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Nutrient Film Technique (NFT) · Hydroponics Daily

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  Hi, welcome back to Hydroponics Daily. Today we're talking about NFT.
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  No, not the cryptocurrency scammy tokens.
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  This is nutrient film technique and this is the most popular form of hydroponics commercially.
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  So it's the one that's used in greenhouses to grow cucumbers,
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  tomatoes, chilies, all sorts of different crops.
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  And it's called nutrient film technique because your nutrients run along in
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  a film underneath the plants.
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  So you have a big tank with your watering, your fertiliser, so it's mixing together,
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  and you might have an automatic dosing system. You might have an automatic pH up and down.
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  It can get very complicated very quickly.
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  You might have sensors in there to control and monitor things like oxygen levels,
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  pH, electrical conductivity. They're the main three.
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  And then you'll have a pipe running to your plants, and then the water will
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  run downhill on a gully system, normally through a rock wall slab,
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  or that's the trade name. The technical term is mineral wall.
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  And then your plants sit in there, root into the rock wall, and feed on the water.
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  And then once the furtigation solution reaches the
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  end this is my attempt at drawing a pipe runs back
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  and then the pump will pump it back into the tank or there
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  might be a pump before or after the tank it doesn't really matter a pump is
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  always required unless you're running to waste which is bad for the environment
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  and is a waste of nutrients so you always want to have a recirculatory closed
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  loop system if you can there might be lights above here or it might be a greenhouse and as i say it's
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  it's used the most often because it's the it's
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  often judged to be the best for those crops and the advantages
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  are of this system are that you get lots of nice to
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  the roots so lots of oxygen for a fast-growing plant
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  the roots need oxygen and so the rock wall is nice
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  airy medium and the slabs and other
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  advantages are you can fit a lot of plants in there very quickly and
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  other advantages are that yeah it's it's it's a low volume system that doesn't
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  have lots of pots or things like that so it's good from that perspective you
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  might have a filter somewhere in the system to take out chunks of sediments
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  or bits of root or bits of rockwool that have got blocked or algae biofilms.
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  You might have an ozone sterilizer you might have a uv sterilizer we'll talk
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  more about them in other episodes there are a couple of disadvantages of this
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  system the main one being that the The slabs of rock or mineral are not covered in plastic.
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  They can quickly get covered in algae, and you can get biofilms building up
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  in the gullies, and they need to be cleaned regularly.
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  What are the disadvantages of that? There is another disadvantage is that for crops,
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  for indoor sort of hobbyists or small growers in grow rooms,
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  they're not really conducive to growing in smaller areas and you need more gullies.
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  And the longer the gully, the more efficient it is.
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  And for larger plants like cucumbers or the plant that can't be named,
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  you're not going to get much root system into these. So they were very popular
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  in the UK, even for hobbyists, until about 10 years ago.
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  And it's very difficult to get a hobbyist NFT system nowadays.
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  So keep your eyes out for them. If the pump fails, the system fails.
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  And there's not going to be any water left in the gully if the pump fails,
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  unlike a DWC where you'll get the tank will remain in there in most systems.
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  I've used it commercially for growing samphire marsh samphire it's it's a great system and.
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  It's it's it's the one that's used most commercially you'll see vast
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  greenhouses like thanate earth down
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  in kent the largest greenhouse in the world or it was at the
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  time it was built they use this system and it's a
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  very good system try out nfts if
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  you if you have if you use gold leaf
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  or as it's called in the uk liquid gold you don't
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  even need a tank really if you're running you run
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  to waste because you can dose this into
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  a straight into the tap water and because it's a complete
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  fertilizer with ph optimization as long as you shake the
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  bottle once a day you can literally have a dosatron running that and that's
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  something we've explored with strawberry growers so sort of off-grid nft it's
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  sort of perfect you can run a solar powered pump just pump in with a dosatron
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  straight into the bottle of fertiliser and there's no other fertiliser you can do that for.
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  So nutrient film technique, check it out. That's been Hydroponics Daily.