Electroculture : using the electric field to increase the agricultural yields while removing chemical additives and regenerating soil health
by Florian Davoine
Electroculture consists in establishing an electrical field around a crop or a vegetal plants in order to increase the mass yield per unit of production area among other benefits. A century ago, a simple principle of operation was used: the construction of a vertical structure in a conductive material (typically copper and galvanized iron) bring the Earth electrical field at a given height, i.e. at a higher level, to the plants roots, either with constant or frequency-modulated voltage.
This effect was mostly studied and proven since the 19th century by electrical engineers and agronoms through numerous testimonies [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. A recent review, making an almost-exhaustive state-of-the-art, was published by a Korean research group [7], shows that a great majority of those past publications reported positive effects of electrical field application on the plants growth, as much as on bioactive compounds content (27% more essential oil for peppermint ; 57,5% and 28% more alkaloids in datura leaves and seeds [6]), with both Earth natural electric and artificial fields, either constant or modulated.
Historically, both the conversion of the nitrate industry, necessary for military purposes (artillery shells), and a strong lobby from industrial chemical companies to penetrate the market of agriculture have lead to the disappearance of these techniques. Today, modern agriculture is facing critical issues such as the decrease of soil health, the possible shortages of fertilizers, the adverse effects of persistent chemical products on the environment in general and in source water in particular. In this context, our idea is to conduct experiments in order to investigate scientifically the effectiveness of this process on given seeds and to evaluate the conditions and the impact for its introduction in some agricultural processes in Switzerland.
The project intends specifically to establish an experimental protocol and conduct experiments to verify the effects of different electrical fields on different cultures. We will conduct two kinds of experiments : a first with an artificial electromagnetical field into a phytotron room ; and a second into greenhouses and fields with use of natural electrical field.
The metrics defined for evaluation comprises the yield compared to various fertilizers strategies, earth quality evolution and product quality. The expected results should demonstrate the benefits of this approach, the costs involved, the interest of a combination of other fertilizing techniques and the impact on earth soil. The detailed process will be precisely defined on the basis of an interdisciplinary preliminary work in the early phase of the project with several actors and stakeholders. Farmers that are currently undertaking research in this field in France will be involved in the definition of experiments. Additional observations, such as evaluation of the resistance of plants to diseases and other parasites, will also be made and further investigated if proper set-ups could be defined.
Through the scientific investigations of the electroculture method, it is expected to discover effects to be further investigated according to the observed potential by proper and specific projects either in applied or more fundamental research. A general view on the sustainability aspects and potential for circular economy will also be analysed.
Bibliography
[1] : Justin Christofleau, Electroculture.
[2] : V.H. Blackman, F.R.S., A.T. Legg, F.G. Gregory, The effect of a direct electric current of very low intensity on the rate of growth of the coleoptile of barley,
Proceedings of The Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 1923, 95, 214-228. DOI : 10.1098/rspb.1923.0034
[3] : V.H. Blackman, Field Experiments in Electro-culture, The Journal of Agricultural Science, 1924, 14, 240-267. DOI : 10.1017/s0021859600003440
[4] : Werner Oswald, Beiträge zur Theorie der Elektrokultur, ETHZ Thesis N° 688, 1933.
[5] : H.A. Pohl, Electroculture, Journal of Biological Physics, 1977, 5, 3-23. DOI :
10.1007/bf02310088
[6] : Martine Queyrel, Électroculture et plantes médicinales, Thèse n° 338, Université de Limoges, 1984.
[7] : Sora Lee and Myung-Min Oh. Electric field: a new environmental factor for controlling plant growth and development in agriculture, Horticulture, Environment, and Biotechnology. 2023. DOI : 10.1007/s13580-023-00525-y
With fertilizers, the chemical industry has installed a new paradigm in agriculture in the 1920’s-1930’s, one of the golden age for the development of the chemistry industry. The development of techniques that use the Earth natural electrical field (without energy supply) and achieve similar effect as chemical fertilizers would be of considerable interest from a sustainability viewpoint, as it would address urgent topics in which solutions must be found in the coming decade.
This idea is disruptive because it could open a new paradigm by reconsidering an ancient sustainable method, initially used to increase yield of production, allowing not only the culture to stop polluting but also regenerating the surrounding soil by stopping the massive use of nutrients, pesticides and insecticides. As a new paradigm, it opens numerous investigation fields such as:
the possibility to use present technologies for measuring and experimenting different approach to electrical field generation and modulation, and further optimize the process, as it is probable that the impact on different crops or plants could differ significantly depending on its receptivity to electroculture conditions.
the impact on the ecosystem around a plant, such as bugs, mushroom, worms, ants, etc., which also opens the door to combinations of different additional approaches to reach sustainable goals.
