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

Abstract

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.

Introduction

[M]an in the past has been completely dependent on the soil for his food supply. [. . .] But hydroponics is agriculture’s first real competitor. (Gericke, 1940: 1)

Writing amid global war, the Californian plant scientist and inventor of hydroponics William Gericke opened his seminal Complete Guide to Soilless Gardening by claiming that hydroponics might well deliver humanity from age-old agrarian constraints and provide for an age of peace and plenty. In the future, he suggested extravagantly, hydroponics could deliver societies from hunger, empower smallholders anew, and provide a cheap source of renewable bioenergy. For International Relations, moreover, Gericke imagined hydroponics might well make wars of territorial conquest redundant, resolving conflicts over limited arable lands through technology. In such a world, he wrote, ‘nations such as Italy and Japan (. . .) worried by crowded populations and inadequate agricultural land’ would find a new means for self-sufficiency ‘within their own boundaries’ and lose all ‘reasons for seizing the rolling wheat fields of their neighbors’ (1940: 6). Though Gericke’s grand visions have not materialized, his fantastical imaginations of soilless futures continue to resonate among contemporary advocates of hydroponics as a sustainable food technology.

Today, hydroponics is a well-established technology used in controlled environment agriculture, responsible for large shares of the global greenhouse production. While hydroponics remains far from competing with soil-based agriculture because of its technological complexity and agrological disadvantages concerning staple cereals and tubers, it has nevertheless yielded a mass economy. Indeed, countries such as the Netherlands and the United States employ hydroponic systems at scale to produce tomatoes, cucumbers, leafy greens, herbs and cut flowers for commercial consumption, annually yielding over 200 million kilogrammes of produce in the United States alone (Dohlman et al., 2024: 5–6). This sizable industry, moreover, is currently forecast to be expanding fast, with market researchers estimating that the present global hydroponics value, estimated at 14.5 billion dollars, may rise to 42.3 billion dollars by 2034 (Research and Markets, 2025). Beyond technological improvements and investments, this growth is increasingly explained by framing hydroponics as a providing the means to proof food systems against climate change and geopolitical instability, with some dubbing it ‘the future of sustainable farming’ (Kumar, 2024). Against the ravages of global warming on conventional agriculture, hydroponics is imagined as providing a valuable means to shield crops from extreme weather, promote greater water and nutrient efficiency, as well as mitigate land-use environmental degradation (Singh and Hati, 2024). Against geopolitical instability, moreover, hydroponics is imagined as offering a food-growing redoubt for both wealthy cities and impoverished communities, where arable land is scarce and import dependence high. Thus, manifesting our uneven world, hydroponics is presented as promising to fuel advanced vertical farming in megacities such as Dubai, Singapore and Tokyo, as well as a ‘smart’ portable technology for disaster relief and food security in impoverished places, such as refugee camps in Jordan or smallholder farms in Jamaica (Verner and Tebaldi, 2021). The lure of hydroponics, in short, is alive and well.

And yet, even as hydroponics is embraced as a means to foster climate-resilient food systems, its longer political history is forgotten. In this amnesia, as we begin to show, lies a fascinating international history, where many thinkers framed hydroponics as providing revolutionary solution to overcome planetary soil limits and lessen geopolitical competition over arable lands. Strange as it may seem, Gericke’s visions of soilless revolutions were no cry in the wilderness, chiming instead with a chorus of mid-20th-century agronomic enthusiasm for hydroponics and its perceived geopolitical promise. Indeed, as we retrace, connected agronomists across the US Army, the Zionist movement and the Commonwealth placed outsized expectations on the power of hydroponics to furnish military, settler-colonial and postcolonial designs. Throughout such imaginations, appeals to hydroponics challenged the usual centrality of arable lands in geopolitical discourse, which often centred on securing farmable frontiers for allegedly congested industrial nations (Bashford, 2008). As such, hydroponics came to be seen as a promising tool for distinct worldmaking projects in soil-scarce geographies, such as remote islands, arid regions, densely populated cities, frost-prone latitudes or equatorial lands. In this context, agronomists across many parts of the world tinkered with visions of hydroponics expanding agrarian frontiers into diverse places such as the Canadian Arctic, Soviet cities, the Congolese rainforests, Caribbean islands like Aruba, the Indian city of Calcutta, the Floridian everglades, the Negev desert or the Micronesia archipelagos. In this article, rather than attempt to cover all instances, we focus on three connected visions of hydroponic geopolitics, as articulated by agronomists in the US Army, the Zionist movement and the Commonwealth. At a first level, this case selection was made inductively, by exploring digital archives openly for publications on hydroponics and international politics from the 1930s to 1960s. ¹ After surveying over 200 sources, including technical books, newspapers articles and conference proceedings, we identified three highly recurrent cases, with the US Army schemes referred in 53 sources, Israeli experiments in 31 and the British Commonwealth ‘Bengal’ hydroponics in 21. As we deepened our reading of these three cases, moreover, we were struck by their connected histories, with key actors in each context referring to each other to reinforce their own ambitions, while effectively putting the promise of hydroponics towards quite differing political projects. For engineers and agronomists in the US Army, hydroponics came to embody a valuable technology in supporting a world-spanning string of military bases in remote islands across the Atlantic and Pacific, as well as the post-war occupation of Japan. For Zionist agronomists, in turn, hydroponics was mobilized to bolster settler-colonial designs on Palestinian arid lands. In postcolonial India, however, Commonwealth agronomists such as James Sholto Douglas envisaged hydroponics as an emancipatory tool for landless workers, able to service postcolonial efforts against hunger and impoverishment. While all imagined hydroponics might help overcome planetary arable land limits by expanding agrarian frontier beyond soil dependence, in each case, as we show below, agronomists took hydroponics to fuel specific geopolitical imaginations. Thus, the promise of hydroponics was brought to service distinct geopolitical horizons, with the potential for state power over different geographies reimagined.

With this article, beyond mobilizing history to speak to present-day hydroponics enthusiasm, we contribute to a burgeoning literature concerned with agricultural modernization and its international politics. Indeed, as many scholars have examined, throughout much of the 20th century, many politicians and experts framed agriculture as vital for national security and world peace. After the 1920s, pressed by a perfect storm of crop failures, high food prices, rising hunger and population surges, many sought to reform agrarian orders by such varied means as bio-engineering, mechanization, river planning, land redistribution, farming education and global cooperation against food price shocks (Cullather, 2013; Ekbladh, 2009; Guldi, 2022; Pernet and Forclaz, 2019; Saraiva, 2016). With new scientific governance, agrarian modernizers hoped to unlock greater organic productivity and pacify international politics by guaranteeing a resilient food supply to rising industrial nations. Interestingly, in literature examining this international history, hydroponics has thus far remained underexamined (cf. Ihar, 2025; Nanavati, 2022), no doubt due to its small operational scale and limited use in comparison with large governmental schemes to enhance agricultural yields through irrigation, mechanization as well as seed and fertilizer distribution targeted chiefly towards farming of staple cereal crops (Saraiva, 2016; Van der Grift, 2015). And yet, as we argue, enthusiasm for hydroponics was also part of this story, with its perceived promise of scientific efficiency proving alluring to many agronomists hoping to perfect intensive farming at a smaller scale. Interestingly, beyond boosting productivity, hydroponics also spoke to then deep concern for improving resource conservation, both in terms of soil fertility, irrigation and fertilizer use. Indeed, as shown by Bashford, Selcer and Lubbock, 20th-century agrarian international politics were pervaded by intensifying environmentalist concern with how reckless farming might irretrievably destroy arable lands across the planet. Often tied to neo-Malthusian concerns for population surges intensifying resource overuse and social conflict, this conservationist concern was regularly connected with geopolitical ideas concerning the ties between land-use, state power and international conflict. Indeed, as Bashford has shown, among interwar League of Nations internationalists, much debate was given to how to best secure ‘more territory’ for ‘overly dense nations’, arguments for a peaceful transfer of territory in a ‘demonstrable continuum’ with the ‘German Lebensraum ideas’ (2008: 337). These Lebensraum ideas, most infamously articulated by Weimar and Nazi geographers, centred on claiming that state power was linked to population density being met by improved access to farmlands or agricultural productivity. This way of thinking led geographers, demographers, economists, agronomists and other experts to imagine that the value of different territorial units might be understood by reference to their potential ‘carrying capacity’ – that is, the total population it might feed if exploited at its maximum. In this manner, as recently argued by Lubbock, the American geopolitical thinker Isaiah Bowman called for internationalist planning towards the ‘conquest of the soil’ across the ‘world’s pioneer belts’, in under-exploited ‘frontier’ regions in Canada, Brazil, Australia and beyond (as cited in Lubbock (2025: 1205–1206)). Coordinating such conquest, Bowman emphasized, was necessary to avoid irretrievable wastage of these fertile reserves by reckless land-conversion and farming-driven soil degradation. In the post-war years, as Lubbock (2025: 1214) underlines, this vision would echo in the foundational efforts of the Food and Agricultural Organization.

