Focusing on the pursuit of production efficiency is no small matter for farmers. The world has now reached 8 billion inhabitants. Maintaining the crops needed to feed this huge population is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity. Vaclav Smilin his well-documented work Feeding the world. A 21st century challenge analyses in detail the characteristics of this challenge, starting with the concern that we must be concerned about whether the basic triad of land, nutrients and water will be sufficient to feed a population that will soon reach 10 billion human beings on earth.
This is no joke. Recently we are seeing how the dysfunctions created by drought, wars or pandemics are putting the food production chain under severe stress. The old spectre of famine threatens to loom over the weakest regions of the world within that chain.
But the aforementioned author is not totally pessimistic about humanity's ability to meet this challenge. And he is not because we humans have shown throughout our history that we are capable of improving efficiency in all the basic processes of our lives. And farming, as our most fundamental and necessary process, cannot escape this rule.
That is why at Mochana Green we have the pursuit of production efficiency as one of our fundamental principles. The aim is to achieve the maximum possible output with the lowest possible consumption of resources. Earth, water y nutrients must be measured out as the scarce commodities that they are.
We have already spoken in another article in this blog about our commitment to systems that recirculate water so that water consumption is kept to a minimum, as this is one of the weakest elements in the production chain mentioned above. It is normal that with traditional cultivation and increasingly widespread irrigation systems, aquifers tend to be overexploited. And we cannot allow water scarcity to limit our productive capacity. For this reason, we are committed to recirculating hydroponic systems, so that we minimise the use of water in crops.
But the other major element is land. With a growing population, the land available for cultivation will also tend to be insufficient. This is why there is no choice but to set up systems with an ever-increasing rate of production per area of land occupied. Our hydroponic greenhouses more than comply with this principle. The yield per hectare in this type of infrastructure can double or even triple the results of a traditional plantation on land.
There is still the matter of nutrients. In our greenhouses, as fertilisers are controlled by the irrigation system, the amount of product used decreases as it is more efficiently delivered to the plant. The use of highly prepared substrates to facilitate rooting and the absorption of water and nutrients also plays a role. And this is improved with reverse osmosis systems that allow us to use pure water, free of the salts dissolved in it. The reduction in conductivity that is achieved facilitates the absorption of nutrients. This is one more element in achieving a higher degree of efficiency and quality in production.
Our agricultural systems require significant investment to get up and running, but they dramatically increase crop productivity. This is not an option but an obligation for a humanity that has to compete more and more for access to the planet's resources. That is why one of our fundamental principles is the pursuit of the highest possible productive efficiency in our crops.