CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The Verdict

It is time to answer the question directly.

Does electroculture work? It depends on which electroculture, and the evidence can be sorted into four plain verdicts.

Powered overhead fields: probably yes, modestly, under the right conditions

A high-voltage field maintained over a crop has been reported to increase yield by roughly a fifth by independent workers across more than a century: Lemström in the 1890s, Blackman in the 1920s, the Chinese program since the 1990s, the Nature Food study in 2022. The effect appears most dependable in greenhouses and on well-watered crops, and it has repeatedly failed or reversed in hot, dry or uncontrolled conditions. One careful government study, in the United States, found nothing. The mechanism is not established. I judge it more likely than not that the effect is real, and far from certain. It is not a practical or safe method for a home garden.

Powered root-zone stimulation: promising, early

The eSoil work shows a clear effect on seedlings under laboratory control. It has not yet been shown to raise harvest yield, and it has not been widely repeated. It is a research result, not a gardening method.

Galvanic pairs: unknown

A real but small current flows. No adequate modern trial exists. It is cheap and safe to test for yourself, and Part Six shows how.

Passive antennas and coils: no good evidence, and good reason to doubt

No controlled trial supports them. The one mass trial in history went against them. The energy they are said to collect is, by measurement, about a trillionth of what sunlight supplies. Where benefits are seen, ordinary explanations are available. I cannot tell you with certainty that a copper coil does nothing; no one has done the definitive experiment. I can tell you that there is at present no sound reason to believe it does what is claimed.

The other three questions

When did it start? In 1746, with Maimbray’s myrtles in Edinburgh, and as a proposal for agriculture in 1783, with Bertholon’s book.

Who started it, and why? Clergymen and natural philosophers of the Enlightenment, who had just learned that the sky is electric and reasonably wondered whether that electricity was part of how God makes the fields grow. It was carried forward by a Finnish physicist curious about the Arctic, by a British government afraid of hunger, and by a Chinese government with more than a billion people to feed.

Has it been hidden? No. It has been repeatedly tested and repeatedly set aside because its results were inconsistent and its costs exceeded those of fertilizer. One government’s reports were left unpublished, which was a real loss. There is no documentary evidence of deliberate suppression, and the most promising form of it is being actively developed and published today.

That is the state of the question. If it is less than you hoped for, consider the other side of it. Here is a real open problem in agriculture, three centuries old, on which a careful amateur with a few garden beds can still gather evidence worth having. The next part shows how.