Let's not forget that I AM a commercial grower, at least a small one, whereas you are blowing bubbles in a bucket of water with a $6 air pump. First, I don't believe that you grow anything commercially, simply because you haven't learned the differences between the 6 types of systems yet. Second, you have no idea what plants I have grown, or even how I build the systems I grow them in, or even why I make the design choices I do. Again that type of stuff you only learn by doing, and I have done plenty. That's why I'm building my greenhouse to grow commercially for our local community. And I have never bought, or ever will buy a commercial hydroponic system, I know how they work, and how to construct them for the plants needs. I do however enjoy looking at commercial systems, but I have never seen one yet worth the money. The Aeroflow (which I was buying, disassembling, and re-building into a better machine ten years ago) does not use misters. Well the new ones I have read about do use misters. The aeroflow isn't exactly nft. It does represent the manner in which system designs tend to overlap. I never said it was a strict NFT design, but it's a NFT with modifications. But the modifications don't change the fact that it's classified as a NFT system, and not even close to the water culture sub-category of DWC (recirculating or not). I would give you NFT/recirculating water culture if the roots were at least half way submerged, and the pump runs 24/7. The roots would need to be at least 75% submerged 24/7 before it could be considers any type of water culture system. Including a stagnant water culture system (no pump at all), or a water pump only recirculating water culture like you recomend. Roots grow in the thin layer of "nutrient film" as the very shallow layer of nutrient water cascade down back into the reservoir. This design takes advantage of what I keep telling you, which is that almost all of the oxygen in any body of water will be at the very top, thus the importance of maximizing surface area. It has nothing to do whatsoever with your false statements about how much dissolved oxygen is at the top of the waters surface verses farther down. Furthermore, no mater what you do it's imposable to raise dissolved oxygen levels above the waters dissolved oxygen saturation point. The plants in a NFT system get water and nutrients from the flow of water, they get very little oxygen form the water. They get 90% plus of their oxygen from the roots that are hanging in AIR above the water line. Hopefully you can see that the "types" of systems are not very well-defined. The most popular machines combine properties of the different classifications. The six types of hydroponic systems are clearly defined for those of us that that know what they are, how their different, and what makes them work. That's how you learn to identify the systems, know their pro's and cons, and the very first thing anyone getting into hydroponics should learn (something you clearly have trouble with). As I already mentioned that doesn't mean that you cant combine aspects of more than one type in the same system. But only by knowing what makes them different, how and why they work can you identify the primary system type of any system (again something you clearly have trouble with). But combining different aspects into the same system doesn't create a new type of system. It creates a sub-category/classification under one of the six primary system types. The waterfarm is really just nft over rocks. These types of statements are exactly how I know you haven't learned how to identify the six types of hydroponic systems yet, and why I posted the definitions for you in the first place. High-pressure aeroponics, when built over a table or tube, actually becomes an nft system as soon as the pump cycles off and the misted water flows back into the reservoir. First there can be more than one sub-classification. Aeroponic/NFT would only be the case if the roots were long enough to reach the bottom of the root chamber, and if the water level was shallow. Second, It could just as easily be a aeroponic/water culture system or even a aeroponic/flood and drain system. That's where knowing what makes all six types different, as well as what makes them work. Without knowing those fundamentals you don't know how to classify it, or even how the modifications affect your plants for the desired effect. You simply use livestock watering troughs that you can reach across. Or build your own out of a wood frame lined with a pond liner. Being able to get to the plant to harvest is a challenge with any growing method. I have also seen some cement troughs as well. But any way you build it, it will cost ten times as much to build/construct verses using a drip system instead. Real commercial growers have done their homework and know that drip systems are much more cost effective because they did. Not if you buy the nylon stuff, kiddo. Look up the "Florida weave." It's standard commercial practice for tomatoes, inside or out. First that isn't twine old man. Twine is a organic product, that is a synthetic product. That's why referring to things in the proper context is important if you want people to know what you are saying. But regardless that doesn't change the fact that you would need to use more than three times as much of it to support tomato plants in a water culture system verses the same crop grown in a drip system. Again there is