoses and those smaller hoses give a nice little trickle to the plants okay because these hoses are small they're subject to clogging and that's why I have to use that filter that you have to have the water filter before it gets here but if we peek inside here if you can see inside you can see that it's just a tray it's just a stream creating a little a little stream of nutrients and the roots just dip down into that and they get exactly what they want and they just grow really really really well I should say we're not even running this at maximum capacity because with five people in the home in producing six large heads of greens it's all we can do for lunch okay so this is the NFT system it's based on continuous circulation okay we're continuously circulating in once a day I refill the tweak and adjust the nutrients doesn't take much time at all five minutes a day and then once a week we plant our seeds for the week and then for the first week the seeds are growing in here then they're moved to the system and we replant the seedlings so it's a system by which we are constantly we are constantly harvesting okay our system is a Dutch bucket system and here we have the tank in the floor because the tank has to be below the level of the buckets and that way as the nutrient exits the bucket it drains back into the main supply tank this is an example you can see that down in the tank we have a pump to pump it's on a timer it comes on for five minutes every couple of hours so it's not continuously recirculating it's speeding once an hour for about five minutes it comes up this black hose it goes through this filter again the key with hydroponics is you have to filter filter filter or he will end up with these cloth from here it comes down this black hose and then we have these emitters with these things injectors that inject the nutrient into the bucket let me see if I can turn this on okay I just hit the on switch it's on a timer but I can turn it on manually and you can see when I turn it on it gets a drip that drip feeds the bucket the bucket has a perlite grow medium it's like a very light almost like puffs drops okay that goes down and feeds it again it's on a timer and then you can see that the tomatoes here are very very very good these are cherry tomatoes the one thing I have to do since there's no animals in here I have to pollinate I just use this toothbrush and I come and every day I just get the blues and these will therefore pollinate just by kind of shaking them a little bit you don't have to do this but you get a lot better production a lot better yield if you just take five minutes and get the blooms every day so that is tomatoes in Dutch buckets over here you can see there's very happy it's doing very well and it should be beginning to put on very small cucumbers like this will make a cucumber here's a small cucumber in less than a week that cucumber will be ready it over here we have mature mature you can see that this one is about ready to take out it's gotten so big that it's kind of gotten too too big you can see the small cucumbers here that are you know will be ready in the next probably four or five days they grow incredibly fast but what you can see is I want this one I want this one producing before I take this one out and so it's not so much that I want to produce 50 cucumbers in a day what I want to produce is I want to produce constantly store every day I can come out and have some cucumber I'll show you again back to this Dutch bucket system that after you can see that this has been dripping well as this has all the water it needs the excess water begins to drain out of this little hole okay and then it goes down into this tube or into this pipe here and I accidentally knock this off so I'll put it back on and then this grey line comes back in brings back in here so you're not wasting any water you're not wasting any nutrient and see if you can get a you of the excess running back into the tank so again it recirculates with the difference I can go ahead and turn it off and put it back on the automatic automatic circulation so these tomatoes were fixing to within a few days these cherry tomatoes will be right in ready to pick larger tomatoes and B as you can see are just very very healthy and see if you can show these these Tomatoes here that are coming on so you can see that those are very very happy and doing very well okay so that's system number two system number one is a nutrient and an old system that just has a little stream of nutrients it's great for growing greens you can grow all different types of lettuces all types of greens it's not good for other things because the roots will overtake the small traits but is perfect for greens and the Greens grow very very quickly the Dutch buckets are very good for bonds so we have tomatoes and we have cucumbers you can grow pretty much any type of bond that you want but those are the things we things were focusing on so that's the second trouble system the third third type of system that I'm looking at in here is organic soil okay so the hydroponics is great because it's very high-tech but we're also investigating we're investigating organic soils so you can see that we have these large buckets that we have an organic soil mixture in we fertilize with organic bat guano and sort of a fish emulsion so the fertilizer is all organic the soil is all organic and you're producing zucchini and you can see that we've got to be nice and teeny again we just picked these and so there's a couple there probably that one this afternoon this one down here this afternoon also we're always composting so any excess organic material we have we add to an important