Hydroponics and geopolitics: soilless farming and visions of state power, c.1936–1972

From the late 1930s to today, the technological lure of hydroponics has inspired many geopolitical imaginations of planetary transformation. Hydroponics, or soilless farming, refers to a bundle of technologies to raise crops outside of arable land, using nutrient solutions in water, sand or gravel media. Envisioned as a technology with the potential to overcome food scarcity, soil exhaustion and climate limitations, hydroponics featured in many 20th-century geopolitical imaginations, often as a tool unlocking greater state power over formerly inhospitable regions and reducing territorial competition. In this article, we investigate three such geopolitical imaginations, as articulated by a raft of agronomists within the US Army, the Zionist movement, and the British Commonwealth. Engaging with these agronomists as international thinkers, we reveal how they fabricated geopolitical visions of hydroponics as part of new infrastructures of American transoceanic airpower, Israeli desert reclamation and postcolonial community development in South Asia and Africa. Through these three cases, we argue that geopolitical imaginations of hydroponics traded in distinctive geographical imaginations, epistemic politics and ideas of state power, placing emphasis on transforming frontiers, controlling plant productivity and enabling the contrasting politics of military hegemony, territorial occupation or postcolonial democracy alike. To conclude, we reflect on how hydroponics remains entangled with geopolitical speculation today, amid concerns with global climate change and agrarian shocks. Casting present-day anxieties through past futurisms, we suggest future avenues for the study of hydroponic imaginations within historical International Relations.