just no need to make things harder or more complicated than they need to be. A RDWC system lid does not "float," You can use lids and baskets to support the plants, if you design it well enough to be able to support all that weight, again much more costly on a large scale for commercial growers, and for absolutely no benefit over using a drip system either. a simple post in the ground on either end anchors the twine to hold up the plants. I can also attach to the greenhouse hoops overhead, another very standard commercial practice. You must be thinking of growing in really short rows if you think two stakes (one on each end) will support all the tall tomato plants with no root support. Commercial growers grow them in long rows to make the most of space. And I know very well that the poly string used in commercial tomato production is usually attached to the greenhouse structure. But that has nothing to do with my point about needing to use a much, much more extensive support structure to support the weight of hundreds and hundreds of large tomato plants that have no root support verses the support structure needed for the same crop that has root support. Support that not only helps the plants stand up without falling/tipping over easily, but also supports much of the overall weight of plants foliage and fruit as well (needing much less artificial support). Again more work and expense for absolutely no benefit over using a drip system. Run to waste drip into perlite is the current standard for hydro tomatoes. It does waste water and nutrients, as well as typically just dump the runoff back into the ground, another environmentally damaging practice. Your using the wrong places to use as your role models if you feel that way. Today's commercial non recirculating drip systems are fine tuned to keep the roots moist, yet have very little run off. And coco coir, and pine shavings will hold moisture much better than perlite will. However I do agree that some commercial run to waste systems do just run off into near by soil. However even so that's far less of an environmental concern than how traditional agricultural floods their large fields with thousands of pounds of chemicals every year. But again, newer well planed run to waste systems run the run off into aqueducts that only water the field grown crops. If they don't have any close by, it's run back into the sewer system where sewage treatment plants process the water. If they don't have a city sewer system, or near by field grown crops, the run off is typically just ran back into the soil. Environmental concerns do not factor into commercial standards, at least until the government passes relevant regulating laws. Yes, but the government has been doing just that for over 100 years. Ever since the big dust bowl (I forget what year) that was caused by soil erosion from farming practices. You simply wont get any city to grant a business license for a commercial agriculture business without the city granting you the yearly water rights for the amount of water you expect to use. And in the event that the figures in your business plan were wrong, your not likely to be allowed more water. At least not without heavy fines anyway. The biggest benefit of DWC over any other method is that the large body of water regulates root temps. Not exactly, a water culture system with a depth of over ten inches doesn't necessarily constitute a large body of water. Ten inches deep and ten inches wide is less than 7 gallons. One cubic foot of water is 7.48 gallons, I don't call that a large body of water. Though it is true that the larger the amount of water there is, the slower it will be to change (raise or lower) temperature. But in my experience and weather conditions, relying on water volume to keep water temps down in our summers require 100's of gallons, as well as a in ground reservoir as a minimum. That's why my 3 greenhouse reservoirs are 300 gallons, and 4 feet deep in the ground, as well as insulated from above ground heat. Because ground moisture is a big factor in how well geothermal energy works, I will be installing soaker hose around the reservoirs, and set on a timer to keep up good ground moisture as well. That's what you are seeing when your bubbler bucket seems to work so well. It's not the magic bubbles that make the bucket work, so much as it is the temperature regulation of the roots. But if you would set up those buckets as RDWC, you'd have several times better results That's such a a bunch of BS. You have no idea how I built my water culture systems, or seen them working. You have no idea what the water temps were, how the temps affected the plants, or any of the observations that you would need to see to come to any conclusions. But rest assured if I took out the air pump and only used a water pump instead like you recommend to people, the plants would have just wilted and been extremely sad looking. The water pump would be better than using nothing at all because the falling water would help aerate it, but the roots themselves are helped ten fold by the direct contact with the air bubbles themselves. That's a well known concept that completely goes over your head, and you just are not able to understand that simple concept of how much that helps. I have nothing against using falling water to help aerate the water. But it's simply a mistake to solely rely on that alone in a water culture system if you want healthy plants.

