Hydroponic farm tile requires pipe to be hooked up to do mealwood

Why trying to plant mealwood in hydroponic farm tile, instead of the standard "farm tile" that does not require liquid input ? O_o

If you are building a glossy drecko farm, you need to feed the normal dreckos in the farm mealwood, until  you can replace them with glossy dreckos. At that point you can continue to feed them mealwood or you can switch to bristle blossom. If you switch to bristle blossom you can use a hydroponic farm.

If you could replace the normal farm tile by building a hydroponic farm tile over it, that would be an easy solution to this. But you can't. You have to deconstruct the farm tile and build a hydroponic farm tile in empty space.

This would also not be a problem except the gas environment in a glossy drecko farm is very delicate, because for efficiency you probably want the whole thing to be hydrogen except for a narrow strip along the bottom, ideally one tile. You'd think you could just remove the farm tile, replace it with a hydroponic tile, and everything would normalize quickly. Fact is that the moment you remove the farm tile, gasses get jumbled up and your farm tiles stop producing, because they are immersed in hydrogen. And if this ever normalizes I wasn't patient enough to wait for it to happen. It certainly doesn't normalize within a cycle or two.

So to answer your question, I plant the mealwood in a hydroponic tile because otherwise trying to switch from mealwood to bristle blossom in a drecko ranch is a nightmare.