part of our scheme is earthworms each one of these buckets is just crawling with earthworms and so we we keep the worms in here so that as we throw stuff down as we throw stuff down the earthworms come up and eat it and so we're constantly generating on we're constantly generating compost with with this material I wish this was neater but again with all the different projects I'm doing I focus on getting a lot of food production not doing a lot of keeping things perfectly straight out here these tomato plants over here in the soil are about ready to be taken out okay they're about ready to be taken out and you can see that I've gotten a little bit behind on doing the pruning I haven't taken them out because they're still producing it so I'm kind of waiting for these Dutch bucket systems to start putting tomatoes on before I even take before I take these out because even though they're looking kind of ratty we are still getting a bucket of tomatoes from them every day what we're noticing is in comparing the hydroponics to the organics things grow twice as fast with the hydroponics and so like if we do the if we do the bok choy in hydroponic system it grows and matures twice as fast as it will with organic soil why am i doing organic soil and well just because I am Not sure as beautiful as these plants are I'm not sure that you're really getting all of the trace minerals because the only nutrients in the plant are the nutrients in the bucket that you use to create the nutrient solution from to where in soil with earthworms and decaying things and all of that you really are much more sure that you're getting all of those trace minerals that you would that you would like this is a nice bell pepper plant you can see that we've got an orange bell pepper that's just about to pick just about ready to pick and then also that here we are throwing hatch green chilies and so we are getting some just really exceptional chilies you can see that this one we've allowed to mature to be a red chili so what I will do is it's the same breed of pepper but this one we let to mature to the red stage they're also exceptional green so we pick them as a fewer turning red and a lot green we'll take them inside and roast them and then we'll chop them and then vacuum seal them and freeze them to create sort of a ready-to-use I will call it a salsa but just sort of a chopped roasted green chilli it's good on eggs it's good on hamburgers it's good in soups and so we keep the freezer full of these hot peppers process to top cut because we really we enjoy spicy food and so we produce these things year around so the freezer is always full so so those are the three systems organic soil nutrient thin film in Dutch buckets and those are the three systems that we're using this is a picture here of our water plant or this is a our water plant where we have these large capacity ro systems so that we can generate all the water that we need here because if you start with completely pure water you are much much more ease much more easy to get the nutrients perfect as you're not dealing with the minerals that are already the water so we we have gotten the best result to start with our water ok let's talk a little bit about environmental control you also want to keep the temperature perfect for joint conditions on the winter you have to keep it warm the way we do that is we have a hot water heater and this is a very very nice hot water heater very high efficiency and then we have a temperature sensor here okay so the temperature sensor monitors what the temperature of the greenhouse is in the winter and I try to put it on the good kind of average air temperature but what happens is it's the temperature begins to drop this control unit which is a PID controller will sense that the temperature is dropping so it doesn't wait until it gets cold it looks at the derivative of the temperature and sees hey it is getting cold or we are gonna have a problem soon and so it starts dealing with the problem before the greenhouse gets cold and when it sees that this is on its way to getting cold there is a pump here this red pump okay that red pump is hooked up to the hot water heater and in the concrete floor is apex tubing that goes back and forth and back and forth and back and forth so all in the concrete floor is this tubing when it begins to look like it is going to get cold the water and the hot water heater is always hot but then the pump turns on and takes that water and puts it into the floor but it's a very intelligent control system so it doesn't pump the water pump the water and pump the water and say oh look it's it's 70 degrees now I can turn the pump off no because by that time then the water would continue to heat he feed and you would end up with the greenhouse at a hundred degrees so it looks at the signal and it a very sophisticated analysis so it turns the pump off before it gets to 70 knowing that the temperature will continue to rise for some time so it's a very intelligent PID controller that is turning the pump on and off but basically you maintain just simply by turning a pump on and off with a hot water tank and then as you heat from the floor it works very well for hydroponics because all the bucket systems includes the roots worm which is what you really want to do now we have a backup if for some reason either this can't keep up or if all the sudden you the room is getting cold overhead here we have the natural gas furnace and so if for some reason the hot water heater malfunctions this will turn on and instantly heat the thing up so that you wouldn't lose the problem I am Not sure this thing has ever come on because this this radiant orchid system