In this article, following Bashford and Lubbock, we show how the promise of hydroponics was also read alongside geopolitical imaginations concerned with governing global agrarian limits, with the critical twist that hydroponics promised to do without soil and thus radically expand agrarian frontiers beyond the limits of arable lands, soil fertility and even climatic conditions. In this way, as we show, hydroponics was not only imagined as fuelling technocratic dreams towards more resilient and abundant food systems at large, but also tied with geopolitical concerns for improving global living space, often by transforming allegedly under-used lands into productive agrarian frontiers. With hydroponics, however, such frontiers differed substantially from those imagined as ‘pioneer belts’ by the likes of Bowman, who was chiefly concerned with identifying grasslands and forests to be converted into cereal fields. Instead, emerging out of the seemingly a-geographical context of the agrochemical laboratory, hydroponics would feed into geographical re-imaginations of soil-scarce places, such as remote islands, arid regions, and crowded cities, recasting their potential futures within global geopolitics. Hydroponics, in this way, challenged a well-established geographical imagination of agriculture, by centring soil-scarce places as future frontiers of production rather than perennially import-dependent places.

To build this argument, before discussing our three connected cases of hydroponic geopolitics, we examine the historical context in which hydroponics was invented by William Gericke, and trace its boosterish reception by American public opinion in the 1930s. Following this, we trace how the US Army came to embrace hydroponics towards the end of the Second World War, as a promising supporting technology in its quest to gain a global string of military outposts in remote islands, and supporting Japan’s agrarian capabilities after its loss of colonial frontiers across East Asia. In a second case, we examine how the Zionist agronomist Selig Soskin promoted hydroponics as a new means to bolster settler colonialism in Palestine, arguing this technology would allow Israel to support a larger population, become an agricultural exporter and spearhead a revolution in intensive farming techniques across semi-arid regions. In a third step, turning to the case of the British agronomist James Sholto Douglas, we retrace his efforts to simplify hydroponics in post-famine Bengal, and his campaign to frame soilless farming as a promising tool in promoting postcolonial development and fighting hunger among landless workers across South Asia and Southern Africa. To conclude, reflecting on the continuities and discontinuities of these three cases, we suggest a threefold heuristic to interrogate other instances of hydroponic geopolitics and indicate future avenues for research. First, this heuristic highlights hydroponics’ connection to specific geographies in which arable land is in short supply, including cities, remote islands, and arid environments. This connection to such ‘soilless’ geographies is enabled through a second element, hydroponics’ lab-grown epistemological underpinnings, which engender efficient technoscientific control of plant bodies through environmental insulation. Finally, through its connections with laboratories and soilless geographies hydroponic geopolitics allows the latter to be reconstituted with an eye to different political horizons, thus underlining hydroponics’ political multivalence. Interpreted through questions of geography, epistemology and politics, we argue that scrutiny of past imaginations of hydroponics reveals latent geopolitical fantasies, where those imagined mastering this technology could make marginal territories bountiful, control environments and reshape international politics to their advantage.

Imagining soilless futures in chemical laboratories

Dreams of soilless farming were first sown during the emergence of agrochemistry in the 19th century. This new laboratory science promised to unpack the processes underpinning soil fertility and plant physiology, paving the way for increasing farming yields globally (Marchesi, 2020). Such promise fed into multiple social expectations, from increasing homestead prosperity, to improving marginal lands and warding off hunger. Towards these aims, agrochemistry reframed understanding of soils as limited containers of mineral plant nutrients, thus redefining soil fertility as subject to excessive extraction through uninterrupted cropping (Marald, 2002). This new understanding broke radically with prior knowledge underlining humus, manure and organic matter as the primary source of soil fertility, and informed the development of artificial fertilizers to substitute organic manures. Thus, they hoped, agrochemistry was to reveal terrestrial limits to farming and seek chemical means to overcome them. Soils’ compositions would be laid bare through laboratory analyses and fertilizers produced to match differentiated needs of specific plants. Moreover, with critical minerals identified, corporations and states alike would map, appropriate and mine deposits of ammonia-rich guano, nitrate and potash across the world (Cushman, 2013). As deposits grew scarce, however, scientists would seek to synthesize ammonia from more accessible elements, eventually leading to the Haber-Bosch process and mass production of synthetic fertilizers after the 1910s. With this discovery, many hoped planetary limits of soil fertility to be permanently expanded, banning much food scarcity and hunger (Smil, 2004).

Ironically, while growing yields seemed to vindicate agrochemical theories of inorganic fertility, by the late 19th-century significant crop failures caused by excessive tillage instigated a paradigm shift. Displacing attention to mineral nutrients, erosion crises made scientists focus on geophysical structures. Through these crises, peaking with the 1930s Dust Bowl, agronomists, geographers and soil scientists reframed soils as precarious geobiological bodies with varying responses to physical processes such as heating, absorption, drainage, compaction or run-off. Accompanying this reframing, fear of irretrievable erosion fanned the flames of Neo-Malthusian alarm over population surges, land limits and geopolitics (Bashford, 2014; Ferraz de Oliveira, 2025; Lubbock, 2024). Responding with urgency, many scientists argued for charting new national and global soil maps, and promoting new landscaping and farming practices against erosion (Selcer, 2018). Arable soils, they noted, resulted from processes at a geological time scale, whereas their destruction could take a single season. Thus, should humankind fail to protect the precarious physical natures of soils amid its push to extend farming, many arable lands could be irretrievably lost, causing a protracted global agricultural crisis.

