"These houses, kitted out with special hydroponic equipment, can produce £70,000-worth of cannabis every 11 or 12 weeks, raking in big profits for the organisers, who are predominantly Vietnamese".
And it has already set up an "experimental vertical hydroponic food system", which allows it to grow animal feed, such red chard, mizuna, edible flowers, wheat grass and barley, on site.
Hydroponic gardens, by contrast, need to be thoroughly sterilised between harvests.
This semi-automated hydroponic facility in Antarctica is used to provide each of the 65 staff of the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station with at least one fresh salad a day during the winter months, when supply flights to the station are extremely limited.
Today, new advances such as genetic engineering and hydroponic farming promise further boosts.The other reason for the taboo is that official attempts to control population have a dark and disturbing history.
And for those who prefer a healthier diet there is also a hydroponic greenhouse where fresh vegetables will grow all year round.Each of the 750 people who will pass through the base in a typical summer season will have the luxury of a private room with a phone and an internet connection.
Between 2006 and 2009 Dr Caplow and his colleagues operated the Science Barge, a floating hydroponic greenhouse moored in Manhattan (it has since moved to Yonkers).
(They also killed the last goats, which was probably fair enough since the shipwrecked now had other options, including vegetables grown in experimental arrays of hydroponic tanks, the island lacking the fertile soil needed for their support).In the 1960s Ascension found itself again on the way to somewhere: space.
Dutch farmers, too, are attracted by SALSA's work on recycling the nutrients used in hydroponic farms (which grow crops in nutrient-enriched water, rather than soil).
When I'm in dire need of some humidity, I think I'll go to the station's hydroponic greenhouse to suck down some deliciously wet air.The two previous, less luxurious incarnations of the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station were slowly buried under snowdrifts as the years passed.
For a skyscraper-sized hydroponic farm, that is clearly impractical.
