I noticed that thread, too, and had a good pounding-my-head-against-the-wall session about it.

This reminds me, too, of a thread I had some years ago on Reddit that was also about hydroponic farming. The other guy also had the idea that hydroponics would change everything, and would also shake off all the corporate control of farming. As if large scale hydroponics wouldn’t also become the new large scale corporate farms. Or that Monsanto would see the market shift and go “whoops, guess we’re irrelevant now”.

I bring this up because I’ve noticed a trend of hydroponics advocates. They see the problems with our farming system, which is fair, but drink deep of the hydroponic flavor-aid and don’t understand the other problems of what they’re talking about. This tends to overlap with techno-fetishism. Grow plants in dirt? Like we did when we first learned to make fire? Move over, because I’ve got something that will make it way better without knowing how the current system works.