Scientific interest in soilless culture emerged at the crossroads of these diverging understandings of soils. On the one hand, agrochemists envisaged growing plants without soil as part of experimenting with nutrition pathways to increase crop yields in a laboratory setting. Such experiments replicated agrochemists’ reductionist view of soils as limited nutrient containers and enabled easy manipulation and observation of the growth and health of plants. On the other hand, through geophysical concern with precarious soils, soilless gardening experiments were reimagined as gateways into breaking agriculture out of the prison of soil entirely. Indeed, throughout the 1920s, in the United States and beyond, numerous agricultural experimentation stations trialled soilless farming, foregoing soil in favour of washed-out sand, water or gravel beds. It was in this context that William Gericke, a Californian plant scientist, rose to fame as the self-appointed inventor of hydroponics, a new method of water-based soilless farming. In 1936, after years at the California Agricultural Experiment Station, Gericke announced to the American press that his new soilless farming method was primed for commercial use and held the potential to transform food supply nationally and worldwide (Gericke, 1937). These grand claims traded on his latest yields of tomatoes, potatoes and tobacco to reach multiple times higher than soil-grown averages in the country. Furthermore, Gericke claimed, as a landless method, hydroponics could empower the urban poor without redistributing land rights (Gericke, 1940: 261). While Gericke’s predictions never materialized, in years to follow soilless farming experiments multiplied, and came to be colloquially known as hydroponics, despite often growing in sand and gravel media rather than water.

At any rate, issued in the aftermath of the 1930s dust bowls and amid the techno-utopianism of the New Deal, Gericke’s announcement catalysed a wave of public enthusiasm about the coming of soilless farming. In Virginia, editorials waxed lyrically that Gericke’s discoveries would bring about changes akin to what HG Wells had imagined in the science fiction novel The Food of the Gods, with boundless harvests issuing from ‘skyscraper farms’, forcing through an agricultural economy of abundance (Peninsula Enterprise, 1936: 5). In North Carolina, journalist Harry Nelson (1936: 4) suggested that ‘man’s dependence on the soil’ might be coming to an end and that soilless farming was bound to expand to new frontiers, with ‘high and dry climate’ regions such as Arizona becoming ‘favoured spots’. In Southern California, the press celebrated Gericke’s ‘futuristic ranch’ as eliminating the great dangers which had beset American agriculture, from ‘soil exhaustion’ to ‘dust storms, drought, unseasonal rain, hail and insect pests’ (Imperial Valley Press, 1936: 1). In Alaska, the press quoted Gericke as saying that the discovery of hydroponics was as revolutionary as ‘the discovery of a new continent’ and it would enable ‘any country to (. . .) become self-contained from the food standpoint’, starting with those nations with ‘the most serious problem of land shortage – Italy and Japan’ (The Nome Daily Nugget, 1936: 1–2). In Washington DC, in turn, commentators pondered whether hydroponics might not offer a breakthrough akin to the Haber-Bosch ammonia synthesis during the World War, conjuring a world beyond natural limits and silencing conservationist prophets of ‘doom because we have looted the soil’ (Hill, 1937: 24). In New York, the futurist president of the American Interplanetary Society, George Pendray (1939: 344, 353) claimed hydroponics might soon cause ‘vast realignments of trade, industry and even international affairs’, reproducing the laboratory’s insular power to ‘create climates and conditions’ at will. Thus, despite limited evidence, in the late 1930s, American enthusiasts imagined hydroponics might help liberate society from food scarcity, soil degradation, the bounds of climate and even end international strife tied to lack of agricultural self-sufficiency in countries such as Italy and Japan.

By the summer of 1937, boosting an already febrile atmosphere, one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s influential brain-trusts advised the National Resources Committee to support research into soilless agriculture as 1 of 13 technologies with greatest potential and social impact in the near future (National Resources Committee, 1937: 6, 307). Unsurprisingly, commercial enthusiasm followed such press, with multiple corporations marketing new soilless nutrient solutions, handbooks and kits. Others, such as Heinz and Pan-American Airways, launched their own soilless gardens in publicity stunts – the latter hiring Gericke’s former students to supervise a hydroponicum in Wake Island, a nearly soilless coral atoll turned into a stopover for trans-Pacific flights (The Business Week, 1940: 38). Before long, however, the enthusiasm for hydroponics waned, as practitioners were beset by with meagre harvests, high installation costs and uncertainty about nutrient dosages. Alongside practical failures, sceptical experts increasingly warned that hydroponics’ potential was being oversold and offered more modest appraisals of its value (Hoagland and Arnon, 1938: 3–4). As world war beckoned, moreover, much attention was diverted to defence technology. Towards the end of the war, in a twist of fate, interest in hydroponics would be revived by the military, with the US Army spearheading its revival as part of new geopolitical imaginations.

Defence hydroponics: American air power, trans-Pacific war and soilless archipelagos, c. 1944–1955

In 1942, months after the Pearl Harbour attack and the United Nations Declaration, a Canadian commentator speculated on how hydroponics might ‘have great value’ as ‘a defence measure’, for a ‘country like England’ to save itself from hunger, as well as costly ‘freight charges and shipping space (. . .) in a submarine-infested world’ (Holman, 1942: 152–153). At the time, Canada was supplying Britain most of its foodstuffs, while German attacks in the Gulf of Saint-Lawrence intensified. In parallel, contributing to the US Victory Garden campaign to mobilize household food production, Gericke decided to open his experimental facilities to the public, leading newspapers to report that hydroponics offered an ‘answer to the average citizen’s fear of wartime food shortages’ (Glavinovich, 1943: 50; cf. Palestrino, 2025). With all lines of supply besieged and demand for food increasing, the war provided fertile ground for speculative visions of hydroponics’ strategic value.

Yet, for all such speculative appeals, it was not until the summer of 1944 that Allied armies mobilized soilless gardening into their global frontlines. Inspired by interwar experiments on Wake Island, the US Army announced a plan to set up hydroponic gardens across a string of airfield stopovers, ranging from the mid-Atlantic Ascension Island through the Pacific’s Canton and Espiritu islands, to New Guinea’s Port Moresby and Sindh’s Karachi (Science, 1944: 10; Sumner, 2019: 131–133). At first, the aims of this globe-spanning operation seemed partly psychological. The army’s medical staff had noted with concern that soldiers regularly refrained from eating their rations out of distaste, leading to possible malnutrition hazardous for airborne missions (Editorial Board of the Air Surgeon’s Bulletin, 1945: 390). Freshly grown fruits and vegetables, as well as gardening itself, were expected to boost soldiers’ health and morale as they fought and convalesced. Beyond this, as evidenced by communication campaigns, the Army understood that its hydroponic gardens might provide a technological spectacle to inspire civil audiences both at home and behind enemy lines. To begin with, the windswept Ascension Island was chosen as a testing site for this ambitious plan, both given its lack of arable soil and strategic position as a stepping stone for airborne supply of the Mediterranean and Burmese fronts. Mobilizing an array of army engineers, civil agronomists, chemists and entomologists, within a year the US Army succeeded in making the seemingly barren island bloom, and sympathetic observers quickly acclaimed Ascension Island as ‘an engineering victory’, where ‘soldiers-turned-gardeners’ made themselves ‘at home on the oceans’ despite their remote and inhospitable environment (Geographic School Bulletin, 1945: 9). Buoyed by Ascension’s success, by the summer of 1945, the US Air army launched construction of larger hydroponic gardens at Atkinson Field, in British Guiana, in the Hawaiian Christmas, Coconut and Johnson Islands, and in the hard-won Iwo Jima Island. Soon after, advised by the botanist R. H. Stoughton, the British Air Ministry built hydroponic gardens around the Persian Gulf, both at the central Iraqi Habbaniyah airfield and in the island of Bahrein (Ihar, 2025: 5–6). In 1946, following the atomic and firebombing of Japan, the US occupation army under General McCarthy constructed its largest hydroponic gardens yet south of Tokyo, in the Chofu and Otsu farms. By summer 1946, the American War Department issued a public manual on its own soilless farming practices, renaming hydroponics as ‘nutriculture’ (TM 20-500, 1945).

