Hydroponics, answered plainly.

It depends almost entirely on two things: the area you are covering and whether you need a structure over it. A bare NFT system in an existing shed is a different order of cost from a naturally ventilated polyhouse built from scratch on open ground. Rather than publish a per-square-foot figure that would be wrong for most people who read it, we would rather you tell us the crop and the area and get a written quotation with actual quantities on it. That is free and there is no obligation.

Leafy greens are the reliable starting point -- lettuce, pak choi, spinach, mint and coriander all do well in NFT channels and turn around quickly. Vine crops such as tomato, capsicum and cucumber suit dutch buckets rather than channels, because they need the root volume and the support. Root vegetables are possible but rarely worth it. If you are growing for a specific buyer, tell us who and what they want, because that changes the answer more than anything technical does.

Substantially less than a soil bed of the same area, because the solution recirculates rather than draining away -- what the plants do not take up returns to the tank and goes round again. The honest caveat is that you still need a reliable supply and reasonable water quality to start with: hard borewell water can need treatment before it is worth running through a system, and that is worth finding out before you build rather than after. We will look at your water as part of sizing anything.

NFT -- nutrient film technique -- runs a thin film of solution along a shallow channel past bare roots. It suits light, fast, shallow-rooted crops, and it packs a lot of plants into a small area. Dutch buckets hold a volume of inert media per plant with solution fed in by drip, which suits heavy vine crops that need root mass and something to anchor to. Most working setups end up with both: channels for greens, buckets for tomatoes and capsicum. We make both, so we have no reason to push you towards one.

You can run hydroponics in the open, and people do, but what limits you depends on where you are. Across much of central and western India the summer is the problem rather than the rain -- sustained high temperatures stress leafy crops badly and a bare system gives you nothing to manage that with. On the coast and in the east it is more often the monsoon. Either way a naturally ventilated polyhouse buys you shade, airflow and some protection from pests, and it is usually the difference between a crop that works through the year and one that works for part of it. We build them, and we will also tell you when your site does not need one.

Yes -- protected cultivation attracts support under National Horticulture Board and state horticulture schemes, and for polyhouse construction it can be a meaningful share of the project. We are deliberately not printing rates or eligibility here, because both are revised often enough that anything published would eventually be wrong and somebody would plan around it. Ask us and we will tell you what currently applies to a project your size, and point you at the department that actually administers it.

Daily, not much: checking the solution level, the EC and pH, and looking at the plants. Weekly, mixing nutrient and cleaning filters. The real answer is that hydroponics is less physical work than soil and more attention -- a pump that stops matters within hours in a way that a drip line stopping in soil does not. That is worth knowing before you commit. We walk you through the routine at handover and stay on the phone through the first cycle, which is when the questions actually arrive.

Channels, buckets, grow media and nutrients ship anywhere in India -- they are manufactured goods and they travel. Polyhouse and greenhouse construction is site work, so where we build depends on the size of the project and where you are; ask, and we will give you a straight answer rather than a maybe. For system supply we provide installation support either way, so you are not left with a pallet of channels and a diagram.