Finally, from the literature review, the stimulation of plants growth by electric fields can be achieved by simple apparatus and even a modulation at 10^4 Hz, as described in patents from the company Ciba-Geigy in the 1980’s, could easily be achieved using low-cost electronic technologies.
Another radicality will consist in the systemic impacts in the agriculture and food business. The perspective to increase the production in a rather biological and natural way will improve the incomes of farmers, especially for bio-foods. It will also reduce the dependency of Switzerland for this primary need.
In order to conduct this project successfully, we integrated several relevant actors in the form of a pool of various experts. They have agreed to participate to the project in order to contribute:
Grangeneuve: Dr Thomas Rime, biologist, he will contribute on two important subjects:
-Providing support to contribute to the understanding of the biological effects observed both in the phytotron and in the field tests.
-Coordinating field tests in Grangeneuve with agricultural experts.
Permafutur: Loïc Etcheberry is teaching agricultural science in Auch’s Agricultural High School in France and worked for the French Ministry of Agriculture. He empirically experiments electroculture since 2011 and founded his publishing house « Permafutur ». In particular, he published three books on the re-editing of old documentations on the subject. He achieved various results which shows a dependency of the effects on various parameters. He will share his experience in order to define tests in order to measure the effects of various parameters.
In order to meet the needs and constraints of the potential future users, and construct an anthropotechnological approach to design a relevant product, we also decided to integrate two potential future users :
University of Fribourg, botanical garden : Alain Müller, ideally located close to HEIA-FR, the botanical garden open his greenhouses and available fields for experiments.
Domaine des Savoies: Sébastien Tombez is a farmer and an entrepreneur. He is growing different plants on his fields. He will contribute to share the needs to be fulfilled to achieve sustainability and resilience in agricultural domain. He will also be fundamental to understand the economical impacts that electroculture would have on the agroeconomy sector by providing a case-study (the idea is to estimate a total cost of ownership and evaluate what are the components of value for a farmer and for various stakeholders.
This pool will interact mainly with the implementation partner. This interaction will allow the potential impacts of electroculture in agroeconomy, sustainability and on solving the problems that agriculture is facing today. An interaction with the research partner will provide inputs for the definition of early experiments. The pool will also be involved in the definition and observations of field and greenhouse tests.
The interdisciplinary team includes a farmer (Sébastien Tombez), an electrical engineer (Pr. Dr Marco Mazza) to conduct electricity experimentations and a mechanical engineer (Dr Ing. Vincent Bourquin) experienced in the development of high torque electrical propulsion systems for trucks and heavy machinery to construct and maintain structures, but essentially to describe the systemic model influenced by this approach to grow plants. An expert who have already experimented electroculture (Loïc Etcheberry) has also been integrated in the experiment in order to beneficiate from their experience and observations. A food-science engineer/biologist (Dr Thomas Rime) is also integrated in the team to define the analysis methods for the production yields, the growing steps, the biologic phenomenon and the causal link with the electric field generation. The discussion with the farmer (Sébastien Tombez) during this process will be of great importance to understand the anthropotechnological aspects of this innovation and its acceptance by farmers. The accent will be concentrated on measuring the effects on the expected impacts for a reduced set of plants. A project manager (Dipl. Ing. Florian Davoine) will also bring his experience in process development and take the responsibility of organizing the teams, do the reporting, coordinating the project and proceed to measuring tasks and make observations. The economic aspects will also be treated from a farmer (user) viewpoint and also considering societal and environmental impacts, as well as impacts on industry.
iPrint Institute, represented on this project by Pr. Marco Mazza, will bring a precious expertise in electrical field. As previously mentioned, he was, is and will be involved in number of projects at the frontier between AgriTech and Electronic Engineering. Here’s a more comprehensive list:
Electrophysiological signal acquisition and classification for plants: three projects have been funded in a collaboration involved the start-up Vivent SA and Agroscope Conthay (two InnoSuisse, 27661.1 PISA and 42751.1 IP-LS SIENA and a SiTech4Impact project, PhytlSigns Scout) plus several other student projects on the same aspect;
Automated identification and positioning for robotic solution for the greenhouse crops for the Italian start-up company HortoBOT;
Pest outbreaks early detection with a a combined sensing system: he’s setting up a European consortium to submit a Horizon Europe project proposal next February; he is deeply involved in three electrical-biological solutions: (a) plant electrophysiology, in collaboration with Vivent, (b) electrical impedance analyses, in collaboration with Politecnico di Torino, Italy and (c) Time-Domain Reflectometry applied to plant stems.