Within less than 2 years, hydroponics had returned to public imagination as a charismatic technology, now associated with the designs of American defence and airpower beyond the war. The geopolitical imaginations unlocked by the US army mobilization of hydroponics, however, were multiple. At first, deployment of hydroponics by the American military fed visions of global reach, with remote sites made more available as military bases. Indeed, as phrased by an US Air Force wartime report, given its global operations and reliance on ‘isolated air bases (. . .) devoid of soil’, one could expect hydroponic gardens to be ‘established at all remote installations’ (Arnold, 1945: 69). In this view, small oceanic islands and deserted shores could be transformed at will to offer supply lines or strike ranges otherwise unavailable – resonating with what Immerwahr describes as the US’ pointillist empire (Immerwahr, 2019). Yet, even as this vision seemed to offer great expanses for American airpower, its focus often turned to imagining new geopolitical possibilities for its ‘hidden’ Pacific empire. For some, such as the science-writer Frank Thone, it seemed certain that the United States was about to annex and gain mandates over ‘a lot of scattered parcels of real estate, out in the Pacific’, whose lack of good soils primed them for ‘the world’s biggest development of hydroponics’ in the post-war (Thone, 1945: 141).

Beyond this trans-Pacific vision, the US Army’s use of hydroponics was touted for its potential to foster reconstruction in ravaged lands in Japan and the Mediterranean, and launch a commercial industry in the United States and Caribbean territories such as Puerto Rico. Indeed, leading US Air Force officers, such as the director of hydroponics operations in Japan, Major Ewing W. Elliot, participated in publicizing hydroponics by delivering press briefs underlining its post-war promise. As early as 1945, Elliot stated that the ‘wartime experience with hydroponics’ was ‘likely to develop an important peacetime industry’, with demobilized veterans leading commercial ventures in places such as ‘Florida, Texas and Cuba’ (Science News Letter, 1945: 21). Simultaneously, Elliot claimed hydroponics units could be usefully deployed to Greece to feed the starving people of the war-torn Mediterranean. If such claims were significant concerning European reconstruction, however, it was in occupied Japan that they peaked.

With over eighty acres across two sites, the US Army’s hydroponic farms in Japan became the world’s largest soilless farming venture, producing enough vegetables for troops stationed in Japan and Korea. At one level these farms had been set up amid epidemiological fears that some soils might be contaminated with pathogenic bacteria related to traditional manuring practices using human excrement. Beyond this, however, hydroponics gardens fed into public relations effort set on cultivating an imaginary of American technology serving Japan’s relief and reconstruction. Thus, the Chofu and Otsu hydroponic farms were enlisted into propagandizing General MacArthur’s efforts towards ‘staving off famine’ among the Japanese, while enticing ‘Japanese agricultural scientists’ to see how soilless culture could transform production capacities in an ‘over-crowed country’, ‘stripped down to less than its pre-war size’ (The Science News-Letter, 1946: 341; Hone, 1947: 154–156). Fantasized by observers, hydroponics offered an apex of efficiency, with ‘no weeds, no waste spaces, no back-breaking labour over land which is subject to erosion and depletion’, with plants made ‘thriftier’ and ‘abundant’ (James, 1948: 59). Furthermore, denoting hydroponics’ symbolic potency for post-war Japan, the US Army even ensured that the imperial family visited its facilities, and that reporters saw General MacArthur harvesting radishes (cf. Nanavati, 2022). Here, waxing on a geopolitical theme, American army efforts to promote hydroponics corresponded with preoccupations to address Japanese interwar complaints about lacking the farmlands and critical minerals associated with greater territorial expanses. From this viewpoint, in the words of an Australian journalist, the effect of hydroponics on the ‘over-crowded islands and atolls of the Pacific’ seemed ‘incalculable’, as it stood to forever mute ‘the Hitler cry of ‘Living space!’ among them (Lawrence, 1947: 2, our emphasis).

Yet, even as the army mobilized hydroponics to its greatest scale in occupied Japan, scepticism grew about the possibilities of soilless farming to contribute significantly to arable land shortages worldwide. Indeed, eminent political geographers such as Isaiah Bowman warned that neither hydroponics, nor artificial fertilizers, plant breeding nor water conservation technologies were able to overcome international dependence on the precarious patrimony of arable fertile soils (Bowman, 1948: 134). Conservationists like William Vogt and Henry Fairfield Osborn were even more trenchant, with one arguing ‘its complexities strongly question its practicability’ (Osborn, 1948: 75) and the other that its costs placed it ‘beyond the reach of all but a few people’ (Vogt, 1948: 20). In the words of another conservationist, despite ‘all its potentialities’, hydroponics could not ‘eradicate the tragic effects of an ill-used, depleted resource-base’ or ‘substitute for a sound ecological balance’ (Hatcher, 1949: 24). Similarly, for the then chief of the USDA Soil Conservation Service, hydroponics ‘on any large scale’ remained ‘impractical’, and ‘[p]roductive land’ was ‘the only natural resource without which we cannot live’ (Bennett, 1952: 24).

Notwithstanding such scepticism, the US Army continued to use hydroponics to both symbolic and practical ends. As the Korean War escalated in the 1950s, hydroponically grown vegetables once more supplied frontline troops and were framed as a military technological feat. In the military press, Air Quartermaster Clyde Adkins claimed the army’s Japanese and Pacific hydroponic farms as testing ‘large-scale production’ and noted that ‘in a military sense, hydroponics may have a future of great promise’ (Adkins, 1954: 8, 14). For military strategists, he thought, hydroponics provided a useful emergency technology to deliver a ‘nutritional and morale boost’ in remote fronts. In addition, commenting on ‘hydroponics and geopolitics’, Adkins: 14 argued that soilless farming had a special role to play in ‘heavily populated areas in subtropical and tropical regions’. Far from innocent, this claim sought to portray the US military as developing hydroponics benignly, as a future tool in technical aid to improve food security not only in Japan, but also throughout Southeast Asia after decolonization.

Thus, as we have shown, from 1944 to 1954, the promise of hydroponics grew headily in the geopolitical imaginations of the US Army. First, while fighting across the globe, hydroponics was recentred as a means to outfit a string of remote island bases with farming units, in support of greater airpower projection. Trialled in South Atlantic Ascension Island, this vision was later expanded to numerous Pacific bases, leading some to wager the post-war years might see the ‘world biggest development in hydroponics’ within US-controlled Pacific territories (Thone, 1945, 141). Yet, beyond remote islands, the US military fuelled imaginations of hydroponics as a pacifying technology for occupied Japan, answering its food needs without requiring foreign arable lands. In this garb, it was hoped, hydroponics could still Japan’s former imperialist cries for Lebensraum. Past Japan, moreover, for officers such as Adkins, the imaginary geopolitical power of hydroponics was projected forward to the broader field of densely populated subtropical regions, offering an additional tool for American efforts to gain allies and assuage postcolonial territorial disputes over farmland frontiers, such as in India and Indonesia. Hydroponics, in short, featured richly across US Army post-war geopolitical imaginations for furnishing its transoceanic airpower network, occupying Pacific territories profitably, pacifying Japan, and employing technical aid strategically in southeast Asia. Unsurprisingly, while the US military publicized its hydroponics operations, agronomists elsewhere felt emboldened to embark on their own grand designs. In Palestine, news of the US Army’s hydroponic success in the desert-like Ascension Island inspired Zionist visions to bolster an Israeli state. In Bengal, in turn, overblown news of the role of US Army’s hydroponics in staving off famine in Japan, caught the attention of a British agronomist fearful of hunger throughout South Asia’s populous cities.

