Is Hydroponic Cotton the Future of Sustainable Fashion?

Regenerative agriculture has been the new farming buzzword for the past year or two. As such, brands are investing—heavily—in shifting to this agro-concept in an attempt to combat climate change, in particular targeting cotton, a water-guzzling and soil-abusing crop.

While starting with the soil is a prevalent mindset among sustainability leaders, David René Rodríguez had a different approach: What if we could grow cotton without any soil at all?

“Cotton is agriculture. The world population is growing, which means we need more food, which means we need more farming land,” Rodríguez told Sourcing Journal. “If we don’t have food, there’s no farming land for cotton. And if we don’t have food, we have a problem.”

The former currency trader for Citibank and resident of Bangladesh was working in garment manufacturing, managing more than 8,000 pounds of cotton a day. Based on his experiences during those four years at Nath Group, “90 percent” of the people working in fashion—from sourcing to marketing—have never seen a cotton plant.

“There’s this huge disconnect between the rural farming part of the industry and the brands,” Rodríguez said. “The industry has been trying to audit the garment factories for the last three or four decades, but nobody was auditing cotton fields.”

So, he set out to change the landscape of cotton farming.

Meet Mediterranean Agro Tech (Magtech): the first company in the European Union working on the scalability of soilless cotton for the fashion industry by utilizing hydroponic technology—a technique of growing plants using a water-based nutrient solution instead of soil. All of Magtech’s research is driven by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), which has over 35 years of experience working in hydroponics.

Since early 2021, the Spanish startup has been growing cotton without soil or substrate as a base in a lab, followed by tests in 2022 where Magetch managed to harvest cotton for the second time from the same plant 12 months after the first harvest. Last year, the company ran two proof-of-concept trials in a roughly 750-foot space and is farming roughly 2.5 acres in its pilot greenhouse in Valencia.

“This is a call to action for the industry; I was consuming three football fields of cotton every single day in a SME factory in Bangladesh—we don’t have the space for that,” he said. “We need alternatives to grow food and save water without compromising the growth and the profitability of the business.”

And that may have been what caught the attention of the luxury sector. Namely that of the British brand Burberry, which has a “long-standing heritage” of innovation and exploration.

“We are working to bring soilless agricultural techniques in cotton cultivation into our textile production,” the luxury label said in a statement. “Together with our supplier and agricultural startup Magtech, we are developing a fabric comprised of hydroponic and organic cotton.”

Hydroponic cotton has a myriad of benefits—increasing cotton yield per plant by 60 times compared to traditional soil-based methods while reducing water use by 80 percent, for example.

“Grown in greenhouses, hydroponic cotton relies solely on water and nutrients, using only coconut fiber as a substitute for traditional soil,” Burberry said. “This ongoing trial will help us to understand how to grow and source the same high-quality cotton, while the cultivation process conserves water and minimizes land use.”

This relationship is rooted in a shared commitment to exploring innovative solutions, the heritage house said, as the arrangement marries Magtech’s advanced hydroponic cultivation with Burberry’s textile production expertise.

So far, Magtech has been well received by its community in Valencia.

Spanish billionaire Juan Roig lauded the company as his accelerator, Lanzadera, incubated it. Magtech even won the award for best startup of 2023 in the fashion, textile and design category at the VLC Startup Awards, which recognizes innovative talent and entrepreneurial projects in the Valencian ecosystem.

So why hasn’t this concept of cultivating cotton without land been seen—or even attempted—outside of the Spanish province? Perhaps a fear of entering the Gartner Hype Cycle’s “trough of disillusionment.”

“There’s a lot of interest in regenerative agriculture, so how do you go to your boss and talk about soilless farming when you went advocating for organic farming last year?” Rodríguez said. “You asked for support to do organic farming and now you need support for soilless farming; your boss is going to tell you that you didn’t do your research right.”

That said, Rodríguez is focused on raising awareness about the benefits of hydroponics—for now.

“My main goal right now is to spread the word,” he said. “I want to communicate that this is something that is worth thinking about.”