Hydroponic Capital: Socionatural Innovation and the Intensification of Glasshouse Agrifood Production

Abstract

This article develops the concept of hydroponic capital in order to explain the emergence of socionatural innovations aiming to enhance food security and production efficiencies in glasshouse agrifood production clusters. It does so through an archaeology of the knowledge regimes involved in technology innovations and examines the regionalized and transnational networks of crop scientists, growers, and extension workers involved. How hydroponics resulted in an intensification of the circulation time for capital and a reduction in the scale and costs of labor inputs is explained. In doing so, advances in economic geographic understanding of innovation through an engagement with agrarian political economy and political ecological debates to explain how hydroponic capital developed through the combination of different innovatory knowledges seeking to grapple with plant pathologies and cropping systems across regionalized networks of actors are discussed. Hydroponics was a way for growers to overcome biophysical barriers to production and labor rationalization problems. The article combines an understanding of the dynamics of labor and capital in agrarian systems, since they struggle with crop biophysicality, with the granular processes of knowledge deployment by which innovation takes place to overcome these biophysical barriers in agrifood supply chains. Unlike much existing innovation research focusing on the combination of different knowledge bases, why different forms of innovation knowledge were combined to overcome biophysical barriers in agrifood innovation is explained.