Bioponics: How Organic Hydroponics Works for Cannabis

Bioponics is organic hydroponics: you grow without soil, but instead of synthetic salts you feed with certified organic nutrients and a living crew of microbes that break them down in the water. To understand it, you first need to know what hydroponic growing is.

Hydroponic grows skip soil entirely. Instead, they use nutrient-enriched water and an inert medium that keeps the roots anchored and hydrated. You can learn more about hydroponic growing in this article.

So, what exactly is bioponics?

What is organic hydroponics (bioponics)?

Bioponics is a hydroponic growing method developed by hydro veteran William Texier, founder of General Hydroponics Europe.

Bioponics means running certified organic fertilizers through a hydroponic solution alongside a growing medium. It's an alternative to hydro grows that rely on synthetic nutrients, aimed at more sustainable growing. It caught on as more and more growers got into the challenge of mixing techniques in search of healthier, more effective and better-tasting results.

Bioponics is related to hydroponics and aquaponics, but it focuses on fully organic nutrients, with the option of adding fish and other aquatic creatures to round out the nutrition. The technique has been around since 2005, when Texier patented the process.

How to succeed with a bioponic grow

To pull off an organic hydro grow, you need at least three things:

1. A filter on the pump:
   This is a big deal for healthy growth, especially when you have bare roots hanging in the nutrient solution. Keep in mind that the larger particles in organic fertilizer need to be filtered out well, since they can smother the roots.
2. Living organisms:
   They're what let you recreate the breakdown process that happens in soil. Microorganisms need somewhere to "settle": a well-oxygenated spot, out of the current created by the flowing nutrient solution, that stays moist. If they dry out, they die. In hydro you can use several kinds of growing media; the most natural ones are expanded clay pebbles and coco coir.
3. The right fertilizer:
   Not every organic cannabis fertilizer works for organic hydro. A bioponic fertilizer has to be liquid or soluble. It can't contain particles that are too big, and it has to break down quickly.

You can also add fish and other aquatic critters, like crayfish, to the system. That way the fish waste mixes with the added nutrients and gives the microbes even more to feed on. The result is a super rich growing environment that combines the best of organic growing and hydroponic gardening. That said, the fish are optional: you don't need them for a working bioponic system. 

A bioponic system needs allies in the form of microorganisms. But how do you get them? One way is to let nature do its thing. Microorganisms are always present in the environment. They're in the air, in the water, on us and inside us. They're everywhere.

If you go the natural route, decomposition will start slowly, and your plants may struggle until a reserve of nutrients builds up in the solution.

The better move is to speed things up by introducing trichoderma, a genus of beneficial fungi that colonize plant roots in a win-win relationship.

Organic nutrients: how to use Trichoderma harzianum

Trichoderma harzianum, along with plenty of other microbes, lives naturally in any good soil. But if your soil is dry, poor, fragile or just worn out, it's a good idea to add them along with your fertilizer to make it more fertile and productive. Obviously, in a home hydro grow you'll have to add these microorganisms yourself, and depending on your growing medium, you may have to adapt the habitat to what they need.

How Trichoderma grows and multiplies

This fungus needs a clean, airy, fairly warm environment that's well oxygenated and moist at all times. Not every growing medium works for this, or at least not very well. There are three main categories used in hydroponics:

• water-retaining media like coco coir or rockwool,
• fast-draining media like lava rock, perlite or clay pebbles
• growing with no medium at all, like in bare-root systems.

In a hydro system, of course, you have to add the fungi yourself, and depending on your medium, you may need to adapt the habitat to their needs.

With rockwool or coco coir, you just add the Trichoderma to the mix and it'll grow as long as it has food close at hand.

Clay pebbles, perlite and lava rock, on the other hand, are fast-draining media: they won't hold enough moisture. That's why we recommend mixing 10 to 20 percent coco coir into the medium before adding Trichoderma to the system.

Bioponics: pros and cons

Pros

• Lower water use, about 40% less water than traditional farming
• Helps with water scarcity
• Takes pressure off land use
• Higher yields in less space than soil-based organic growing
• Less spent on integrated pest management
• Little to no weeding
• More efficient use of plant nutrients
• Better control over climate conditions in home organic grows
• No soil required

Cons

• It doesn't suit crops with very large fruit or high-volume produce
• It's not an option for trees.

Bioponics offers a lot of different ways to reach higher nutrient levels in a water-based grow. In an aquaponic system, for example, nutrients come almost entirely from fish waste and fish food. In hydroponics, you add nutrients to the mix by hand. With bioponics, you build an organic environment by applying high levels of nutrients. That in turn draws beneficial microbes into the root zone, where they colonize the roots and boost both nutrition and the plant's ability to pull nutrients in.

These microbes are present in all healthy soils, but they're also well adapted to surviving in an inert medium. Trichoderma fungi do their job well, they're easy to find and they're cheap.

In terms of quality, harvests from different hydroponic techniques have the same flavor and nutritional value as the best organic soil-grown produce. It's almost impossible to tell the two apart, but bioponic grows have a slight edge, since bioponics removes some of the barriers that hold plant growth back.

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