I grew up in a farming community in Newport as a young boy and my grandparents, they had an acre farm, which is a lot, you know, aunts and uncles, and everybody came over and farmed.
It was just, it was ingrained in US.
My name is Rob Galloway.
We're at the nursery here in Little Rock, AR.
We are a nursery that has a farm component to it.
We're the only hydroponic and home brew supply store in Central Arkansas.
It's merged the the farm with with with the residential retail sales and I've been telling a lot of people that you know we're we're trying to just farm and trying to teach people to farm.
That's really my goal here.
All of our lettuce production and and and those foods are grown with hydroponic nutrients and so I'm supplying the nutrients to the water.
Hydroponics is really just growing plants in a soilless medium.
I mean it can be just Rockwool, Coco core and any kind of I mean just pebbles, you know, so you just put the plant into the medium and then you get the water with nutrients and so that's really all it boils down to.
It's, it's lettuce, it's it's, it's it's leafy greens, you know, right now.
And so we can do you know, Bibb lettuce, romaine lettuce, all the curly ones, all the red ones, you know, collard greens, turnip greens.
We can do bok choy, Swiss Chard, herbs, anything you really want to grow tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, zucchini.
I've done pumpkins, watermelons.
We sell to some restaurants here locally.
Any kind of food bank or any kind of nonprofit.
In the purpose of farming is great because you're bringing something to life.
You're managing it.
You're you're you're sharing it with others, you're bringing people together.
It has a lot of the boxes that you check.
So when hydroponics, we're really a water quality control company, you know, that's why I kind of look at it if if my water is great and then my plants are happy, you have to start with your source water and you just make sure that the pH is balanced.
So then you add your nutrients.
If it's too much, you're gonna make them sick.
And if you starve them to death and don't put enough nutrients in the water, then they're gonna do the same thing this started.
So you find that magic number for whatever crop you're growing, and then you get the right amount of nutrients in there.
Soon for a target around 1516 hundred, I have a little anachronism that's called deep lawns.
Lawns would be lights, air, water and nutrients and seeds.
You have all of those to grow plants, right?
And then the deep would be these disease, energy equipment and pests.
Those are some of the critical failure forms, right?
Those are some of the things going to take out your farm.
You're going to have success if you just do the basic water things right.
Just trial and error and DIY.
Few cycles of just doing the water, seeing how it goes.
My plants aren't growing, um, you know, they're they're short, they're not doing right, they're sick and it's really you just start diagnosing the symptoms at that point.
Online, it's there's a million videos out there.
This is just basic 101 stuff.
I mean, people will have success with it.
It's just gonna be how much yield based on your your farm, which could be your bedroom or 25 greenhouses.
On a home level, you know hydroponics can be as grandiose as you would want it or as simple as you want it.
You can have it just so it's on a rack on a table, on a shelf where the plant just sits in the water.
One plant, or you could scale it to a sands rank.
You could get off the shelf and then put 150 plants on there so you can scale it to whatever you want to at home.
A2 foot by 6 foot rack with four shelves, you can get 36 plants harvested on one shelf.
So if you dedicate two of those shelves for your growth space, you can get 72 plants on there.
So really, you know, 20 plants a week would not be out of the question, 30 plants a week, 40 plants a week.
It's just really how well you are at at managing your tool as a farmer.
If you talk about what's important in hydroponics, it uses 90 to 95% less water, right?
I mean we are in drought issues.
The second one is that it opens up all boundaries.
You can grow when the soil is not good, if it's rocks, if you don't have the land, etcetera, all of those things.
But the third one is really just going to be about the quality.
The reports say that your, your produce can lose 50% of its nutritional value within the 1st 24 hours of being harvested.
We can harvest it today and get it to you.
Hydroponics can bring that step closer to you're getting more than nutritional values from.
With with the hydroponic, you'll get faster yields.
You know you're gonna get a bigger plant that grows faster, that's healthier, and then it can be harvested whenever you want it.
Another thing Hydroponics does is get you indoors those extra levels of protection from these crazy weather swings we're having right now.
If you're into tech stuff, I mean I'm, I'm in automation and so all my farm is getting built around automation.
You know, from my farm I can manage all of my inputs of the sun, the shade cloth, the fans, my flow meters, my pumps, my lighting, my and then they're telling me too if my water nutrients are wrong, it'll dose it for me.
So the redundancies getting put into place.
So it really increases yields by decreasing some of the symptoms because you can catch them earlier.
Right now, I would make a really good product.
We we keep our nutrient levels constant.
You know, we keep all this system constant and there's only like three of us working here at this nursery.
That's it.
I'm seven days a week.
I mean 1000 plants a week is totally doable in this greenhouse with one person and moving a lot of customers through here is doable with one or two people.
Some of the challenges that we face in in hydroponics industry is just getting people to adopt it.
It's getting them to do it at a home level.
Hydroponics, what it does is it opens up boundaries.
And you know, if you don't have big money and and and big opportunities and you can't go get big land, do you have a spare bedroom?
We can provide for our families by growing and we can start at our home and start growing individually.
Then you can help your neighbors.
People are wanting to try to get into farming and this is a great way to do it without spending a lot of money.
And if you don't have those big deals, like we said, you can go and start in your home.
This segment of good roots is made possible by support from Acre Trader.