Soilless Farming–The Next Generation Green Revolution

In recent years, due to a rapid increase in world population, many challenges have come to limelight. One of these challenges is the reduction in per capita land available for soil-based farming, which leads to other agricultural and environmental issues. Under these critical circumstances, it became necessary to develop advanced technologies and techniques to withstand the current situation. Although several works were carried out on cultivation of plants in soil and in vitro, few of these are concentrated on soilless cultures. Soilless agriculture is a new promising method for improving cultivation of different cash crops. Besides reservation and restoration of cultivation lands, soilless farming, especially close-loop system, has various advantages: it utilizes recycled fixed amount of water, saves 85–90% of irrigation water, can be implemented in areas unfavourable for ordinary farming, almost zero environmental pollution, better yield than conventional cultivation. In the present study, various techniques of soilless farming are elaborated and a basic design of eco-friendly soilless farming unit is proposed.