Livestock, health and welfare monitoring through voice call analyses: this activity is part of a start-up project at very early stage, a patent request has been filed in October 2023 and currently under evaluation.
Given the strong interest around this promising field of application, the “Filière de génie électrique” (electrical engineering department) decided to support prof. Mazza’s activities with the acquisition of a Phytotron by Pol-Eko-Aparatura. This new equipment due to be installed in Q1/2024 will allow to reproduce environmental conditions very reliably to compare effects of specific actions on crops growth.
The agricultural experts as the farmer Sébastien Tombez from the Domaine des Savoies, the biologist Dr Thomas Rime from Grangeneuve and the technical leader of Unifr’s Botanical Garden Alain Müller, in addition to allocating some surface field to conduct those little experiments, will give us some precious feedbacks and knowledges on the agricultural and biological fields. Loïc Etcheberry from PermaFutur, who has already experimented electroculture in an empirical way, will help us to build and set up the different apparatus in the greenhouses. He will bring also all his experience and his ideas.
We contacted also the Organic Agriculture Research Institute (FiBL) which could allow us to set up a rigorous approach for our second research axis in greenhouses, and to comply with regulations related to organic farming. Currently, their participation is to be confirmed officially.
We will also mandate Agroscope to make tests to evaluate the nutrients amount into electrocultivated and control products, in order to see if significant differences are observable.
Afterwards, if the experimentations are successful, these two institutes could help us to create an interest group around the thematic grace to their networks to set up a massive project to go further.
These experiments intent to provide a first “proof-of-concept” to move towards specific scientific investigations and larger scale experimentation afterwards. The experiment should last at least one year (two would be better).
At first, on an economic viewpoint, currently the farmers are meeting some problems. With this technology, they could save money spent on phytosanitary and fertilizers applications. They will also increase their production yield as much as the amount of nutrients into their products. Therefore, their incomes will increase in the same way. This potential increase of the nutrients amount, combined with a lower amount of pesticides applied on the crops, will get the food quality increase. Therefore, the local population will also be positively impacted. Switzerland covers approx. 50% of her needs in terms of food. Increases in productivity could lead to a direct increase in the coverage of the local food supply. If the economics of farming is more attractive than it is today, the population of farmers could increase as well and lead to a further increase at the scale of Switzerland. The increase of the surface production yield combined with the decrease of the dependence to the phosphate fertilizers (which is one of the most stressed fossil resources on Earth) will increase also significantly the local food safety and resilience at a local scale. At the end, thanks to the reduction of the pesticide use, the soil health will be increased and the diversity preserved, particularly the necessary insects, moreover many problems related to pollution, as groundwater pollution, will be reduced.
We have considered two axis of experiment.
For the first axis, we will experiment electroculture with a controlled atmosphere generating room called “Phytotron” to master all parameters like temperature, luminosity, and moisture rate. By setting all those parameters and varying only the electromagnetic field, we will be able to check its impact on plants. We will experiment on seeds and little plants with a short cycle of growth as radishes, to save volume and time. Afterwards, we will cultivate the control and electrocultivated seeds.
For the second axis, we would like to observe the effects of various types of electroculture apparatus on a real field in greenhouses on various plants to proceed to the investigation, with control. We will work on plants with different growth cycles.
The evaluations criteria will be the germination rate, the germination time plants height, the dry weight, disease resistance, bioactive compounds content, the number of flowers and the nutrients amount.
During the team building phase, we have contacted a lot of potential future partners, like the FiBL and Agroscope, in order to arose their interest towards this theme. During the next step, and because electroculture propose a very large research field, our aim will be to go further in experiments, and to scale-up the process experimented during this funding period to reach the industrial scale. We think therefore about to create an interest group in order to set up a massive experimentation project at a large scale in cooperation with Agroscope, FiBL and Grangeneuve, with funds from a research program such as Innosuisse, Projet systémiques from Fribourg Agri&Food or Interreg France-Switzerland.