Yes, welcome to the forum Sameboat!! I joined about 8 years ago when I was stressing over my first time hosting a holiday dinner in my new house. And I was 44 years old so NOT a new cook or hostess but I'm mostly vegetarian and my family asked for organic turkey. Now what did I know about cooking a turkey??!! Folks here held my hand and were so friendly and nice I stayed. And I am a firm believer in the school of thought that Chase mentioned, food tastes best when served in a warm, relaxing manner by a happy hostess!! There's a whole bunch of us here who are all into short cuts, low cal, low carb, high carb, store bought, "inexpensive", whatever floats your boat, no apologies!! Diversity is the spice of life and the spice of the kitchen! So take your shoes off (I don't want mud tracked in now!) ;) and stay a while!!

I debated on whether to add this since it is long. It was submitted by Marys1000 back in Oct '08. Don't know which forum. But it was a lot of fun to read and you might enjoy it: Here is an article I found very informative in my search for info on pie crusts. She spent a lot of time actually baking with lard, oils, goose fat, and even suet. November 15, 2006 Heaven in a Pie Pan: The Perfect Crust By MELISSA CLARK A FEW years ago, I achieved perfection in a pie crust and it smelled like pig. Not in a muddy, barnyard way, but with a very subtly meaty, nutty aroma. Carefully confected with part butter and part freshly rendered lard, this pie pastry was everything baking-book authors and bloggers wax poetic about: a golden-brown-around-the-edges epiphany richly flavored and just salty enough to contrast with the sweet apple filling, the texture as flaky as a croissant but still crisp. It shattered when you bit it, then melted instantly on the tongue. The only problem with my masterpiece, I told my guests as they licked the crumbs off their plates, was that I was never, ever going to make it again. Because what they didnt see was the outsize effort that went into acquiring and preparing the not-so-secret ingredient: leaf lard, the creamy white fat that surrounds a hogs kidneys. The veritable ne plus ultra of pig fat, its far superior to supermarket lard, which is heavily processed stuff that can have an off taste. But leaf lard is hard to track down (I special-ordered it from a friendly butcher) and a headache once you get it. Step one: pick out any bloody bits and sinews, chop the fat into pieces, and render it slowly in a double boiler for eight hours. At the end of the day, be prepared for a kitchen that smells like breakfast at a highway diner, and a pan full of dangerously molten fat crowned with cracklings. The leaf lard may have made great crust, but, like homemade cassoulet and puff pastry, this was a culinary Everest I felt no need to climb twice. Everest became a lot more manageable when I discovered that rendered leaf lard was available at the Flying Pigs Farm stand at the Union Square and Grand Army Plaza Greenmarkets on Saturday and by mail order. With this convenience at hand, I decided to have a pre-Thanksgiving pie crust baking binge to see whether, with the prep times and mess not being a factor, lard pastry was really the best when tested next to my favorite standby, an all-butter crust. Or was my memory of the lard pie crusts sublimity simply a hallucination caused by long hours of porcine toil? And while the kitchen was a floury mess anyway, why not test a variety of other fats to see how they affected the flakiness and flavor of the final crust? With fat as my variable, I decided to keep all the other ingredients in the crust as straightforward as possible. That ruled out using a mix of flours with different protein levels (like bread flour, cake flour and Wondra). For this pie, I went with all-purpose all the way. But before I started baking, I did some research in the pie crust recipe canon. Most crusts were a combination of shortening and butter, or all butter, so I started there. I first made five crusts: all-butter; all-shortening (I used the trans fat-free kind now on the market); 50-50 butter and shortening; 70 percent butter to 30 percent shortening; and vice versa. Crisp, flaky and sweetly luscious with deep, browned flavor, the all-butter crust was the hands-down favorite. The shortening crust, however, was a bust among tasters. Even when combined with 70 percent butter, all agreed that the unpleasant greasy film the shortening left on the palate was not worth the vague texture improvement. Shortening is much less expensive than butter. Is it popular with bakers because of the cost? Rose Levy