Average crop yields per hectare
Introduction
Farmers are constantly talking about crop yields in hydroponic cultivation and how different techniques, additives and methods can be used to produce more plants. However, what is the average yield you can expect in a hydroponic product for a particular plant species?
Where are these returns measured and what can you expect from your product? In this article, I will discuss the average yield of hydroponic crops per hectare, why our expected number is not close to the actual number in practice. You will find that meeting greenhouse owners’ expectations of crop yields is not easy and depends on a complex combination of variables.
The table below compares the average yields of some soil crops with hydroponic crops per hectare.
the product | Soil cultivation (kg) | Hydroponic culture (kg) | soy | 272 | 703 |
|---|---|---|
Beans | 5000 | 21000 |
Peas | 1000 | 9000 |
Wheat | 272 | 1860 |
Rice | 453 | 2267 |
Oat | 453 | 1133 |
beet | 4000 | 12000 |
potato | 8000 | 70000 |
cabbage | 5896 | 8164 |
Lettuce | 4082 | 9525 |
tomato | 5000-10000 | 6000-300000 |
Cucumber | 3175 | 12700 |
The table above is from a book published in 1998 by Howard Rush. However, if you look at the seventh edition of this book (published in 2013), you will not find the table above anywhere. I do not know why this table is removed from the book, but it may be related to problems using high efficiencies, or those efficiencies do not have realistic expectations for medium hydroponic settings. This does not mean that the book is bad – I consider it a great introduction to hydroponic cultivation – but it does show that lowering expectations for simple tables can be problematic.
Below this post you can see another table. From an Indian article written in 2012. Finding these articles online is virtually impossible. So it’s very difficult to know where the data is really coming from. However, we can see that there are many similarities between these numbers and the numbers published by Howard Rush in his 1998 book, which show that the two tables actually have the same source. This table seems to have been widely used as a way to show that hydroponics can be superior to soil.
the product | Soil cultivation (kg) | Hydroponic culture (kg) | Corn | 6800 | 3628 |
|---|---|---|
Peas | 907 | 6350 |
Wheat | 272 | 2267 |
Rice | 340-408 | 5443 |
Oat | 385 | 1360 |
beet | 4082 | 9071 |
potato | 8000 | 70000 |
cabbage | 5896 | 8164 |
Lettuce | 4082 | 9525 |
tomato | 5000-10000 | 180000 |
cucumber | 3175 | 12700 |
soy | 272 | 6800 |
Cauliflower | 4535-6803 | 13607 |
Let’s consider the case of tomatoes. The yields of highly advanced large-scale greenhouses that can grow tomatoes throughout the year are 235 to 308 tons per hectare per year, while for growers who can only grow one crop per year – due to lack of proper water and Air / Light – The average yield per hectare per year is about 50 to 60%. Here we can see how technology can make a difference of about 2 times in results. Newer data from Pakistan in 2018 show an average yield of hydroponic greenhouse tomatoes of 65.5 tonnes per hectare compared to 4.07 in open ground. This difference is about 5 times the return reported in the United States in 2002.
The above indicates a very significant risk for people who want to produce hydroponic products under unknown conditions. Creating a business plan can be very difficult if you do not know how much product the business is producing. If you are in this situation, I recommend that you do not use any of the values commonly used on the Internet as a guide, as these values are often very swollen and show the potential results of the most ideal hydroponic drives instead of the average. The best guide to yield is to look at growers who are harvesting the same crop in similar conditions in your area. If this is not available, the cheapest way to get this information is to actually do a small scale experiment to see how much product you can expect.
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