'Low-tech solutions needed to deal with water shortage'

Added on 02 October 2023

Tags

'Low-tech solutions needed to deal with water shortage'

Agritecture is an advisory services and technology firm focused on climate-smart agriculture, particularly urban and controlled environment agriculture. An important topic is water management, because of the growing shortage in the world. Founder and CEO Henry Gordon-Smith however believes the solution mostly lies in creativity.

Gordon-Smith is an acknowledged global thought leader in the accelerating vertical and urban agriculture industry and has facilitated, moderated and spoken at sustainability-driven forums and events worldwide. In the past, his work field was water. It is a topic that still interests him. “That's why I love hydroponic cultivation and recirculation systems. To me, the first foundation of re-using and managing water properly, is having a system that can recirculate and recapture some of the water instead of wasting it. You can do that in a low-tech way or in a high-tech way. Recently I visited Egypt for a project using sandponics. This form of aquaponics uses sand beds to host plants and filter water. There is a lot of sand in the desert, and they use it in a very simple infrastructure. This is where a lot of the principles begin: what do you have locally available? Especially when you have a low-cost project. When you think about saving water, we need to think about the lowest cost ways of saving water in many cases. Simple structures, net houses, drip irrigation and sandponics have therefore interested me a lot lately.”