Sources and Further Reading

Primary works

• Bertholon, P. (1783). De l’électricité des végétaux. Paris.
• Lemström, S. (1904). Electricity in Agriculture and Horticulture. London: The Electrician Printing and Publishing Co. Free online at the Biodiversity Heritage Library.
• Jørgensen, I., and Priestley, J. H. (1914). The distribution of the overhead electrical discharge employed in recent agricultural experiments. Journal of Agricultural Science 6.
• Blackman, V. H., Legg, A. T., and Gregory, F. G. (1923). The effect of a direct current of very low intensity on the rate of growth of the coleoptile of barley. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 95: 214–228.
• Blackman, V. H. (1924). Field experiments in electro-culture. Journal of Agricultural Science 14: 240–257.
• Briggs, L. J., Campbell, A. B., Heald, R. H., and Flint, L. H. (1926). Electroculture. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Department Bulletin No. 1379. Free online.
• Electro-Culture Committee, Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries (1918–1937). Interim Reports. The National Archives, Kew, file MAF 33/913.
• Christofleau, J. (1927). Electroculture. English edition.
• Lakhovsky, G. (1939). The Secret of Life. London: Heinemann.

Later science

• Murr, L. E. (1963). Plant growth response in a simulated electric field environment. Nature 200: 490–491.
• Pohl, H. A., and Todd, G. W. (1981). Electroculture for crop enhancement by air anions. International Journal of Biometeorology 25.
• Goldsworthy, A. (2006). Effects of electrical and electromagnetic fields on plants and related topics. In A. G. Volkov (ed.), Plant Electrophysiology. Springer.
• Clarke, D., et al. (2013). Detection and learning of floral electric fields by bumblebees. Science 340: 66–69.
• Toyota, M., et al. (2018). Glutamate triggers long-distance, calcium-based plant defense signaling. Science 361: 1112–1115.
• Li, X., et al. (2022). Stimulation of ambient energy generated electric field on crop plant growth. Nature Food 3: 133–142.
• Oikonomou, V. K., et al. (2024). eSoil: A low-power bioelectronic growth scaffold that enhances crop seedling growth. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 121. doi:10.1073/pnas.2304135120.

History and reporting

• Kinahan, D. (2009). Struggling to Take Root: The Work of the Electro-Culture Committee of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries Between 1918 and 1936. Dissertation.
• Chen, S. (2018). Report on China’s electro-culture program. South China Morning Post, September 2018.
• Fleming, S. (2018). China has made a shocking food production discovery – electro culture. World Economic Forum, 19 October 2018.
• “Electroculture.” The Gardens Trust blog, 4 September 2021.

A note on sources. Figures for the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century experiments come from the historical reviews in Lemström and in USDA Bulletin 1379 and should be read as those experimenters’ own reports. The figures for the Chinese program are as reported in the press in 2018. Where this book says “I have not found,” it means exactly that: a search was made and nothing turned up, which is not proof that nothing exists.