Desert hydroponics: Zionist dreams, water conservation and the UNESCO arid zone programme

In April 1944, two agronomists presented a proposal to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) for ‘feeding liberated Europe by hydroponics’ (Jewish Telegraphic Agency Daily News, 1944: 4). The two scientists, the famed Gericke and the lesser-known Selig Eugen Soskin, argued that large-scale hydroponics could be implemented in Mandate Palestine to produce food for war-torn Europe, reducing mass hunger and shipment costs for the Allies. With abundant sunshine, bereft of good soils and in-need of economic uses of water, Palestine seemed to them the ideal region for new soilless farming technologies. Serving this effort, they imagined a Jerusalem School for Hydroponics would train Greek, Yugoslav and other Mediterranean agronomists to assist UNRRA efforts in their ravaged homelands, fostering much-needed agricultural modernization in their soil-poor countries. By 1945, this Soskin-Gericke proposal persuaded the UNRRA to experiment with hydroponics in Greece but its greater ambitious were never realized (The Palestine Post, 1945: 4). The degree to which this project was considered, however, suggested the relative success they achieved in cultivating the imaginary that hydroponics might ‘make the desert bloom’ in Mandate Palestine.

For hydroponic enthusiasts, this vision may not have seemed surprising. After all, ever since Gericke had publicized his alleged revolutionary invention, commentators had noted that hydroponics was suited to regions with dry and hot climates, such as Arizona or New Mexico, where it could allow more controlled irrigation. Indeed, for techno-optimists such as the British pacifist Richie Calder, hydroponics promised to ‘harness the desert sun’ and make arid lands the world over ‘flourish like a garden’ (Calder, 1940: 640–641), and the post-war years might witness it turning ‘the Great American Desert’ into a region of ‘farms and factories’ (Carlisle and Brown Latham, 1944: 212). If the American Southwest had often featured foremost in such imagination, in the post-war years, the prospects for ‘desert’ hydroponics would be increasingly tied to Palestine, in no small part reflecting Selig Soskin’s persistent advocacy for its use.

Born in 1873 Crimea, Soskin was a leading figure in the Zionist movement and a lifelong advocate of the potential of intensive agriculture to enable Jewish settlement of Mandate Palestine. As early of 1903, Soskin had participated in expeditions to study Sinai’s conditions for possible Jewish settlement (Cohen, 2024: 21, 55; cf. Von Suffrin, 2021). Throughout the 1920s, in turn, Soskin argued that small settlements could transform Palestine through intensive labour and irrigation, increasing food sufficiency and even enabling exports to Europe (Soskin, 1920; see also Gottmann, 1935; Rook, 2000). With this horizon in mind, in 1937, at the young age of 64, Soskin became convinced hydroponics offered a unique technological path to enable the transformation of Palestine’s territories, multiplying farming output and increasing its capacity to support larger populations. Sharing his enthusiasm in the 1937 Zionist Congress, Soskin was given the moniker ‘‘flower-pot’ colonizer’, for imagining rooftop hydroponic gardens mushrooming across Jewish settlements (Soskin, 1940: 3). At the same Congress, as Masalha (1992: 51) notes, Soskin had discussed plans for a partition of Palestine, with compulsory land and population exchanges deployed towards preparing a Jewish state.

If Soskin divined such futures in 1937, as the second world war raged on, his expectations of hydroponics serving a future state of Israel only amplified. In 1940, 4 years in advance of the US Army’s mobilization of hydroponics, Soskin argued that soilless farming could revolutionize settlement prospects in Palestine. In his own words, hydroponics stood to break the cage of a ‘backward’ land-dependent agriculture, which forced human societies to seek ‘Lebensraum (. . .) in order to exist’ (Soskin, 1940: 3). By opposition to fascist territorial depredations, he implied, hydroponics would allow countries to expand their living space without territorial conquest. Honing into Mandate Palestine, as Zionism’s Promised Land, he claimed that hydroponics held ‘natural advantages’ given its economic use of irrigation and harnessing of Palestine’s ‘abundance of sun’ (Soskin, 1940). With the country’s sunshine across the year, he argued, plants could grow better – if only provided with nutrients and water to match their needs. Suited to exploit hitherto wasted sunshine, hydroponics would furthermore enable avoiding its damages. By placing soilless farms in annexes to houses, the intensive heat of outdoor work could be mitigated, and water losses to evaporation and percolation reduced. In addition, Soskin claimed that hydroponics provided a means to farm without eroding impoverished soils across the Judean hills, in the future West Bank. Furthermore, he claimed, hydroponics made ‘the South of Palestine, the Negev, and the Sinai Peninsula (. . .) accessible for the newcomer’, awarding new means to ‘settle’ these territories ‘intensively’, freeing ‘men from the bondage of unfertile soil’ (Soskin, 1940). For Soskin, hydroponics promised to expand possibilities to settle Palestine, by increasing crop yields, feeding into settler homesteading, and enabling occupation of further lands.

Conceived in service to Zionism, these new settlement possibilities were tied specifically to efforts to render Mandate Palestine into a Jewish homeland. Indeed, in 1940, sympathetic press framed hydroponics as a means to support greater numbers of settlers, despite British laws restricting land purchases by Jewish refugees (The Sentinel, 1940: 31). Alongside Soskin, other Zionist leaders such as the biochemist and future president Chaim Weizmann were reported to be studying the possibilities of soilless farming in hopes to ‘increase the absorptive capacity of the Holy Land’ (The Sentinel, 1940). Bolstered by the Dead Sea Potash plants and synthetic nitrates factories, it was imagined that such hydroponic ventures could flourish despite wartime disruption of global supply lines. Indeed, for Soskin, such disruptions rendered hydroponics essential as part of ‘agricultural emergency production’ towards self-sufficiency (Soskin, 1941: 4). In 1942, similarly, Soskin framed hydroponics as usefully reducing wasteful uses of Palestine’s limited stocks of good soils, water and fertilizer minerals. In post-wars years, he added, hydroponics could foster profitable food exports ‘without loss to the national economy (. . .) and without the recurrent wastage of exhaustible materials’ (Soskin, 1942: 4). Hydroponics was thus imagined as a technology of resource conservation alongside self-sufficiency and abundance.

As the war wound down in 1944, as mentioned above, Soskin translated this vision into a UNRRA proposal for large-scale hydroponics in Palestine to feed liberated Europe. Yet, even as Soskin advocated for this plan of hydroponic humanitarianism, he also insisted on how hydroponics could boost conditions for resettlement of Jewish refugees in Palestine. In his words, hydroponics would change ‘Palestine’s Absorptive Capacity’, increasing the demographic carrying capacity of that semi-arid territory (Soskin, 1944: 17–18). Taking aim at Walter Lowdermilk’s influential Palestine: Land of Promise, Soskin (1944: 17) argued that ‘the productive capacity of Palestine’s agriculture’ was ‘based not on the fertility of its soil, but on the fertility of its climate, that is to say (. . .) the intensive uninterrupted sunshine granted by nature’. Harnessed by hydroponics, this solar wealth promised ‘undreamed of opportunities’ to transform Palestine into ‘one of the most densely populated countries in the world’ (Soskin, 1944). Thus, while Lowdermilk estimated that even after extensive waterworks Palestine could not possibly support more than 4 million people, Soskin suggested it might easily support a population of over 15 million (cf. Mané, 2011). Far from a scientific quibble, such disagreement signalled Soskin’s imaginative use of hydroponics as a tool in a geopolitical contest over Palestine’s future. By re-envisaging the region’s geography as no longer determined by limited arable land but rather by solar abundance, Soskin and like-minded agronomists mobilized hydroponics as a key technology for the Zionist settlement of Palestine. In his final years, as the state of Israel emerged amid war and displacement, Soskin’s advocacy seemed to yield results, with hydroponic units found in military bases and scientific stations across the Negev, religious kibbutzim in central Israel, and in commercial ventures in northern towns (Arnold, 1959: 2; Mestras, 1956). Ironically, however, in later years, as Israel hosted the 1960 Rehovot conference, which celebrated sharing technology among newly independent states, an editorial noted that despite hydroponics’ advances, Israel’s territory still did not ‘present much Lebensraum’ (Biron, 1962: 25).