has worked so well it has worked so well but I don't think it's ever required this overhead furnace actually it turns out the easy part is to keep things warm the harder part is to keep it cool in the is to keep it cool in the summer so let's go outside and show you how that starts so we'll come around to the back okay CeCe we have the shutter system as the day begins to get warm temperature sensors inside will sense that and the first thing they will do is open one shutter here okay it will open shudder there's servos right we did Arduino lessons on servos the servos will open this shutter all the way up and then if that doesn't cool it off and the temperature continues to build the second thing that will happen is a fan on the other side will turn on to start drawing the air so this fan will come on and it will pull air through the greenhouse it will pull it from the outside through that open shutter and then through the greenhouse and out so the first thing that it does is to just bring cool air in and the fan comes on in low because again you don't want to overshoot where you're going you're getting a little too warm you don't want to freeze the plants out so you start trying to cool things gently first thing is the shutter comes open if that's not enough then the pan comes on low then finally the final thing that will happen if temperature continues to rise we have a wet wall here and on the other side of the wet wall is the shutter so if it's if the first shutter is open and the fan is on low and the temperature continues to build up what will happen then is the second shutter outside will open somehow two shutters open the fan will turn on high and then this tank of water has a pump in it this tank of water has a pump in it the pump will turn on come up filter the water and then go through a pipe here and cover these pads with water so that you're drawing the air through the water coated pads and that will cool it and then at that point you will stay cool also since we're in West Texas and it's very hot we have a shade cloth on in the summer now in the winter we'll take the shade cloth off of the in the winter we'll take the shade cloth off because then that helps to keep it warm but let's see John maybe you can come over here and just go scan around and show all of the nice production that we're getting we are producing a whole lot of food in this in this greenhouse we produce all of the vegetables that we eat in here and then we produce really you know way more than what we're and so this has just worked out really really well I mean while you're here show you one more aspect of our of our food production you can see that we're growing all of our vegetables we also have chickens and let me show you our chicken operation real quick so on this property we are on 10 acres and we just have free-range chickens and you can see one of them here that's just going around the nice thing about three ranges they get a neat what they want they they find a lot of their own food and since we don't have any poison of any type on this property it's very natural and very organic production this is our chicken coop very very simple the chickens have not no to go in there all we have to do is at not we have to go and we have to close the little door we do have raccoons and Fox and so we have to be diligent it does to close them up because the varmints come out at night and then to collect the eggs we just raised this up it's still pretty early in the morning so I don't think we'll have any eggs yet well there's one there but they usually lay their eggs about midday looks like we got another chicken coming in about about ready to to lay an egg but we just come out and gather the eggs here okay and then this you could have about 30 about 30 chickens in here our chickens are getting a little bit old and their egg production is going down so we have a new batch of chickens and that new batch of chickens is over here in our larger coop I think this tooth were told about a hundred but right now we have 35 of these and we're not letting these chickens out yet because they're about ten weeks old and we're letting them get a little bit bigger before we start letting them out and you can see we have a variety we've got the red star and the Easter layer the red stars lay big brown eggs and the Easter layers lay colored eggs and so when we collect our eggs we've got a nice nice variety of color in the in the eggs but probably in the next week we'll start letting these chickens out and so between these two coops we have room for probably a hundred and thirty-five chickens right now we have about four chickens that we are probably we have probably 45 or 50 chickens in given that were five people and that would produce 35 eggs a day again we're producing way way more than we can eat so what I wanted to talk today about is kind of high-tech sustainable farming and and kind of combining technology in the greenhouse with kind of old-school production like the backyard chickens and the organic farming we're kind of trying to bring together the high-tech with the traditional organic and trying to create a really sustainable sustainable system would love to hear your comments down below what you think about this is this interesting technology is this stuff you would like to hear more about or would you just rather hear about Arduino programming ok palma quarter from top tech boy comm you guys leave your comments below and I will talk to you guys later

Channel: Paul McWhorter

Views: 4,413

Keywords: Hydroponics, Organic, Sustainable Agriculture

Id: 1e1ILTYWPBg

Length: 27min 2sec (1622 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 15 2019