The greenhouse paradox

The industrialization of agriculture has long been driven by the promise of technological control over nature. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the proliferating field of agrotechnology. One emblematic example is the “global greenhouse boom” (Zimmerer and Bell 2025), in which closed-environment agriculture is promoted as a way to manage environmental uncertainty and secure high yields in an era of climate volatility. In four years of ethnographic research with Romanian migrant farmworker families in an Austrian high-tech greenhouse cluster, I learned that such techno-solutions to the climate crisis generate problems of their own. While greenhouses enclose the environment to optimize conditions for accelerated plant growth, the humid microclimates they create can be extremely taxing on the human body. For migrant farm workers, caring for plants in these spaces often means enduring debilitating heat stress, regimented work rhythms, and precarious labor conditions.