Yet, it bears reminding, geopolitical visions of hydroponics’ power to transform the political destinies of semi-arid regions was not confined to Palestine. In magazines such as Discovery, science writers seized on hydroponics ‘mightier prospects’ as potentially remedying the plight of malnourished and import-dependent populations in semi-arid countries at large, harnessing ‘the sun’s energy’ and offering better results than irrigation and soil conservation works (Hopkins, 1946: 250–253). In this spirit too, others imagined that hydroponic technical aid could fuel ‘international cooperation (. . .) to make a better world’, improving drought-stricken places from ‘Arabia [sic]’ to Brazil, Venezuela, the Philippines, Nigeria and Australia (Spessard, 1948: 142–143). Similarly, in 1955, American experts evaluating UNESCO’s Arid Zones programme claimed that hydroponics offered an important focus for international technical assistance and research cooperation towards desert reclamation the world over (US National Commission for UNESCO, 1955: 36–37; on the Arid Zones programme, see: Selcer, 2018). Yet betraying the ambivalences of such internationalism, years later, UNESCO-backed hydroponic experiments at the French Béni Abbès station prompted a telling bout of geopolitical speculation. Enthused by newly discovered oilfields in northern Algeria, science writers in Discovery imagined that fossil energy could be used to drill deep-water reserves for irrigating large-scale hydroponic farms, feeding new desert towns and industrialization in the Sahara (Discovery, 1960). Such possibilities, they argued, were momentous enough to make the Nazi-backed geopolitical visions of Herman Sörgel’s Atlantropa mega-dams seem ‘no longer speculative dreams, but engineering projects which merit immediate and careful investigation’ (Discovery, 1960: 112; cf. Lehmann, 2016). Writing amid the Algerian war of independence, these science writers argued that military spending ought to be diverted at once into ‘the peaceful scientific development of the Sahara’ whose material results alone could yield ‘a truly satisfying and lasting peace between Africans and Europeans’ (Discovery, 97). Paradoxically, while expressing pacifism, in appealing to Sörgel’s fantastical plans, these authors echoed interwar imperialist geopolitical imaginations premised on engineering North Africa into a greater Lebensraum for European powers.

In this section, we highlighted how hydroponics was envisaged as a technology aimed at making arid geographies more inhabitable to different political ends: from improving the prospects of settler colonialism in Palestine to reducing hunger across arid countries and preventing environmental degradation.

In such visions, hydroponics provided an answer to water and soil limitations while making greater use of the photosynthetic potential of solar abundance in subtropical regions. Again, revealing conceptual ties to geopolitical leitmotifs, commentators sometimes imagined hydroponics could increase the Lebensraum of arid lands and stem desires for territorial conquest, while simultaneously serving projects of colonial settlement. Curiously, moreover, as North Africa and Middle Eastern independence reshaped geopolitical horizons, hydroponics was reframed as a technology suited to peace-building scientific cooperation, not least under UNESCO efforts to coordinate desert reclamation through its Arid Zones programme. Interestingly, in these same years, as decolonization and global development emerged, visions of hydroponics’ potential to combat postcolonial hunger would be nurtured elsewhere, with the British agronomist James Sholto Douglas reimagining it as an appropriate technology to fight poverty and hunger across the Commonwealth.

Development hydroponics: the ‘Bengal system’, feeding the commonwealth, and appropriate technology

High up in the Darjeeling Himalayan hills, in the summer of 1946, the young James Sholto Douglas set out to ‘evolve a system of hydroponics suitable for India’ (The Oriental Watchman and Herald of Health, 1949: 16). Working at the Government of Bengal’s Agricultural Experimental Farm, after a year of trials, the ambitious researcher claimed to have succeeded in adapting hydroponic farming into a cheap, simple and reliable method, accessible to anyone. He called it the ‘Bengal System’ and hoped it would prove ‘a boon (. . .) to the starving millions’ in the Indian subcontinent, still haunted by the 1943 Bengal Famine (Sholto Douglas, 1950: 87; cf. Davis, 2000). In Japan, he (mistakenly) reckoned, the US Army’s hydroponics station had ‘saved millions of lives’, suggesting the potential of soilless farming as a tool to fight global hunger (Sholto Douglas, 1950: 86–87). His own Bengal method, he hoped, could multiply this achievement by making hydroponics democratically available to millions of poor workers, eliminating the ‘constant threat of famine’ in India, rendering both ‘isolated villages’ and ‘large cities like Bombay (. . .) self-supporting in vegetables’ (The Oriental Watchman and Herald of Health, 1949: 17). This vision, which never materialized to this scale, would drive Sholto Douglas’ work for four more decades, inspiring many others in the process.

Writing in 1951, buoyed by further successful experiments in Calcutta, Sholto Douglas published a book-length account of his method, arguing for its spread in the context of Asian decolonization. Indeed, as he put it, the greatest promise of hydroponics was for ‘the ‘have not’ nations, without colonies, worried by crowded populations and inadequate agricultural land’ such as newly independent India, Burma, Pakistan and Sri Lanka (Sholto Douglas, 1951: 14). This promise, however, was to be carried over by societies themselves, with Sholto Douglas claiming boldly that ‘for the landless worker hydroponics is the greatest discovery since the abolition of slavery’, ‘banishing want’ and restoring a long-lost ‘measure of economic independence’ to ‘even the poorest’ (Sholto Douglas, 1951: 6, 128). Only with this great revolution towards democratic plenty and self-sufficiency, he concluded, could ‘Indians grasp that Freedom which has so recently been won’ and ‘weakness be overcome’ (Sholto Douglas, 1951: 6, 129). To carry this out, Sholto Douglas appealed for the Indian government to support setting up a network of public demonstration centres, allowing city-dwellers and villagers throughout the nation to familiarize themselves with the practices of simplified soilless farming. Hydroponics, as he put it, was a ‘Grow-More-Food device (. . .) worthy of national recognition and official encouragement’ (Sholto Douglas, 1951: 127). Issued in 1951, this appeal purposively resonated with governmental efforts to mobilize the nation in a ‘Grow-More-Food campaign’, which encouraged ‘city dwellers to plant window gardens’ in a spirit of self-help contributing to national self-sufficiency (Siegel, 2018: 71).

