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4 Responses to “What is the nutrition difference between a Tomato grown in soil and a Hydroponic grown Tomato?”

1. bilberrybrian Says:
   May 25th, 2008 at 9:18 pm

   After some searching my conclusion is that very little professional research has been done regarding nutritional values of hydroponic produce.

   The first article I came across, clearly favoring hydroponics, even mentions a lack of research. Perhaps I just haven’t searched thoroughly enough but my feeling is that scientists have more pressing questions to explore.

   It cites one particular piece of research titled “Overview of nutrition in hydroponics” by Dr. Cees Sonneveld. This was made available at the Australian Hydroponics Conference at Melbourne in 1993. After further searching the collection of papers from that conference are available from the National Library of Australlia website. It *should* contain Dr. Cees Sonneveld’s research. If so inclined you could order a copy.
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   The same article from the first website also cited research by Plant Research Technologies Incorporated. Interestingly I can’t find anything out about this company, not even a physical address.

   The main point is that if a person claims to know the answer to your question they probably don’t. Simply taking something known to be true for a handful of plants and then making a sweeping generalization based on it and claiming is true for many more or all plants is making a terribly naive error. Additionally it would completely destroying whatever credibility they might have had.

   Plants are sophisticated and produce many chemicals throughout their life that contribute to the perceived quality of produce that people enjoy. Many factors can affect this and soil gardening versus hydroponic gardening would make a minor difference compared to others like proper nutrition, pest management and so forth.

   Hope this helps.

2. wildturkey1949 Says:
   May 28th, 2008 at 2:48 am

   The first answer has a lot of good information in it — read it carefully.

   The problem is that either method can produce very good or very poor tomatoes. It all depends on the moisture, light and nutrients available to the plant.

   Hydroponics requires the nutrients be added to the water so the producer can control it precisely. In soil some may be missing.

   But a good producer will make sure the plants have plenty of both.

   One big difference in the two is that hydroponics are usually grown in greenhouses so disease and insect damage is easily limited. They are also generally hand-picked and sold locally so they are riper and better tasting than the tomato picked a little green so it wouldn’t get damaged in shipping.

   But the bottom line is that there is little or no research on which is best, possibly because there are so many variables involved and the results would be of little practical value.

3. donfletcheryh Says:
   May 29th, 2008 at 4:29 am

   Conventional practice in hydroponic growth of any crop is to collect a lot of the crop specimens from a wide range of soils, and analyze the plants to learn all the nutrients in the plants.

   Or one just analyzes the plants where they are particularly good. This conventional practice gives a starting point for experimentation to accomplish a nutrient blend that approximates the needs of the crop.

   The next step in this trial and error process is to grow test plots with a few hundred variants, all clustered close around that original blend.

   This will likely give us a recipe for something that will give satisfactory results. From that we go on to refine the blend just as we do with soil cropping. We try to see whether given varieties or light levels might need different blends. And we try to generalize, find a blend that works well under a wide variety of conditions and varieties, because commercially we need to produce a range of varieties in light conditions that will not all be optimal.

   None of that is unique to hydroponics. One thing that is unique to hydroponics. We never see any effect on the crop when we have high or low selenium levels. Plants grown in soil will have a selenium level that the soil provides, often enough. But trial and error in hydroponics does not give any guidance, so we will have plants with low selenium levels in most cases.

   Organic hydroponics, where we use green manure as our source of plant nutrients, and the green manure is grown on soil with neutral pH or lower, will almost always have an acceptable selenium level, and if the green manure crop is a well mixed species, the overall nutrients appear to be always adequate if not spectacular.

   If green manure for hydroponics be grown on high pH soils, above 8.4, we will have some nutrient deficiencies, as we will have when we grow in that soil. But in particular selenium will be deficient. Green manure hydroponics otherwise gives a better blend of nutrients than the soil with ph above 8.4 for most crops.

4. piqchure Says:
   May 31st, 2008 at 7:43 am

   The contents of the fruit, in this case, a tomato, come from the medium in which it was grown.

   What was in the dirt will be processed by the plant as it grows the fruit. What was in the hydro solution will do the same.

   As long as all the necessary components are available, no difference should exist in the nutritional makeup of the fruit.

   Hydroponics is thus better in 2 ways:
   1) you can control the nutrition of the water simply by adding it to the solution, whereas with dirt, you must take into consideration what other organisms will do with what you apply (some break it down and make it unavailable to the plant)
   2) the yields of hydroponics is at least 2 times more in the same amount of space. Aeroponics can yield upwards of 10 times more for the same amount of space a dirt garden would grow.

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