Future Farming Starts Here
Operation: Hydroponics for Kids is on a mission to grow young minds and green up our planet! We teach kids the magic of hydroponics—growing plants without soil, using only water and nutrients.
It’s an exciting, sustainable way to bring fresh food and eco-friendly practices into everyday life. Our goal is to inspire young changemakers to nurture a greener world and lead the way toward a sustainable future.
Why Hydroponics?
Rooting for Change
Big agriculture, while vital for feeding a growing global population, often comes with significant environmental and health-related downsides. Many large farms use chemical fertilizers and pesticides to increase profits, which can lead to pollution of water systems and harm local ecosystems, leading to contamination that affects nearby wildlife and even human health.
Save our Soil
Big agriculture farming practices often cause soil fatigue—where the soil is so overworked over time that it gets stripped of essential nutrients and cannot be replanted. As the soil quality worsens, farmers are forced to use even more fertilizers to maintain their harvests, creating a harmful cycle of dependency on chemicals.
Water Wise
As the global population continues to grow, humans face increasing problems around water. Traditional agriculture uses large amounts of our country's water supply. However, there is hope! Hydroponics can produce a larger yield while using 70-90% less water, as in the hydroponics system, the water is recirculated and reused.
Climate Chaos, Controlled Crops
The increasingly volatile and extreme weather caused by climate change is a huge risk for traditional agriculture. “The Dust Bowl” of the 1930s, a period of severe drought and dust storms across the Great Plains of the United States, caused thousands of people to starve. Floods, the opposite problem, can also ruin entire harvests. The consistent and controllable environment of hydroponics mitigates the risk that weather poses to our food supply.
Miles Matter
We’re so used to being able to walk into a grocery store and purchase almost any type of food we want, regardless of whether it is in season or grown anywhere near where we live. But eating strawberries in NYC in January—for example—comes with a cost. The further a food has to travel from where it was grown to where it is consumed, by plane, train, or automobile, the higher its carbon emissions footprint. By tackling food miles with hydroponics, we’re not just growing plants; we’re nurturing a sustainable and resilient food system.
Planting Hope, Fighting Hunger
Hydroponics can provide easy access to healthy, fresh produce, and therefore help to eliminate food insecurity in our communities. Hydroponics can also produce high-yield food production in limited available space, while conserving water consumption. By localizing food in this way, we are no longer faced with barriers of transportation, equity, and accessibility to food.
Feeding the Future, Building Upward
As the global population increases year by year, so does our need for food. Studies estimate earth’s capacity—the number of people that can be fed by the planet—to be around 8 billion. The United Nations estimates that we passed this number in 2022. Because hydroponics can produce much higher yields in smaller spaces, they require much less land. Imagine; hydroponics skyscrapers, buildings just for growing fruits, grains, and vegetables!