In the years to follow, Sholto Douglas’ calls found eager ears among some provincial government officials and parliamentarians. In Lok Sabha debates, members from Bombay, West Bengal, Travancore, Bihar and Madras repeatedly called for further extension of hydroponics in the country (Lok Sabha, 1952: 1036–1037; 1955: 860–861; 1956: 4722–4723). Among provincial governments, in turn, hydroponics gained a powerful patron in the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Sampurnanand, who promoted its study and kept his own soilless gardens to show visitors (Dhar, 1998: 135). By 1955, Sholto Douglas noted that hydroponic farms were operating in ‘Calcutta, South India, Bombay, and Lucknow’ (1955b: 14). Yet, despite this, he bemoaned the lack of sufficiently ambitious investments. For while India’s ‘lead in soilless cultivation’ promised ‘an answer to the problem of feeding the millions of Asia’ (Sholto Douglas, 1955c: 44), there had ‘been hardly any attempt’ to employ hydroponics ‘on a large enough scale (. . .) in the areas where extra nourishment is most needed’ (Sholto Douglas, 1955e: 56).

If such investment was not forthcoming from South Asian states in the 1950s, Sholto Douglas (1955a) hoped that new Commonwealth and UNESCO programmes for technical assistance might contribute to addressing this gap. Turning to the Commonwealth, he argued for investment in hydroponics across ‘British Colonial territories, where increased food production is an urgent need’, alongside ‘land-hunger’ due to infertile soils and accentuated erosion (p. 346). Ultimately, he claimed, across each Commonwealth territory, ‘a healthy national economy’ must rest on ‘an adequate supply of foodstuffs’. In this vein, hydroponics offered a means to produce foodstuffs ‘in the areas where they are required, independently of local obstacles’ (Sholto Douglas, 1955a). Furthermore, beyond fighting hunger, hydroponics promised new means to fight poverty by multiplying possibilities for growing cash crops such as tea, coffee or tobacco. Indeed, he noted, these possibilities were being explored in trials to raise coffee hydroponically in Kenya and tobacco seedlings in Ghana. Soon, he imagined, ‘hydroponics conducted according to the simplified Bengal methods’ might spread across the Commonwealth, bearing ‘luxuriant crops’ from ‘overcrowded Malta, to the semi-desert lands of Adan; or the congested West Indies’ as well as to ‘the eroding and over-populated’ territories of West Africa, Tanganyika and Bechuanaland (Sholto Douglas, 1955a: 349). Across its small islands and vast African territories, hydroponics promised to legitimize the Commonwealth through decentralized agricultural development.

Writing for UNESCO in the same year, Sholto Douglas equally presented hydroponics as a technology to fight global hunger by enabling ‘countries lacking fertile farmland to grow all the crops they need to nourish their people’, ‘divorcing food production from the soil’ and operating ‘under all manner of climatic conditions’ (Sholto Douglas, 1955d: 30). Enthusiastic as always, he again claimed the simplified Bengal methods were ‘rapidly spreading throughout the world’, especially ‘in Southern Asia, the adjacent areas, and South and East Africa’ (Sholto Douglas, 1955d: 35). In India, he claimed ‘thousands of hydroponicums’ across ‘large cities’ offered the ‘only way to ensure that another devastating (. . .) famine does not occur within a generation’ (Sholto Douglas, 1955d: 39). Beyond the Commonwealth, moreover, Sholto Douglas claimed simplified hydroponics might transform the whole world, with all large cities becoming ‘self-supporting in all vegetables’ and with vast soilless farming across once ‘immense barren lands (. . .) such as the Sahara Desert, the wastes of Arabia or Central Asia, the “badlands” of the Middle West of America, the rocky highlands of Japan, or the underdeveloped territories of Australia, Canada, and Patagonia’ (Sholto Douglas, 1955d: 38). Beyond eliminating hunger, it seemed, hydroponics promised a reliable world of plenty, with peaceful development muting geopolitical struggles over access to arable lands.

Such hopes for international cooperation were shared by others, as suggested by the creation of the International Working Group on Soilless Culture (IWOSC) at the 1955 International Horticultural Congress in The Hague. This new group, driven by experts from the Netherlands, Germany, Israel, Belgium, France and South Africa, nurtured interest in soilless farming for decades to come, establishing a worldwide directory of expert consultants. Growing a network of university researchers, commercial farmers and state officials, IWOSC came to embody a non-governmental organization keeping the dreams of hydroponic scientific internationalism alive, while public enthusiasm subsided amid the Green Revolution. In 1969, for instance, only a few months before Norman Borlaug received a Nobel Peace Prize for revolutionizing wheat yields, soilless agronomists gathered in the Canary Islands for a World Congress on Hydroponics. In his inaugural speech, the German researcher Franz Penningsfeld positioned hydroponics as a technology with ‘potency to play an active role in the fight against hunger in the coming ten or twenty years’, in cooperation with FAO and UNESCO (Penningsfeld, 1969: 9). Simultaneously, in a FAO report, Raymond Stoughton, one of Britain’s foremost horticulturalists, commended soilless farming as holding special interest for the world’s ‘arid regions’ and ‘developing countries’ where fertile soils were lacking (Stoughton, 1969: 15–6). Stoughton’s words came with special authority, given his key role as a hydroponics advisor for Britain’s Royal Air Force’s experimental farms in the Persian Gulf during WWII, as well as among post-war experiments in Commonwealth Ghana and Uganda. For all such endorsements, however, through the 1960s and 1970s, hydroponics faded as a fantasized technology in the geopolitics of hunger.

Sholto Douglas, however, continued to issue visionary appeals for hydroponics’ potentialities as a technology of global development and democratic empowerment. In 1972, for example, he noted that despite the ‘advances made through the Green Revolution’ in terms of India grain supply security, its ‘daily fresh green good needs’, ‘so vital to health’, remained unanswered, seemingly awaiting extension of hydroponics to ‘town and country’ households (Sholto Douglas, 1972: 11). In 1976 too, he imagined it could play an important role in famine relief, with ‘portable hydroponic units (. . .) being airlifted at short notice’ to ‘places devastated by natural or man-induced calamities’ (Sholto Douglas, 1985 [1976]: 37). By then, interestingly, Sholto Douglas further framed hydroponics as a favoured tool for ‘the survival of man in his environment’, with controlled environment agriculture eschewing the ecological dangers associated with large-scale irrigation (Sholto Douglas, 1972: 44, 310). Looking to the future, he imagined ‘soilless megafarms’ built on a ‘three-dimensional pattern’, integrating growing plants, feeding cattle, and use of ‘tidal and/or solar heating and power’, would become ‘a practical proposition’ to supply food in ‘regions where it is needed’ (Sholto Douglas, 1972: 37). Notwithstanding such futurist glimpses, it bears noting that Sholto Douglas’ primary focus remained on its promise as a technology for the weak – promising emancipation without engaging with thornier questions of land distribution (cf. Guldi, 2022; Ihar, 2025). In the 1970s, this way of understanding soilless farming caught the attention of the burgeoning Appropriate Technology movement, which endorsed Bengal hydroponics as a community development technology suitable for improving the welfare of the urban poor and the global countryside alike.

In sum, unlike agronomists in the US Army or the Zionist movement, Sholto Douglas envisioned hydroponics as a technology for the global poor to be enlisted into postcolonial geopolitics of development across South Asia, the Commonwealth, and beyond. Haunted by the aftermath of the Bengal famine and inspired by exaggerated reports of the US Army’s hydroponics in war-torn Japan, Sholto Douglas hoped simplified hydroponics could expand throughout Indian cities. Tellingly, in his visions, hydroponics was not developed by centralized military operations but instead practised through thousands of small units by landless workers. In postcolonial India, given great concern for hunger and soil degradation, Sholto Douglas’ vision found many supporters. After 1955, interestingly, ranging beyond South Asian cities, Sholto Douglas transposed his geopolitical imagination of hydroponics to the Commonwealth at large, waxing on its potential to fight hunger and poverty in Caribbean and African territories with limited good soils. In later years, responding to new environmentalist concerns, he further framed hydroponics as a technology able to fight for ecological survival alongside alleviating food insecurity. For the older Sholto Douglas, then, hydroponics was recast as a technology for the poor, set not only against hunger, but also contributing to ecological repair and survival across impoverished places. Through this last step, interestingly, Sholto Douglas anticipated a form of climate geopolitics, placing hydroponics as a technology to improve socio-ecological resilience in postcolonial territories affected by global environmental crises.

