(gentle banjo music) - Normally when you think about farming, you think about live soil and sunshine and rain, but what about soilless farming?

At Freight Farm, all this takes place in a shipping container next to an elementary school in Morgan Hill.

These kinds of farms, which are actually hydroponic farms, are being dropped down in different places around the country and are becoming more and more popular around the world.

They're great because you can put them on concrete in the middle of a city or on the roof of a building.

They offer other advantages.

For example, you don't have to worry about storms or blistering heat or drought.

So normally, we grow our plants in live soil using sunshine and rain and irrigation systems, and they send their roots deep into the soil to gather their nutrients.

But in a hydroponic system, the plants are growing in an inert pod made of coconut fiber or peat moss, and their nutrients come from a water system that has a solution of minerals placed into it.

So these are very different systems.

In the hydroponic system, there's no sunshine.

What they're getting for UV light is actually LED lights that are very specially controlled.

So as a family doctor, I was wondering what is the difference in nutrition between these two plants?

Of course, if you're really gonna ask this question, you have to compare apples to apples or in this case, lettuce to lettuce.

And these are clearly not the same variety of lettuce.

So to do the study, you really need to put the same seed into a hydroponic system and also into soil and then measure the nutrients in both of them after you harvest them.

It turns out that those studies have been done, and the results are quite interesting.

Yield was actually a little higher in the indoor hydroponic farms because there are no environmental conditions to challenge the plants, and you can get an optimal amount of the key growth minerals such as nitrogen.

This is great because it means more greens for more people.

They also found that the concentration of minerals in the indoor and outdoor plants were about the same because indoor farmers can put these minerals in the solution that feeds the plants.

Also, certain vitamins that are made by the plants in response to photosynthesis and UV light, such as ascorbic acid, chlorophyll, and betacarotene, were also about the same, or sometimes they were even higher in the indoor system because these nutrients are highly light-sensitive and can be destroyed by too much light.

Sugar and fiber content were also about the same.

But when you look at one major class of nutrients we call phytonutrients, the plants grown outdoors consistently had more of these.

Basil, for example, had twice the amount of polyphenols, one of the phytochemicals.

There are thousands of phytochemicals, and we're constantly discovering more.

It makes sense that outdoor plants would make more phytochemicals because they do this in response to environmental challenges such as bugs or viruses or blazing sunshine.

These substances act like inborn defense systems and help plants protect their selves and recover from injury.

These phytochemicals offer us, the eaters, similar protection.

They help our cells recover from injury and radiation.

Some studies strongly suggest that diets rich in phytochemicals, especially from fruits and vegetables and legumes and spices, offer protection against certain cancers, heart disease, diabetes, and neurologic diseases such as Parkinson's.

Kind of a mixed bag when it comes to results.

And although these indoor farming systems really do offer a lot of benefits, I don't think they're gonna replace outdoor farming anytime soon.

I think that there's a role for both of them.

And I'm especially interested in how hydroponic science might help produce medical foods for people with various health issues.

Food scientists are exploring how they can add or subtract various minerals from the nutrient solution and tailor the mineral content of the plant to address specific health needs.

For example, you could grow vegetables with low potassium for people with advanced kidney disease who have trouble processing potassium.

Or you could boost the calcium, silicon, and boron in the mineral solution to grow plants that help with bone health.

This is all in investigation right now, but is a promising thing for the future.

Thanks for checking out Freight Farms to learn about the difference between soil-full and soil-free farming and how they both contribute to our health.