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| Heirloom Photo: Wikipedia |
Why is it
necessary to grow tomatoes without soil? As the video explained, such a crop
would assure necessary quantities of food for an “overpopulated planet,” plants
that grow tomatoes twelve months out of the year, over 500 tons annually, with
no risk of crop loss to the grower.
Hydroponic
tomatoes are nourished by a system of tubes feeding directly to the root of
each embedded plant a mixture of water and nutrients necessary for accelerated plant
growth.
A plant
grows naturally by extracting necessary nutrients from the soil. However, these
plants are being fed continuously by a computer that calculates what it takes
to keep the plants alive and to grow tomatoes as quickly as possible. A cocktail is mixed in the high-tech kitchen that
includes calcium nitrate, potassium chloride, mono-potassium phosphate,
potassium nitrate, potassium sulphate, magnesium sulphate, etc. The grower
claims that the plant absorbs these chemicals and metabolizes them into other
substances that are not harmful to humans.
Dan Borotea,
a former engineer turned entrepreneur, claims that his tomatoes are beautiful, perfect,
and his plants are disease-free.
Another
grower, Andrei Barbu, selects his seeds from organic tomatoes and dries them
out. To begin the growing season, Barbu painstakingly drops a few seeds into tiny
squares in seedling trays filled with soil. His seeds are small and yellow in
color while the hydroponic seeds are much larger and green, treated with the
special fungicide. Barbu’s seeds are going to be planted in dirt, watered, and
a plant will grow the natural way without chemicals. He is dependent on good weather
and never knows when a disease may attack his beautiful three week-old tomato
plants which are then planted outside the nursery.
In the new
buzzworld of “sustainable plant protection for high quality,” Romania was the
first country that authorized Initium products.
Grape growers and tomato, potato, cucumber, and onion farmers added to
their crops since 2010 the special fungicide called Enervin for grapes and
Zampro for vegetables in order to speed production and fight late blight and
downy mildew.
“Because of the very favorable environmental profile of
Initium, the products were authorized in the record time of four years,” said
Roland Ringel, Head of the Initium Global Development Project. “And in fact,
Initium products are not only in high degree environmentally compatible, they
are also very user-friendly – they dissolve rapidly and dust-free in water,
thus saving time and ensuring extra safety.” http://news.agropages.com/News/NewsDetail---2088.htm
According to AgroNews, “BASF’s comprehensive range of
sustainable crop protection solutions” also includes Cabrio Top, a
multi-disease grape fungicide that will “more than double crop protection.”
“Initium-based products are currently available for more
than 30 specialty crops, including grapes, potatoes, tomatoes, lettuce and
other vegetables, in more than 50 countries.” http://news.agropages.com/News/NewsDetail---11924.htm
Research must be conducted to determine if there are
side-effects from Initium fungicides in humans who consume fruits and
vegetables treated with Zampro, Enervin, or Cabrio Top.
Through hard
labor, Barbu was able to deliver organic tomatoes to the markets in Bucharest
for more than five years. An extremely rainy season in May and June of 2014 brought
a fungus to his tomatoes and Barbu lost almost half of his crop. After the June
rains, a dry August prevented many of his tomatoes from ripening. By then he
lost two-thirds of what he had planted initially. The organic tomatoes were still
fragrant, juicy, not filled with empty sacks, but were not perfect-looking. Small
restaurants prefer Barbu’s organic tomatoes even though organic tomatoes can
cost as much as five times more than the hydroponic variety.
The
difference is quite evident to gourmet chefs. The organic tomatoes are juicy,
tasty, fragrant, with thin skin, while the hydroponics have thick skin and are
tasteless and dry. It is alleged that the content of lycopene is much
diminished in hydroponic tomatoes, below 38 percent, while organic tomatoes
have over 60 percent lycopene.
Are vitamins
and minerals still present in the hydroponic tomatoes in the same
naturally-occurring concentration? Could it be possible that they are no longer
containing substances that might help fight certain diseases in humans?
Could it be
possible that large manufacturers of chemicals have encouraged and promoted
hydroponic and hybrid agriculture in order to maintain sales and profit
margins? Could it be possible that the use of too many chemicals has caused the
death of millions and billions of bees that naturally pollinate so many crops?
The planet
does grow plenty of food. But if you listen to the merchants of doom and gloom
of the United Nations, we are going to starve to death. They base their
predictions on computer modeling of population explosion which mimics Thomas R.
Malthus’s 1798 prophecy that population growth would outstrip food supply.
And speaking
of Malthusian predictions, the developed world population has a fertility rate
problem but the third world does not. To address the need to feed a growing
third world population, developed nations can and do produce more food which
they export, sell, and, when needed, donate to needy and overpopulated underdeveloped
nations.
It is not true
that we are not growing enough food; there is certainly enough misinformation
circulating under the guise of settled science based on computer modeling which
has been proven wrong time and time again. We are having a distribution problem
born by inadequate planning, improper delivery, and storage of food. Interference
of third world governments exacerbates the problem when they allow donated food
to rot, using it as a bargaining chip, instead of distributing it to those who
need it.
Additionally,
dictatorships prioritize spending on war machines instead of on food for their
people. Wars that create refugees also create severe shortages of food and
famine. Droughts and plant disease occurring naturally or through human
mismanagement of water resources to protect an endangered species such as the
delta smelt in St. Joaquin Valley, California, are also causes of potentially
insufficient quantities of food. Last but not least, destroying infrastructure
and the labor markets that support food production can have a devastating effect
on domestic agriculture.
Ileana Johnson 2015
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