It holds the plant up
Replaced by the structure: a channel, a net cup, a bucket of clay balls, a slab. This is the easy one, and it is why grow media does not need to be fertile — only stable, clean and able to drain.
The basics
What is hydroponics? Farming without soil.
Hydroponics is growing plants in water and nutrients instead of soil. The roots sit in a channel, a bucket or a bed of inert media, and everything the plant would normally hunt through the ground for is delivered to them directly, in measured quantities, on a schedule you control.
That is the whole idea. The rest of this page is what follows from it — why soilless farming behaves differently from a field, what you actually grow in, and how to tell whether it suits what you want to grow.
/01 How it works
Soil does three jobs. Hydroponics splits them up.
It helps to be precise about what soil is actually for, because a system that replaces it has to replace all three jobs and they come apart in different ways.
It holds water
Replaced by the solution itself, recirculating past the roots. A field holds water badly: most of what goes onto it drains past the root zone or evaporates. A closed system returns what the plant did not drink.
It holds nutrients
Replaced by the mix you make up. In soil the plant takes what happens to be there, in whatever ratio the ground and the last crop left it. Here you set the ratio, and you can change it when the crop moves from leaf to fruit.
Once those three jobs are separated, most of what people find surprising about hydroponics stops being surprising. Plants grow faster because the roots are not searching. Yields per square metre are higher because you can stack, and because nothing is lost to weeds. Water use drops sharply — substantially less than a soil bed of the same area, though we will not put a percentage on it, because the honest answer depends on your climate, your crop and whether your system recirculates.
/02 What you grow in
If not soil, then what?
Grow media is the inert stuff the roots sit in. Inert is the important word: it feeds the plant nothing. Its whole job is to hold the plant steady, hold a little moisture, and let air get to the roots between waterings. These are the four we manufacture and supply.
Expanded clay pebbles
Clay balls — sold as LECA, hydroton or simply clay balls — are baked clay fired until they puff into light, porous spheres. They drain fast, hold air well, never rot and can be washed and reused for years. The default choice for dutch buckets and for media beds. We stock 8–15 mm and 15–30 mm.
Coco peat slabs
Coconut husk, compressed into slabs. Holds far more water than clay does, which suits long-season fruiting crops on drip — tomato, capsicum, cucumber — where a buffer between irrigations is an advantage rather than a risk.
Oasis propagation cubes
Where seedlings start. The cube goes into the channel or the bucket with the plant still in it, so nothing gets transplanted and no root gets torn.
Nothing at all
In an NFT channel there is no media past the propagation cube. A shallow film of nutrient solution runs along the base of the channel and the roots sit directly in it. That is the purest form of soilless farming, and the cheapest to run for leafy greens.
/03 The systems
Three shapes, and the crops that suit them
Almost every commercial hydroponic setup in India is one of these three, or a combination. Which one you want is decided by what you intend to grow, not the other way round.
NFT channels
Nutrient film technique. Solution runs in a thin film down a sloped channel; plants sit in holes along the top in net cups.
Suits
Lettuce, spinach, rocket, basil, mint, pak choi — anything harvested for its leaf on a short cycle.
Dutch buckets
Individual buckets of clay balls or coco, fed by drip and draining to a shared return line. Each plant gets its own root volume.
Suits
Tomato, coloured capsicum, cucumber, strawberry — long-season crops that are trained upward and picked over months.
Vertical towers and racks
The same principles stacked, so the growing area is multiplied by the number of tiers rather than by the floor.
Suits
Leafy greens and herbs again, where the ceiling is space rather than light — rooftops, sheds, peri-urban plots.
/04 The case for it
Why it gets called modern farming
Not because it is new — the technique is older than most people assume — but because it answers the specific problems Indian growing is running into now.
Water is the binding constraint
In a recirculating system the solution the plant does not drink goes back to the tank rather than into the subsoil. Where groundwater is being drawn down faster than it returns — much of Maharashtra, most of Punjab — that is not a sustainability talking point, it is the reason the switch gets made.
Land quality stops mattering
A system does not care what the soil under it is like, because it is not using it. Saline ground, rocky ground, a concrete rooftop, a shed floor — all the same to a channel on a stand.
You grow through the seasons that used to be gaps
Under cover, with the root zone under control, the summer that would have ended a soil crop becomes a matter of ventilation and shade rather than a lost quarter.
The produce is cleaner and travels better
Leaf that never touched soil arrives without grit in it, and that is a real price difference into restaurant and retail buyers rather than an aesthetic one.
And where it is the wrong answer
Hydroponics costs more to set up than a soil bed and it does not tolerate neglect: a pump that stops on a hot afternoon is a problem within hours, where a field would have given you days. Staple grains and most root crops make no commercial sense in it. If you are growing wheat, or if the plot already grows what you want at a price that works, the honest advice is to leave it in the ground — and we will say so on the phone.
Next
If this sounds like what you are after
We manufacture the equipment at our own unit in Katraj, Pune and ship it anywhere in India. These are the pages worth reading next.
Where we work
Hydroponics, region by region
What is worth growing, and what a structure has to cope with, changes a great deal between a hill station and a plain. These pages cover the crops and the conditions in each.
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Maharashtra
Hydroponics in Satara
Satara is two growing climates in one district, and they want two different structures.
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Maharashtra
Hydroponics in Pune
This is where the channels are actually made.
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Maharashtra
Hydroponics in Mumbai
In Mumbai the constraint is never sunlight. It is floor area.
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India
Hydroponics in Maharashtra
One state, and about five different arguments for growing without soil.
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India
Hydroponics in Punjab
The state that grows the most is also the one being asked hardest to grow differently.
Tell us what you want to grow.
The crop decides the system and the system decides the quantities, so that one answer gets us most of the way to a quotation. No obligation at the end of it.