Conclusion

Soilless farming, as we have shown, supplied a focus for many geopolitical fantasies in the 20th century. Far from a technological oddity, many international thinkers hoped hydroponics might foster revolutionary changes in socio-environmental relations and state power. Rooted in the laboratory’s powers of efficiency and insulation, hydroponics seemed poised to separate food production from land’s environmental embeddedness. Writ large, enthusiasts thought hydroponics promised to liberate societies from their bondage to exhaustible soils and food insecurity, making way for self-sufficing cities, leaps in agricultural productivity, and lessening territorial conflicts tied to arable lands. Beyond this wide purview, however, hydroponics came to serve situated projects and geopolitical imaginations. At war’s end, among the US Army, hydroponics was framed as a part of expanding air power projection through a transoceanic network of soilless footholds, with the Pacific islands foremost in mind. In Mandate Palestine, as Zionists struggled against political and geophysical limits to settlement, hydroponics was cast as a key tool for intensifying desert reclamation campaigns, harnessing wasted sunshine and economizing water. In independent India, in turn, as the government fought for food self-sufficiency, hydroponics was reimagined as a decentralized tool to fight hunger among the global poor. Such imaginations, unsurprisingly, often promised more than they could deliver. Whatever their shortcomings, however, their power to mobilize resources and expectations makes such imaginations worthy of study for International Relations scholarship. In this article, we have endeavoured to show how these imaginations of hydroponics carried a distinctive geopolitical grammar, often narrating its political potential as reducing territorial conflict over arable lands or re-engineering inhospitable territories into promising frontiers. At times, indeed, the promise of hydroponics was even explicitly tied to the idiom of Lebensraum, underlining a vision where soilless farming might pacify calls for conquest among ‘land-hungry’ powers such as Japan, while also boosting global living space by expanding farming beyond the geographical limits of arable lands.

Today, curiously, hydroponics is again subject to grand visions, with many enthusiasts claiming it may provide a vital technology in adapting to global climate change. On the one hand, in striking continuity with early enthusiasm in the 1930s, hydroponics is seen as a promising means to deliver sophisticated controlled environment farming across wealthy large cities such as Singapore, London, Chengdu and Dubai, reducing urban dependence on the global countryside amid climate and geopolitical supply disruptions. On the other hand, as if echoing Sholto Douglas’ visions, simplified hydroponics is increasingly celebrated among UN programmes as a portable means to bolster livelihoods and socio-ecological resilience for impoverished communities under pressure of forced displacement and ecological disruptions. Curiously, however, unlike past geopolitical imaginations examined above, visions of nationwide, regionally or globally coordinated use of hydroponics seem distinctively muted. Sinisterly then, present scales of hydroponic imagination betray anxieties about a fragmenting world rather than hopes for global convergence. At any rate, however, visions of hydroponic futures continue to speak to past hopes for soilless farming as paving the way to overcome agriculture’s exposure to environmental limits, escaping exhaustible soils and adverse climates. In this way, visions of hydroponics reproduce laboratory horizons to detach production from location and offer independent means to occupy inhospitable environments. This much is ultimately an illusion, but a powerful one, fuelling techno-optimism and obscuring real dangers of environmental degradation, social injustice and economic inequality. Now as before, by examining how the future of hydroponics is narrated, we are bound to find vested agents plotting particular geopolitical dramas, where different territories are fantasized as spearheading or suffering through great transformations of environmental and international order.

In this article, we have explored three telling examples of past geopolitical imaginations of hydroponics, but we remain aware that several other instances remain understudied. In our archival research on hydroponics in the post-war years, we encountered passages referring to interest in expanding hydroponics in the Soviet Arctic, the Belgian Congo and Apartheid South Africa. While we chose to focus on the most referred to hydroponic schemes, in view of future research, we suggest a threefold heuristic to unpack other instance of geopolitical imaginations of hydroponics.

First, it is useful to devote interpretative attention to the geographies of hydroponic geopolitics. Though early popularisers like Gericke envisaged hydroponics to be fruitful anywhere, the instances we examined connected it to particular sorts of places: remote islands, arid environments and cities. These were all soil-scarce places, additionally marked by insular isolation, lack of water or dearth of affordable land. At a broad level, in a muted form of neo-Malthusianism, the promise of hydroponics seemed to enable an improvement in the carrying capacity of very densely or sparsely populated regions. A more fine-grained analysis, however, shows how hydroponics fuelled speculative recasting these different places in greater geopolitical constellations, overcoming former positions of marginality or dependency. Thus, hydroponics was often framed as potentially decoupling agriculture from land and obviating motivations for territorial conquest, it also paradoxically furnished colonial visions for territorial occupation of allegedly vacant islands or arid lands. In this way, as articulated by Soskin, hydroponics was sometimes framed as a colonial technology to be employed by settlers in foreign lands.

A second heuristic relates to examining the epistemic politics of hydroponics, especially regarding plants and environments. With its focus on artificially controlled nutrient flows, hydroponic imaginaries betray the insulated perspective of the laboratory and its circumscribed understanding of ecological processes. This epistemic politics often turns on tropes of shielded technoscientific efficiency and control, with hydroponics framed as a means to decrease nutrient and water wastage at command and scale. From this standpoint, hydroponics’ imaginative appeal speaks to insulating humanity from unwieldy earthly environments and permanently escaping agrarian losses to soil-borne diseases, acidification, waterlogging, or erosion and other problems. Attracted to fantasies of mastering organisms and sheltering food production, this epistemic politics is noteworthy for underplaying the costs and vulnerabilities of hydroponics, as well as undergirding technoscientific fantasies with existential anxieties over planetary soil degradation. In this way, sinisterly, hydroponics seems to promise a way to do without healthy soils and ecosystems, at best allowing their repair but at worst adapting to their decimation.

A third and final heuristic relates to the connection between politics and soilless farming. The geopolitical visions we examined highlight how hydroponics fed into different political horizons – from empowering military reach, to supporting settler colonialism, to supplying postcolonial emancipation. Evidently, ideas of hydroponic politics went beyond quantifying yields. Instead, hydroponics’ status as a potentially prodigious technology fed into divergent political hopes, with implicit contestation over who ought to benefit from it at home and abroad. Was hydroponics to be at the hands of a few military technocrats, the farmers of privileged nations, or workers the world over? The answer to such questions often signalled political judgements and affinities rather than technical estimations. For all such differences, nevertheless, these competing visions shared in one common horizon, whose appeal persists today. Connected unconsciously, hydroponics imaginations shared a desire for a new age of politics, untethered at last from traditional agrarianism and unbound from earthly limits. As such, whether cast as a weapon of the weak or the mighty, hydroponics was understood as challenging established geopolitical ties to geographies of arable land. Beheld in this light, the enduring appeal of hydroponics amid a deepening global ecological crisis ought to unsettle us, and probe investigation of what geopolitical visions may now marshal it forth.