Beranbaum, author of "The Pie and Pastry Bible" (Scribner, 1998), gave another explanation. Because shortening is manufactured for stability at extreme temperatures (both hot in the oven and cold in the fridge), it is very easy to work with, she explained in an interview. "Shortening crusts enable you to get fancier decorations that will hold up when you bake," she said. Once she mentioned it, I realized that even the quickly crimped borders on my shortening crusts stayed pert in the oven compared to the butter border, which melted into Gaudí-like undulations. With round one going to butter, I next experimented with oil crusts inspired by the Mediterranean appeal of a pie pastry scented with extra-virgin olive oil holding a caramelized pear-pomegranate filling. I tested several olive oil variations, chilling the oil in the freezer before cutting it into the flour, and trying other desperation measures like adding egg to one, baking powder to another, and some butter to a third. Then I went on to test canola oil, grapeseed oil, coconut oil and ghee. Not one managed to even get close to a minimally acceptable flakiness level. I had better luck using chilled mixed-nut butter (you could use any natural nut butter, such as peanut, hazelnut, cashew, almond and so on). Combined with regular butter, it turned out a marginally flaky, cookie-like crust with a toasted nut flavor that goes particularly well with pumpkin pie. A dozen or so pies down, it was finally time to pull out my hero, the rendered leaf lard. I pitted it against an array of animal fats beef suet (the fat surrounding the kidneys), duck fat and processed supermarket lard just to see what would happen. The processed lard was not available at my Park Slope supermarket, but I scored it in a nearby bodega. I ordered rendered duck fat online, and picked up suet from the butcher, who charged me a token dollar and told me he usually threw it away. Then I baked and baked. The whole house took on a rich pastry scent with undertones of roasted meat and butter, tinged with ginger, nutmeg, thyme and honeyed apples from the fillings. Not wanting to give up the flavor of butter entirely, I tested all the recipes using half butter, half other animal fat, and also at a ratio of 70 percent butter to 30 percent other fat. I also made a few crusts using all high-fat, European-style butter. The crusts were spectacular, each in its own way. The high-fat butter produced a crust that was markedly flakier, more tender and puff-pastry-like than those made with regular butter. It also shrank a bit less when I pre-baked it, and had an irresistible, browned butter flavor. This was the perfect crust for anyone not inclined to include meat products in a dessert. But overall, the favorites were the crusts using 70 percent butter and 30 percent animal fat. Any more animal fat pushed the meatiness factor too far onto the savory side of the pie spectrum, making these better for quiches than for fruit and custard fillings. Of the three animals, pig, cow and duck, the duck fat crust had the lightest flavor and, texturally, struck the best a balance between crisp and flaky. The pie crust revelation, however, was the suet pastry. As easy to work with as the shortening crust, it retained its shape perfectly in the oven, baking up crisp yet marvelously tender and flaky. It was nearly as delectable as the leaf-lard crust, tasting rich and slightly meaty, though not identifiably beefy. Suet is easy to find (most butchers can get it for you) and inexpensive. One caveat: suet is sold unrendered, but, as I discovered by way of my own laziness, you do not need to render it. Simply cut out the pinkish bits, finely dice or grate the chilled white fat, and toss it in with the butter. More refined bakers might blanch at the idea; if youre one of them, go ahead and render to your hearts content. Still, the leaf lard crust was as gorgeous as I remembered. Puffing up in the oven, and crumbling deliciously when you cut it, it took the crown. That very mild hint of bacon was happily still there. Not so with the processed lard pastry, which had an off flavor veering toward barnyard. Now, after my brief moment of pastry satisfaction, Ill move onto the next obsessive round of pie crust testing. Theres a whole roster of fats Ive yet neglected goose fat, marrow, foie gras fat, browned butter, truffle butter ... and if anyone out there has a source for bear fat, Ill try that too.

One time a cop pulled me over for running a stop sign. He said "Didn't you see the stop sign?". I said "Yes, but I don't believe everything I read". Steven Wright